Before

  A couple decades ago I was rifling through old papers stashed in a box in the basement purging the old and no longer useful. I came across writings by Henry, my long gone ex. I did not understand them until I found the photos. I did not toss them with the other writings.

***

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But I have secrets never shared,

Darker fantasies never dared,

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we’ve just begun looking for weaknesses, blind spots, hesitations, doubts, before the death dance begins in earnest. I would draw her in with false presentations

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I will pierce you with my teeth if you want to outrage your mother; I will lick your blood

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To run to the earth a smaller, more vulnerable prey; you mistakenly look into her frightened eyes. she wants your fierce fang-filled mouth to nip and nuzzle and lick, even with a little blood

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knife is nearer than you think, so long without you, there is no now, no new, no anymore, nothing else to want, to dream of, beg for, offer, OFF HER

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he never has to feel his insecurities because he can keep her under control by threat, or violence, or rage

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…… bent one, bought one, built one, cut one, caught one, drained one, donned one, bedazzled one, frazzled one, dragged one

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I want to take off our skins to flatten them so they can touch all over at the same time.

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To ‘little girl’: dare to turn your back on me I reach around you and I want the front of you against me, too, and in my too drunken haze, your soft sweet skin comes undone and folds around me like a dancing shroud and finally meets all my needs at once, once and for all, for me and my dreams and drool-y, blurry-eyed fantasies and I finally have had it all, all of you, all of y’all – the women of my life.                                                                       

***

Mementos

  Twenty years later, three years after he died, in a rarely opened nightstand drawer in the never used back bedroom I found eight 5X7 glossy photos along with the hunting knives. They fascinated me. I set aside the knives unaware of their significance. I studied the details of each photo Henry had taken in a darkened room lit only by one candle. They were images of his longings and failures. They were his distilled life’s story. I put the photos in an album, returned them and the knives to the drawer. 

  Here is the story they told.

  Tonight the old man sits at his desk by the window in the room lit only by a candle on the windowsill where it can be seen from both Bond and Astor streets. It’s the only window in his shabby apartment visible from two streets, increasing the probability of being seen by two-fold. He is starving to death. He needs to feed. 

  He peers out the window. He waits in the lair he first designed in 1952 when he was a young man. It is outdated. It is laughable. It would humiliate him if he only knew. He is certain one day it will work and finally meet all of my needs at once – needs that dwell in his darker fantasies.  The excuses for his unspeakable thoughts are at hand, displayed accoutrements, window dressings to draw her in with false presentations. He must deceive to prove he is a superior person unconstrained by arbitrary morays that control the unrefined, the unenlightened.  He is not among the base and brutish with drool-y, blurry-eyed fantasies.

  The first night, at the desk with books, tablet,  pen and glass of iced whiskey, he’s playing Hemingway prone to impulsive acts of passion. Crime and Punishment is at hand. He too understood situational ethics. A lesser female who “should have,” dared to deny him.

  The Way of Zen. He’s a Zen master, without desires. No more reincarnation. No more suffering.

  All of his possessions belong to noble, faux personas. Concealed is a fragmented self. He’s absolved of  acts rising from “fears and dreams I can hardly name;” dreams he must manifest to quell the all-consuming terror of an abandoned infant, trapped in his crib, his cries for his mother unheeded. No longer imprisoned in a child’s body, he plots and schemes. A devouring sexual encounter is the only satisfactory outcome.  I want to take off our skins to flatten them so they can touch all over at the same time. He has become an ambush predator surrounded by alluring trinkets, waiting for a juicy morsel to stray too close. Henry will find a way to incorporate “mother.” 

  He peers toward Bond and then Astor. No one can see him watching. No one can see his longing nor his shame. He waits. He stifles the bitter sobs of grief and rage.

  Bread crumbs leading to the lair are easy to follow.

  Blaring Take Five announces the cool guy. The shiny black Mustang belonging to a daring, young stud is parked out front across the entry door which he propped open in silent invitation as he did the door to his apartment at the end of the hall. He awaits the ideal: a smaller, more vulnerable prey, a waif-like, unloved girl; a Gretel, lost, and confused. If he could will her to appear, he would.

  Tonight he imagines she will follow the crumbs. A millennial girl fifty years out from the first will recognize every clue and understand the meanings. She will see the hotrod belonging to a “hep cat” who “peels out.” The mellow jazz is no passé 1940s Big Band sound.

  She arrives. Henry drifts to meet her. In a high-pitched voice, “I saw the candle in your window and I heard the music. A cool guy must live here.” She bats her eyes. With a sheepish smile, he invites her in. They’re both seventeen.

  [“Maybe I could score some flower.”]

  “I’m a writer.”

  [Saul Bellow once said: “All a writer has to do to get a woman is to say he’s a writer. It’s an aphrodisiac.” “Writer” became the focal point of his lair. The other things played supporting roles.]

  Candlelight sets the mood of passionate, emotional extremes required of great writers, though it has never inspired him to anything other than self-pitying free verse Capote accurately described as “typing.” He tries to incompetence in a Beat ditty requiring no editing. It flows perfectly from his perfection. In dreams with studied indifference he reads it once through  in a smoke-filled bar:  Bent one, bought one, built one, cut one, caught one, drained one, donned one, bedazzled one, frazzled one, dragged one scribbled on a coffee-stained napkin. He drops the mic then saunters off to the muted sounds of smug finger snapping from a pre-Ram Dass gathering of those too hip to Be Here Now. They were not there then, nor was Henry.

  Overwhelmed with anticipation and filled with delight in successful deception, he suppresses a guffaw as she moves deeper into the lair. She passes the photos of Che and Fidel. Brave. Rebelling against ‘the man.’ 

  “Once me and some other guys took a tug to Cuba to start the revolution and liberate the poor peasants.” Altruistic. Heroic. 

  [Humble brag.]

  [The FBI nabbed him and the ex-pats on a fascist caper before they could get out of the slip probably because no one remembered to bring rope to tether the harbor master. No one understood hydraulic steering, either. Six months in the Dade county jail. He had been charged with Violation of the Neutrality Act, punishable by life, but the CIA didn’t want goofballs drawing attention to the imminent Bay of Pigs mission.]  

  She passes the gaff hook and ice axe propped in one corner outside the closed bedroom door behind which well-sharpened equipment would cause her to flee in terror if she only knew.

  “I was a fisherman.I loved being with the sea,” like Hemingway.

  [Once he bought a fishing boat he renamed “Starbuck.” He caught five salmon; the buyer laughed. The old man was never with the sea again. Starbuck sank.]

  “I was a mountain climber – Mount Rainier – years ago.” That’s the ice axe he used to save his life and three others tethered to him as they were slipping toward a crevasse. Too exhausted to carry on, the party continued without him. “They chose me to lead the descent.”  Adventurous. Brave. A leader of men.

  [“He’s really flexing.”]

  [He gave up knowing he would not be first at the summit, arms outstretched overhead, the entire group cheering in admiration. “You’re number one! You’re number one!” He sat shivering in the snow and waited for their return. He brought up the rear on the way down.] 

  She sees the photo of Kerouac.

“He’s one of the ‘Beats’.” Counterculture. Bourgeois morals are not for him. Sexually liberated. Her mother would disapprove. She’s a little rebellious against strict rules, like all girls in 1952. “You don’t have to follow their program,” he reminds her.  She is free to do whatever she wants. He accepts that. It’s perfectly fine with him.

I will pierce you with my teeth if you want to outrage your mother.

  [“Thirsty boomer.”] 

  [“I’m not the boy in high school who kissed her in the hall. I’m not the boy who slithered beneath pink angora, undid tiny hooks and lapped like a thirsty dog.”]

  Under the spell of the lair, she drifts into the room with his desk and the candle. To her left she sees the Buddha, his display of lofty, exotic beliefs, not the repressive Christian values she had begun to question. Henry is enlightened.

  [“Basic.”]

  [He flunked out of TCU on a pastoral scholarship, the only way he could get in with a 1.9 GPA, secured by a gay church choir director with a crush. He rejected Christianity entirely, and the choir director. He achieved Nirvana one night on a bridge over the Chicago river. He was drunk.]

  His seaman’s watch clock chimes. Timed perfectly.  “I was a merchant marine, the Great Lakes, on the Edmund Fitzgerald sister ship.” Legendary. Gordon Lightfoot. Once he arrived too late to board and was forced to climb a rope ladder to the deck. Strong, daring and courageous. 

  [“Who’s Gordon Lightfoot?”]

  [Recovering from a hang-over, he staggered up late. The boat sailed without him. He was fired.]

  She sees the library. Thousands of books. Educated. Refined. From the upper class. She need not worry. He’s no low-life.

  [“That’s a lot of books.”]

  [Henry bought books to impress the check-out girls. {I know. It’s sad.} At home he damaged the spines to make them appear read, not once but often.]

  He has strategically placed erotic “good” literature, nothing sleazy or lowbrow, at eye level; proof of his comfort with all things sexual. Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Lolita, and Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex simply because the word “sex” is prominent on the spine. She can’t miss it. Her subconscious is filled with thoughts of sex. He smiles. How smooth he is; how suave. 

  [She’s been hooking up for years, like all her friends. It’s cringe.]

  He offers tea with honey. Inexpensive, yet classy. They sit in his living room and chat. He steers the discussion toward “Art,” the lofty pursuit of a mature culture where sex is open and freely discussed, without any shame. He asks if she likes “films.”

[“Bet.” She doesn’t have any idea what he’s talking about.]

  He tells her he has some art films. Les liaisons dangereuses [in French no less]. He plays the one featuring explicit sex scenes of power and submission where “cheeky” girls are rightfully scolded, punished  and then devoured, as though these scenes are perfectly normal, beyond reproach or question. Art.

  [Low-key vibrational.]

  He inhales deeply of her scent, his heart is pounding, his breathing elevated. The lair has worked. She has fallen in love with him.

  She’s trapped. It only ends one way.

  [“BIG YIKES!”]

  She’s the girl from 1952. She’s just right. She wants him. She makes the first move. He risks no unbearably humiliating rejection he first felt at age seventeen. This time he won’t lose control and be forced to obliterate her on the spot.

  [“I’m dead.”]

  She stays with him. She’s not afraid. She’s compliant with his every whim. She will make him whole. I finally have had it all, all of you, all of y’all.

  This is always his first fantasy. 

  But tonight no one comes and he knows it. He cries himself to sleep. He stifles sobs, moans and guttural growls. Through the thin walls neighbors hear the sound of an infant wailing.

  He waits again the next night and the next. 

  Finally, on the last night, in resignation, he snaps the photos, the ones I found. They are mementos to preserve the scene, to hold it in his hands and re-live the perfection of the lair that should have worked, but didn’t.

   The photos are: his desk, a blank tablet, the pen, the whiskey glass, the Zen book placed at an off-hand angle as though cast aside after reading a particularly inspiring passage that could have led to a poem, the candle diminished to a stub the end of a desperate SOS, and the views of the vacant streets where a young girl could have approached, but never did.

  The photos are proxies. All subsequent ones would exist only in fantasies where she arrives, she’s enthralled. They watch the film. She surrenders. She never sees the whimpering infant. She coos to him, strokes his brow with her small hand and makes him feel safe and loved. He weeps.

  Inevitably the scene flips. She has failed to anticipate and rush to satisfy his hunger before he was starving nearly to death. Want humiliates. Rage sets it. He hates her. He can keep her under control by threat, or violence, or rage. But she hesitates.

   He keeps her there. Knife is nearer than you think, so long without you, there is no now, no new, no anymore, nothing else to want, to dream of, beg for, offer, OFF HER.  He saw weaknesses, blind spots, hesitations, doubts, before the death dance begins. He pounced, pinned her arms against her sides and tore into her. She wants your fierce fang-filled mouth to nip and nuzzle and lick, even with a little blood.

  Sometimes that is enough. Not always in my too drunken haze, your soft sweet skin comes undone and folds around me like a dancing shroud. Flayed. She belonged to him alone. No lair should have been required.

   But either way, he tires. He becomes bored. He will discard whatever remains of her like a broken toy. And he will say it’s what she deserved for forcing his hand and then making him feel bad about her corpse. 

  He will begin another fantasy holding the photos of the perfect trap. He will imagine another girl who can never leave.

***

  He stores the well-worn photos in the forgotten drawer where I find them after his death.

  I keep an album with the photos, my mementos, to remind me of my good fortune to have escaped and to make me wonder why I ever questioned the presence of a Higher Power.

 After

  I should note that it did not end well for Henry. All of his mementos fell away. No other girl saw, nor cared if she did. His mind waned. He was left grasping the handles of his walker, stumbling from room to room mewling about Raskolnikov not being all bad.

  But time was up. The Federales were after him. It was time to pay for Alma, the real one who didn’t get away. One day her phantom appeared next to him on the sofa. Between muffled sobs, in a last ditch effort to feed one more time, even on nothing, he whispered to her. I want the front of you against me, too. She disappeared between the cushions.

  One night he filled the toe of an old sock with quarters, the candle stub and a prescription bottle with the few Alprazolam tablets. He left everything behind, even the knives, and escaped into the cold night barefoot wearing only a grey, threadbare hoodie and baggy pants, to start his new life beyond the reach of the Federales. A neighbor returning home from his night shift at Safeway found him incoherent, lying in a fetal position on the sidewalk just outside his apartment building his legs and arms contracted from hypothermia.  

End

  I thought I should tell the reader what happened to all of his crap. I was tasked with disbursement of his estate.

  I junked the Mustang for $295.

  Photos of Che, Fidel and Kerouac in cheesy frames went right into the dumpster.

  I gave away most of the literature to a nice guy in town. It was a little tough to part with Moby Dick. I loved that book ever since I first read it when I was fifteen, not long before I drifted into Henry’s lair and fell for all of it.

   I copied one of his Beat poems onto the flyleaf of Dharma Bums. It’s in the tall grass by the abandoned railroad tracks waiting to hop a boxcar to “wherever man.”

The Way and Zen and Henry’s enlightened ashes are not suffering in an eastern Oregon landfill.

  I wrapped the knives in an old dish towel and stashed them in the back of a closet in the attic. Evidence. Maybe.

  The Seaman’s watch clock was pretty cool. Jonathan’s pawn shop gave me fifty bucks for it.  I had considered leaving it in the parking lot outside Columbia Hospital as sort of a For Whom the Bell Tolls memento. It was the last place I spoke to Henry. I told him I knew who he was and what he had done. Secrets never shared would be. But that symbolism seemed too big a stretch and, besides, it was a good clock.