by Sally George
One day, for no particular reason, Deborah noticed that she didn’t really like her clothes. Not the ones she was wearing, or the ones she could think of in her closet. She tried to remember how they had looked when she bought them, what she had liked about them. Had they all been on sale, was that it? That was probably the reason for the pale green pants. But what about all the black pants, why had she bought them, and why didn’t she like them anymore? Even the expensive ones. She could see why they were more expensive, how they were better made, of fabric that felt softer, or heavier, somehow more costly. But there was nothing about them that gave her pleasure any more. She tried thinking about other categories; her furniture, for instance. There were a couple of things she didn’t mind, but those had generally been hand-me-downs. The things she had bought she didn’t really care for. Or worse, really didn’t care for. [keep reading…]
Originally posted 2008-09-13 19:19:08.
By Joseph Milosch
I drove heroin hooked soldiers to the infirmary. These men openly cried, or moaned rocking on the back bench of my pick up. One, with his blond hair parted down the middle, wore glasses with circular blue lenses. The MP’s made him sing “TAKE ME OUT TO THE BALLGAME.” His voice split, and large drops of spit hung as if hooked on teeth and gums.
Six weeks later, Dexter reported to me. He said, “I remember you; you drove me to the hospital my first night stateside. You weren’t afraid to let me ride in the cab.” He thought he was clever, and called me, “The driver.” Every day after lunch, he’d sit stoned in the tool room. Sometimes, he would play “Mary Had a Little Lamb” on his harmonica. He thought it was the blues.
He’d finger his choker of beads–red, white, and blue. To Dex it was like the tradesman’s cap my great grandfather wore. It stated who he was. “I’ve got my dad’s hands,” he told me, “See how large they are. That’s why my veins are so good. These hands need a lot of blood.” His blue beads stood for his bloodline and his family’s hatred towards any government agency including the draft board and the military.
He was the son of a machinist and the grandson of the last blacksmith in his hometown. “I can stand in front of my lathe all day, trimming, listening to the lathe. I love the long lean note that floats when its engine heats up and whines at a higher pitch.” Dex believed his red beads stood for the engines’ heat and the blood he left on the machine shop floor.
His white beads stood for what he believed, and that was what his family believed, “When you became rich, you became a Republican, until then you put in 8 hours work for 8 hours pay.” Dex believed he should defy all government laws. He’d use drugs. He’d show up late for formation. He wouldn’t stitch one corner of his nametag, and he’d roll up the sleeves of his uniform in winter, roll them down in summer. He would rebel. He was a confederate. His spirit would not be defeated. Drugs purified his spirit. That was what the white beads stood for, what he believed, and how he’d lived each day.
I watched the sway of his necklace as he polished galvanized fittings with steel wool. I saw his thin build, his fox–like nose, and thought of his Nam experience. In country he was the platoon’s tunnel rat. He was liked because he was fearless. He said his platoon was like our company’s sergeants, “They didn’t know anything about me,” and Dex spoke about root–like rocks rattling his helmet. He spoke about night–throated tunnels devouring light, spoke of that neck cramping fear appearing as balls of sweat on his chin. Dex spoke about what he knew, “One time I felt something alive, a snake, a lizard pressing against my thigh. I felt its heat. It made my asshole pucker,” and his face twitched as if the cold bones of the tunnel’s hands felt his face.
Everyone knew of Dex’s overseas reputation, knew Dex worked in the tool room. They knew he painted the shelving army green with black trim. He bought green felt, and lined parts boxes with it. They knew he stood elbows and couplings on their ends, and he scraped rust off pipe wrenches, putty off putty knives, sanded three hammers’ wooden handles. They knew he washed 24, 12X12 windowpanes. He stacked them. Put brown paper between them. Paper cut so square not an eighth of an inch of light came between the edge of glass and the edge of paper.
All this meant nothing to the mess sergeant who refused him entry to the mess hall, unless a Non Commissioned Officer accompanied him.
By Joseph Milosch
One could see his burning hunger in his shirts, pressed once after washing and once more before wearing to class or on the bandstand. Joseph said, “Books and music are special. They shouldn’t be treated like greeting cards.” The hardest part of college was working at the shipyards, unloading sacks of cement, grain, or salt, and after work practicing his clarinet.
It seems studying and practice made ideas feel like prisoners. A few escaped, and the maneuvers a man created to navigate through the empty spaces their departure created either fashioned good ideas or led to a tangle of emptiness. Learning how to deal with the sudden appearance of space took hours of concentration. He said, “It was through my effort I was invited to work in the engineer booth for an Armstrong recording.†During the session, his eyes hovered before jumping from one phrase to the next like the spray of drum sticks across cymbals. Occasionally, Joseph looked at his clarinet’s case beneath the table. Occasionally, he’d massaged his fingers. Always he hoped against hope that he would be able to respond to the prayed for invitation from the master.
In the future when times were hard and he was alone in his dreaming, he’d remember the obscurity of his history: the shipyard’s light at one AM, a pattern of corn in a pile of lime. In the future this image marked the brutal landscape of a third generation Pole, learning to speak English without an accent, learning to ignore the hooked winged fear, hanging upside down in the rafters of his room. It was the same room he’d soak his hands in Epsom salt, believing it would return to his fingers the nimbleness needed to play his clarinet.
While he practiced, a vision arrived of seven flowers raising the bell of their horns and blossoming. Did he recite the Trumpeter of Krakow? Were his dreams interrupted by voices as light became an image of an arrow passing through a trumpeter’s throat? He’d practice two hours before his first class. In the afternoon he’d study before breaking to rehearse his band, The Ross Gordon Orchestra, then to the station, then to the boarding house — to the shipyards. Who could believe in a life without complications? Believe in practice – practice until sleep brought dreams of fingers touching keys as delicately as a bee leaving splintered trails across a clover field.
By Joseph Milosch
I believe I have come back unfamiliar with the language of my trade. I try to remember where a handful of sand rolled down slope and water darkened earth until it sparkled gem-like. I try to recall the mornings when men focused their imagination on cut slopes, verticals, trenches and willed their backs, arms, and hands to build my country.
I drive down a street trying to recognize the intersection. I stop for a light and remember the stone mason, who broke from work twice a day to rinse old chew from his mouth. His three-fingered hand cradled the rock he chipped as he built Burkett’s milking barn.
It was my first job. I mixed concrete for him. I brought him rocks in a wheel barrow. I rolled a stone over my finger. The nail turned purple, blood leaked along its edges. I had a sliver I couldn’t find in my palm. It was the longest day of the year, the summer solstice.
Near sundown, we stopped and helped Burkett feed his stock. The mason said, “By the end of summer the days won’t be so hot and long.” The two of them laughed; then, I laughed because I realized it wasn’t going to get easier. I smelled water in the evening air as I watched his cows moaning for their metal mouthed-calves. I thought of my hands sweating in my blister’s heat. Up until then I didn’t know hands swelled from labor.
Burkett pointed to one cow, her udder swollen like a gooseberry in late August. He said, “She’s due in a couple of weeks,” and I learned dairy cows gave more milk if they gave birth every couple of years. The farmer said, “Wives are a lot like cows. To keep them happy, you got to give ‘em a child every once in a whileâ€
That cow didn’t look happy as she drew with the aid of her lower lip a few grains into her mouth. The mason thought he was funny as he volunteered me to clean the pig sty, and I wished I was hiking along the road where corn leaves caught dust and bees left splintered trails as they walked across clover.
That was how it was. I came to find there was no dignity in work. There was comradeship. I learned in the trades, I could return years later to say, “I built that.” I came to believe it was good to walk among the cows in winter, as the corn froze in its crib. During these times, I thought I could feel the solid construction in the moist air dampened my chin. It was like feeling the cold in the stone, whose cut revealed the profile of a man’s face.
I rubbed my hand across the ridge under his eye, rubbed the chink in his lip. My hand moved as if it was drawn to the joint between stones. I enjoyed feeling the even space between rocks. I enjoyed feeling the smooth saw cut of the window sill where snow gathered like dirt on its glass. I enjoyed touching our work, as I watched cows standing in their own mist and looked at the wind, pushing snow under fences and around trees.
In the evening of the first day of summer, I park and raise my hand to shade my eyes from the sun. In the street, vapor strands rise from a manhole cover. They merge at a tree of steam. I remember the shade of the white ash tree as I washed trowels, floats, and shovels. I remember that three fingered mason. He laughed when I dropped a rock on my toe, hammered my thumb. My last day, he paid me, shook my hand, and said, “You’re not afraid of work.”
