| Dec. 30th, 2004 @ 12:12 am Lenny |
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A swamp in the American South; spanish moss hangs in grey-green tendrils over a watery bog. There's the buzzing of insects, the watery slosh of snake or lizard. Most of all, there is the pungent smell of wetly rotting vegetation, a jungle eating itself to provide mulch for its next generation.
There is also a young woman here in this swamp. I believe she is blonde beneath the mud that streaks her hair. I believe she is attractive under the layer of grime. In some way the mud and sand that cling to her add a terrible and primal note to her beauty, heightening it. The crazed look in her eyes, the way she manically staggers through the bog, out-of-place but still belonging here, forever a part of this swamp. She tears at her long, soiled hair and then she screams an endless scream, and no one, no one on earth knows why she screams.
Grampa moved like he was made of wood and wire, but he liked to swing his cane when he walked. When we walked together, his gray hand held mine with a firm, gentle attention that, as a child, I thought was my due; it's only across the years that I can feel the love in it.
A retired railroad man who had begun his career at the end of the last century, who had outlived most of those who were near to his heart, Grampa must have known that he was ending his days then and there, living in the spare room of his son's suburban house on the outskirts of Buffalo. He, my father and I all shared the same name, Robert Houston Martin and, though I knew Grampa loved my sisters, I realize now that I was the treasure of his last days on earth.
But he was an Irishman, not the sort of man to spoil a child; his generosity was of a different kind. When I was caught playing with my sisters' paper dolls, my parents patiently explained to me that these were girls' toys, that I shouldn't be interested in them, and that the property of others called for respect. But Grampa took me for a walk the next day and bought me my first comic book.
Though I was only five, I clearly remember the first moment I held that book in my hand. There was Woody Woodpecker, whom I'd seen only on the glowing screen of television and movies, now on the flat, but glorious, printed page. The cover's illustration featured two smaller woodpeckers that I'd never seen before (nephew and niece, though, on TV, Woody had no relatives); they'd accomplished some strange mischief to Woody's great consternation. At the top of the cover was another picture of Woody, astride a bicycle made out of two letters from his first name (though I couldn't read, I recognized the pattern of his name from the countless times I'd seen it flashed before me on television).
It was Woody on that double-o bicycle that most delighted me. I think it was the revelation that, for that troublesome woodpecker -- the bane of millionaire walruses everywhere -- letters and words, this dry code of adults, could be made into vehicles and playthings.
When I remember my astonishment, I remember too the angle and quality of the morning light reflected from the ink-coated paper, telling me that it was no later than eleven, as early as ten, though on that day I was too young to have such a sense of time. In the same way I can now discern my grampa's amusement at my delight, his ancient dry giggle at the way that my eyes widened.
It was not many mornings later that my grandfather found himself unable to rise from bed. The doctor came, my sisters fought with me, my parents snapped at each other. But when my parents decided that I should go visit Aunt Catherine, I knew that, when I came back, Grampa would be fine.
The night before I left, I rested uneasily in my bed, in the room next to Grampa's. I thought about old people, about what happened when old people got older. I decided that, when you got as old as you could possibly get, then you started to get younger again, younger and younger until you were a baby, ready to begin again the long climb to adulthood. Though the theory had flaws, it comforted me, and I slept.
Aunt Catherine lived in the center of the city of Buffalo, among the ugliest of cities anywhere in the world. But she was our wealthy relative. The building she lived in was grimy and gray on the outside. Within, it was a vast, high-ceilinged townhouse, lavishly furnished. At that age, I had no fix on the difference between wealth and middle-class comfort, but I knew that Aunt Catherine's home was different in kind from any other home I'd seen.
Catherine had married a man of national prominence in the field of electronics, a man whose last name was nearly a household word in those days. They had an infant son named Jimmy, and Uncle Al had come into the marriage with a son of his own who was my age, Lenny.
I looked forward to my visits to Aunt Catherine's, though I seldom felt that they ended too soon. I can only remember her with a drink in her hand -- Scotch, always Scotch, cut by a few ice cubes that had precious little time to melt before a refill -- and a cigarette in the other. She looked much like my father, a similiar profile, though her face was sharper, contoured more by bone than by muscle, and she had the same rust-red hair. And where my father was humorously cynical (he talked back to television commercials with sardonic jibes), Aunt Catherine was bitter.
She did not guard her bitterness, and I remember that she often spoke to me as she might speak to any adult. I can't remember her words, only their flavor of bile. No doubt, she was a lonely woman and, as young as I was, I was not too young to feel some pity for her.
Her world revolved around Jimmy, who was then about two, and well on his way toward becoming a thoroughly spoiled rich kid. Much of her bitterness rested its weight on her stepson, Lenny. Lenny was retarded.
I loved Lenny. My selfish reasons for this love had to do with the problems of my own childhood; the constant uprooting of my family when my father, eager to be a good provider, would volunteer for a transfer each time Sears, Roebuck and Company opened a new store in a new location. We would move to another, larger home in a more distant suburb, and I'd again be a new kid in the neighborhood, excluded from games, challenged to fights that I couldn't win. I grew more and more a loner, in a pattern that would continue through my entire childhood, and into my adult life. I never did learn to ride a bike, or to throw and catch a ball properly; I grew more and more alone, with television and, later, books as my main companions.
I did have some friends, but these were hard to earn, and easily lost when again we moved away; eventually I no longer even bothered to extend myself. But before my family left New York, I would see Lenny four or more times a year, which made him my only friend of any constancy.
Now I turn his image in my mind and I can only see him as beautiful; plain, regular features, marked by the openness of prolonged innocence. He wore coke-bottle lenses that made him appear as alien as I felt, with his blue eyes made huge, projected beyond the plane of his face, until he removed the glasses to rub his eyes and squint. Then they would be normally sized and normally set, but even more vulnerable, blinking against the loss of vision.
It was Lenny who told me that my grandfather was dying. We were walking on the large spiraling red-carpeted staircase that swept down from the second floor into Aunt Catherine's living room. When Lenny told me this, I remember looking in memory at the last time I had seen Grampa. My parents must have tried to avoid my seeing him, but the doctor, when he arrived, had left the bedroom door open. He was lying on the bed in his room, still and dry as an old branch, his eyes closed in sleep or coma, his mouth open, his breath an audible wooden rasp.
I had some idea of death. Television had given me images of blazing six-guns, fighter planes down in flames, the screech of brakes followed by the impact of shattering glass and twisting metal. I had never reflected on the more common sort of death, a simple winding down, a collapse of the body; a death more real because it was unavoidable.
Whatever fiction there may be here is the unconscious fiction of memory, but I believe it was the morning of the next day that Aunt Catherine entered Lenny's room, seething. We were playing on the floor, perhaps we were moving toy trucks back and forth that were filled with imaginary earth. But I sharply remember the two of us looking up at her as she stormed in.
"Lenny!" Her tone was already piercing, accusatory. "You pee-peed on the floor again! How many times do I have to tell you to be careful when you pee? Are you a moron? Don't you have ears? Can't you hear? Why do I have to be on my hands and knees cleaning up after you every time you pee?"
Though I was to some extent accustomed to Aunt Catherine's abuse of Lenny -- this wasn't the first time she had described him as a moron -- I had never hated her until that moment. I knew that if my own mother had found it necessary to speak to me about such a thing, she would never have said a word to me about it in front of anyone. I could feel Lenny's pained embarassment in the bristling silence that followed my Aunt's outburst. And then he spoke, in that voice of his, marked by the nasal whine of the asthmatic: "My real mother would never talk to me like that!"
His real mother. It had never occured to me before that, somewhere, Lenny had a "real" mother. I'd never heard her mentioned before or since and, later, when I spoke to my own mother, she claimed no knowledge of this woman.
Aunt Catherine was as shocked as I was by Lenny's sudden assertiveness; her face twisted into a scowl, and her tone grew even more severe. "Your real mother!" she huffed. "Your real mother! The last anybody heard of your real mother, she was screaming crazy in the swamp!" She turned and stalked out of the room.
There were other visits to Aunt Catherine's, but they grew less frequent, and then Sears opened its first store in Pittsburgh and we moved out of state. Then I entered my teens and the anger that I felt over my childhood began to surface, much of it directed at my family. But the family proved a poor target; when I was 12, there was already a tumor growing in my father's brain that, in the course of another year, would make him crazy, impoverish him and his family, and then kill him. At the time, I felt that I had little to mourn. Like many good providers, my father was most distinguished by his absence from home. And, in the period of poverty that began with my father's illness, I at last began to make friends among people whose values weren't shaped in the suburban mold.
Our family re-entered the middle class when my mother married again, and my life returned to its old, lonely pattern. In spring of the year 1966, the first year that most Americans heard of Vietnam and LSD, I left home at the age of 17, thinking to save my life or end it. Over the next two years I spent three months at home, two months in state mental institutions, and much of the rest of that time on the streets of New York and San Francisco.
During one of my recuperative stays at home, I was told that Lenny had died in Vietnam. At the time, it was just one more bitter pill, swallowed quickly with a draught of anger. Self-preoccupied, I saw it only as validation for my own choices -- after all, it was only my time in mental institutions that had allowed me to escape that useless war.
If there are ghosts, they must be products of such memories as these, memories that, even when they are buried or deliberately neglected, vibrate with a hunger for resolution.
In the last 17 years of my mother's life, I did not speak to her more than seven or eight times. By avoiding each other, we found that we no longer fought about values, about money, about what I chose to do with my life. We no longer made each other miserable.
Two months ago, I remembered my last conversation with my mother, shortly before her death.
She had called only to apologize for the sort of childhood I'd had. I denied it. I told her apologies were unnecessary, that my childhood was not so bad. I blamed the drugs, I blamed the times.
Just two months ago, I remembered that conversation, remembered the apology that I had denied, and realized that my mother and I both knew that I was lying; I realized that I was still angry enough to let her die without the forgiveness that must have been so difficult for her to seek. I remembered this and, for the first time, I gave her my forgiveness, and for the first time, I cried for my mother six years dead.
None of my living relatives know the details of Lenny's death, or how it happened that a mentally handicapped teenager was accepted into the military. I have filed with the army to receive a copy of his military record. I don't expect his record to tell me much more than where he died, and perhaps the nature of his wounds. But it seems important.
Because now, when some very old wounds of mine are just beginning to close, the woman who is screaming in the swamp and the boy who is bleeding in the jungle seem not so very distant to me. They scream and they bleed for each other, until their pain becomes a single ache. I need to find a reason to believe that, in the end, they were able to touch one another, if only for a moment, and to ease each other into peace. |
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