5. Struggle to Life

 

Soon—if I survive—I’ll’ve completed the transition that began years ago but didn’t commence in earnest until recently.  It’s not a matter of things going as planned:  Nothing ever does, especially on this block.  Which, of course, means that the inevitable happens.

What, if anything, had mother planned when she met that man whom I saw –just me and him—the last time I was here?  About him, I can state two facts with certainty:  He fathered me, and he left.  Could she have foreseen either event?  Could anyone?  I only know, from what I’ve heard, that her family “warned” her about him.  Did she ignore them, or did she simply not hear them?  In any event, I don’t think she envisioned his flight.  If she could’ve foreseen it, would she have spent that night, that day, or any other time with him?  I don’t think she’d’ve taken the time with him as a dare, or as a way to defy and cheat death (as the young so often do) or authority.  No, she wasn’t that kind of girl.  I guess she never could’ve been.

But she ended up like the women who attended her funeral—and, in fact, every other woman who’s lived and died on this block:  Alone, unless she was in the company of one other woman, and no more.  And there were only a few women who could sit next to her, and whom she would’ve wanted by her—only one of them at a time, of course. She probably wouldn’t’ve liked this funeral any more than she liked any other gathering.  But she wouldn’t’ve tried to stop it: She’d’ve known she’d’ve had as much chance of stopping the rain.

When I was growing up, sometimes she’d lose her temper.  She’d yell at me and toss things across the room.  But her outbursts never came when I expected them, like when I flunked math again or some teacher wrote yet another note about me doing something or another, or even when someone on this block—one of the women who ended up taking turns kneeling by her casket—accused me of taking possessions from, or teaching curse words to, their kids.  Or, for that matter, of teaching them anything at all.  Somehow, I seemed to be the easiest one to blame when their kids started talking about sex sooner than they should’ve—that is, as long as they were living with their mothers, on this block.  Well, I guess it made some sense:  There weren’t any men here to take the fall, and I was older than the other kids, or at least it always seemed that I was the oldest.  And I didn’t have any younger siblings to whom I could impart my wisdom, or corruption.

I don’t now, either.  I don’t know that anything I’ve learned, or am about to learn, will be useful for anybody else.  The change I’m going to make, soon after we bury mother, is one neither I—nor anyone else—can prepare for.  No one’s prepared to bring a new being—or, more precisely, to complete the transformation that brings a new form of life or life in a new form—into this world.  Expectant mothers have classes, and other less formal encounters, to tell them what they’re going to experience.  Sometimes their friends, mothers and sisters shower them with gifts of food and clothing for the soon-to-be-born.  But nobody can prepare them, not only for the physical pain and struggle they endure, but also for the transition they’re about to make.  In most cultures, they believe that such a transition makes a girl into a woman or a woman into a lady and have some sort of ritual for it.

Whatever they call the transition, they know it’s inevitable and irreversible.  Which means, of course, that it can—and sometimes does—kill the one who embarks upon it.  Of course, no man has ever had to, or wanted to, undertake such a journey.  (Journey:  How quaint the sound!)  Actually, no man has ever skirted death from a life within his own body.  For him, death is death is death—whether it’s from cancer, a bullet or any other projectile strikes at the walls around the moat of his life forces.  If he escapes one kind of death, there are other kinds:  all sorts of collisions and other accidents.  But they are all the same kinds of death, really.

Occasionally a man dies to save a life already present.  But that’s not the same as, it’s not even comparable to, dying in the process of delivering a new pair of eyes and ears and a new voice into the world.  Perhaps I won’t have to do anything like that, either.  But no man has ever faced such a possibility.

 All I know with certainty is this:  Either I will die, or I will live as someone different from the person who left this block.

There’re some rooms I’ll never enter again:  Some because I won’t need to; others I won’t want to see again.  Some of my old clothes, I won’t wear again.  I’ve bought some new ones, and others have been given to me, but I don’t know which ones will be right for me.  And I don’t know that I’ll wear again what I’ve worn to mother’s funeral.

 After the changes all the women at my mother’s funeral have made, many years before the funeral—and after the ones I’ve made, and am about to make—you don’t eat the same things, or in the same way.  Some women binge on certain foods when they first become pregnant and never eat them again once their babies are born.  Someone told me I might experience something similar.  Sometimes you need additional, and unusual, substances to support the life you’re about to create and sustain.

Until about a year ago, I’d never eaten an avocado.  Now I can’t get enough: I don’t know whether it’s because of the taste, which I like. I know there’s nothing like breaking open that hard, almost barklike, shell and opening up to flesh that’s almost fluorescent—soft and cool at the same time, the taste an echo of its color.  And swallowing it is a unique experience:  It goes down smoothly, but not with the cloying unctuousness of olives.  I still eat olives, but lately I’ve begun to eat them with peppers.  Will I want to eat avocados, olives, peppers or anything else I eat now once I leave the hospital in the outfit I’ve chosen especially for that day?  Will I want to wear that outfit?

For that matter, I can’t even say for sure that I’ll get away from this block once I’ve buried mother.  That’s what I planned to do, but I have to be careful, and keep my eyes and ears open.  There are plans, and there are the lives we bring into this world—and this block.

4. Stories of Men and Women

 

Nobody’s a hero; nobody’s decorated.  Nobody’s remembered…at least not the men, anyway.  Now, with my mother gone, I hope that nobody here remembers me, either.  It’s a privilege I could’ve claimed for myself the day I left, no matter where I went next. 

But of course I didn’t have to.  That may be the one advantage I have as a result of growing up here:  that I’ve never had to claim privilege; I’ve never had to pull rank on anybody.  Or at least I’ve never felt any such need.  You might say that I’m not impressed with people or with anything they do; I’m even less awed by men and their stories.  This isn’t to say I fear no one:  I simply know how one can or can’t or will or won’t do what, and to whom or what.

So there’re lots of things I’ve never had any use for.  Like most of the things they tried to teach me in school—or more precisely, most of the things  they were supposed to make gestures of teaching me and I was supposed to make them think I’d learned—and everything I heard in church.  The canons of the academies and monasteries echo thousands of lies and even more exaggerations and misrepresentations.  No one you ever meet is like anyone you read about in any history book or in any epic tale, whether it’s Beowulf, The Deerslayer or All Quiet on the Western Front.  The ballads I had to hear and the paintings we looked at in textbooks and on school trips to museums were all about generals, emperors or mystic visionaries:  about solitary men leading lonely young men to their deaths, in the fields or in the trenches or at their own hands.  No man like any of those characters ever came from this block—or, for that matter, like any other blocks like this one that I’ve seen or heard about.

Who’s ever written an opera about a woman and her cat?  Or a woman and another woman, or a woman and her children?  About the latter, there’s the story of Mary and Jesus.  Of course:  two people who never could’ve existed on this block.  Not only is he to good to be true, she…well, let’s say she contradicts one of the few relevant facts that’s ever been taught in any science class!

Why can’t we have a religion—if we have to have one—based on a story of a woman and her cat?  At least someone could get that one right, I think.  I don’t believe anyone could ever set down the story of a woman and her child, and whenever anybody’s set down the story of a woman and a woman, it sounds like a man’s fantasy.  (Trust me. I know the difference:  I’ve had lots of time—and more opportunities than anyone should have—to learn.)

But about a woman-and-cat tale: If someone could write it, that person is not me.  I’ve never kept a feline, at least not long enough to have such a relationship.  The one time I had one—a gray, smoky shadow I never named—I ended up giving him to an old woman.  It just didn’t seem fair to make that cat dependent on someone like me; it was no more fair than my dependence on my mother for so much of my life.  Since then, I’ve avoided making any need for me in any other living being 

Even if I’d had a cat, a child, or any other permanent companion, I couldn’t’ve written about me and him, her or it.  Maybe if I’d stayed in school, I’d’ve learned how to put some experiences—my own and others—on a page, or even between the covers of a book.  There’s so much I’ve never learned. As a kid, I asked myself, “Why should I?” So I could write the kinds of things they made us read? I wondered.  Or to play what they told us was music, or how to say their prayers?  I never could understand why I should learn how to do such things.

Now, I have practically no education, and as far as most educated people are concerned, I’m illiterate, or close to it. Still, I’ve managed to read a bit outside of school.  I’ve even finished a few books, a couple of plays and a whole bunch of poems—something I never did while I was in school.  I’m not going to explain or analyze anything I’ve read:  Anything I could say about them isn’t that important and probably has already been said.  I don’t know.  Maybe I’d’ve stuck with school or “done something with myself” if I’d known, while I was still in school, that those pieces of writing existed.  Let’s just say that they’re not about war heroes, and they’re not the sorts of things that give men excuses for believing that women are neurotic.

 

I don’t think anybody on this block has read about them.  Living here isn’t like being in one of those books-and-brunch neighborhoods.  I don’t think even Mrs. Littington-- who’d seen more of the world than most of us and spoke at least two languages--ever read them.  (I can only hope that she didn’t have to read some of those really awful books and even worse translations they tried to shove down my throat:  The Bible, for one.)  As far as I know, the male gender has produced three real poets—at least, when it comes to writing about other men.  One of them—who actually could write about women, too—wrote Othello, The Tempest and Macbeth, and of course a whole bunch of sonnets.  Another wrote some great poems and Les Miserables.  And, finally, there’s the one who wrote Don Quixote.  I’ll  pass on all the rest.  Just for once, I want a story about a woman opening—or closing—her window.

3. Survivors

 There’ve never been any statues, plaques or other monuments on this block or any of the others around it.  None of the streets around here, including this one, has been named for anyone who lived or died on it.  Perhaps it’s just as well.  After all, building a statue or naming a street for someone who’s not here is just about the last thing a neighborhood with cemeteries on either end of it needs.

Some of the gravestones always seem to have flowers in front of them, or wreaths on them, even though nobody seems to visit them.  In fact, I can’t seem to recall anyone at either cemetery, which is the reason I went to one of them before going to mother’s wake.  I’d hoped to have, finally, the one thing I always wanted while on this block: a moment alone, one in which I wouldn’t have to suffer in the isolation of forced company.  Nobody’d demand anything of me, not in the form of a direct question or from silence.  There’d be only names, ignored or forgotten, on stones on which the dead were set, set by the dead.

Or so I thought.  I’d fallen, momentarily, into an old habit—looking downward at an oblique angle, but not quite at the ground—and saw, not a name, but a pair of dates:  August 5, 1967—June 18, 1992.   The date of my own birth, and the date on which—according to the state, at least—I died.

The body, supposedly, was found almost a year later.  So close to this block.  But on the other side of the tracks, where they curve away from this block, toward rows of subway cars waiting with their doors opened in the city railyard that separates this block and the neighborhood from endless rows of abandoned bungalows that splinter into the sea.

 

On one of those streets—which I never saw in all the time I lived on this block—actually, just underneath one of those streets, in a space that couldn’t even be called a cellar anymore because two floors of the house had collapsed into it—someone found strands of hair, a few more of rope and a six-inch long strip of duct tape.

I never found out who was walking and prodding through remains of the house that day, or what he was doing there.  For that matter, I really shouldn’t’ve assumed, just now, that the person was male.  I assumed so only because nobody was living in that house at the time and in the nearest habitations—this block and the ones around it—there are only women.  At any rate, you can depend only on the women to be on this block.  The men were off someplace doing the things you heard about, then forgot.

But I know one thing: the gender of the dead person.  I know: I saw the name on the tombstone.  Yes, that tombstone: the one with my date of birth.  And, as far as anybody knows, the last day I spent in this world.

 

I forgot to mention: There was an old leather wallet that broke apart like a cracker when the police examiner opened it.  Empty, except for a driver’s license: mine, supposedly.  Or so the police believed, and probably still believe, if any of them still think about it.  No Social Security card, no credit card: the person identified by the driver’s license never had them, or any military or criminal record, as far as the investigators could tell.  Current address unknown.  Last known address: this block.

It’s not so hard to fathom that the victim had my name: There was, I suppose, some bodily similarity between him and the young person I was when I lived on this block.  Only two other people had physical traits that bore any resemblance to mine.  One—the man who fathered me—hadn’t been seen by anybody on this block in years.  I never even knew him.  And mother.  The one thing that surprised me was that the police never spoke to her. 

At least, I don’t think they did.  She never mentioned it to me, and never asked what I may’ve known about it.  Then again, she might’ve known after all: For years after I left, she never asked my whereabouts, only that I had enough to eat and some place to stay. Whatever she knew, I don’t think she’d’ve told the cops, or anyone else.  In one of our phone conversations, she said, “You’ll come home again when the time is right.”

As for that body: I can’t tell you exactly how it came to have my proof of existence on it.  Since leaving this block, I’ve lost, sold, given away and thrown away more stuff than I can remember, or want to remember.  Especially—yes—around the time of that person’s death.

When you leave this block, the things you used to keep in your wallet, pocket or purse lose whatever meaning they had.  This is not the same, of course, as losing their usefulness: about the only way you can get a place to stay or something to eat without using the things you carry is to offer your body, if someone’s willing to take it.  Or, once you learn a few tricks, you use them: You offer, but you don’t give.  I may not’ve learned much, but I can say this with certainty: You are a free human being when you no longer have to tease, tempt or titillate anybody to get through another day.  Until that time, you’re just turning tricks for somebody.

That’s what I did for years—for ages, it seemed—after I left this block.  Mother never asked how I got enough to eat or a place to stay, and I don’t think I’d’ve told her unless I’d moved on to something else.

I’ve heard plenty of women call each other “whore” or “slut.”  But those words are mainly perjoratives, like “faggot” and “wuss” are when men use them in reference to each other.  No, that’s not quite right.  There is no parallel for one female accusing another—without proof—actually, no, imputing the world’s oldest—only—profession—onto another member of her part of humanity.  They’ll—We’ll—say it to tear at one another, in situations when “bitch” won’t do.  However, I still haven’t seen one woman condemn another for actually using what may have been the only means she had at some point in her life to feed, clothe and shelter herself, or anyone who may’ve depended on her.

One man may honor, or even revere, another man who’s killed.  Has killed—emphasis on the past tense.  Men who’ve killed may get citations, medals and sometimes even statues in parks with their names on them.  No woman has ever been exalted in quite those ways.  But, like the has-been killer, the woman who’s sold herself is not dishonored by her other women—as long as the deed’s been done, finished, out of sight, and out of mind, as they used to say. 

But while men can forget the killings they or their comrades have committed by pretending there was some purpose or honor to them, every woman knows the compromises, the accommodations other women—or they themselves—have made.  And—again, I have no way of proving what I’m about to say—they accept it or at least tolerate those collaborations with, or concessions to, the other side because, well, a survivor doesn’t condemn what another does to survive.  Sometimes the survivors don’t even ask.