33. Names

I don’t remember them, really. Probably nobody else does, either, which is why they’re here—or what remains of them, anyway. Some might still be more or less intact, in body anyway. Others have become the grass that’s cut—every day, I guess—during the summer. And the rain, the mud that drowns the flowers before even a branch, a finger, can poke from the ground—it all becomes their bones; it becomes them.

And I’m here now, with them. I’m all they’ve got, and they’re all I’ve ever had. Someone once said that God is the only friend the poor have. What about the dead? Do they need friends? Do they have any?

Well, I’m here and I can’t honestly say I’ve ever been anybody’s friend. Maybe I couldn’t’ve been, even if I’d wanted to, even if anybody’d wanted me. I never mentioned my own name, or at any rate whatever name I was using, to anyone. And I rarely asked anyone’s name: All names have been lies, or at least inventions. They’ve never, ever described the person, place or thing or animal to which they’ve been attached. Nothing and nobody ever can, or will.

I’ve come to see a woman I called mother. To my knowledge, nobody else did. She almost never used the name she gave me, or any other name at all: not when we were in the kitchen together, not when we were on the opposite ends of a telephone line. And the name she called me—on those rare occasions when she used it—wasn’t the same as the ones I’d use later. And how would they’ve known that they knew me by a different name from the one mother first gave me?

So there were two facts mother knew about me for certain: that I was born to her, and the date on which I was born. And one day there’ll be one other fact, incontrovertible, she won’t know about me—unless, of course, she’s going somewhere neither of us knows about. That fact, of course, is the date of my death.

And there they were, the only certainties on a tombstone I saw this morning: October 31, 1918-December 23, 1969. What it didn’t mention: He died on this block, and ocean and part of a continent separating him from the shtetl where he was born inside the walls, and the fence he managed to slip through, only to end up on this block. Now that mother’s gone, I may be the only one who remembers the name to which he introduced me: Adam Melnyk.

And here’s another—one of whom I knew only a name—November 15, 1934-April 14, 1953. I’d heard he’d won a medal of some sort for leading a charge—and trying to save someone whose name he didn’t know—on a hill he knew only as a pair of numbers on a chart, in a country whose name he’d seen only in a geography textbook when he was a kid. Then he came back to this block.

But there’s one other. Now that mother’s about to become another marker in that cemetery, I’m the only one who knows that this one has not a single piece of accurate, much less true, information, except for the date of death: June 18, 1992. The date of birth is given as August 5, 1967.

First of all, I know that I was more than 25 years old on the date to which this person’s death was assigned. So he was certainly older than that.

Not only that, nobody knows the exact date of his death—except me. On the day on which his death was recorded, rainy, unseasonably cold weather was also recorded. I know that’s right; I was there. For that matter, I’d have to say he died on June 18, 1992. But the coroner, or whoever else was responsible, accepted this as fact only because the body was found and someone decided he hadn’t been dead more than a few hours.

Although I know he died that day—I was there—the others, full of their arrogant belief in gathered data, can be no more certain that June 18 was the date of his death than that it was the day the universe—what anybody knows of it, anyway—began.

And the birthdate: It had no more to do with him than I did with his. That date came from a driver’s license I’d taken from one of my customers. I almost felt bad about it: Somehow the curly dark hair and the cheek and jaw line, sharp even under layers of flesh—somehow, I thought I’d seen them as often as my own face. And I could rub my fingers, up and down his chest, along his arms and legs, all around his cock, it seemed, without rippling any of the coarse hairs that covered his body. And I was making no more of an effort to please him than I did for any other paying customer.

At the time, I knew that license would be useful—not for me, of course. But I didn’t know how until I got back to the block and encountered the man whom police and the coroner would assign the birthdate on the license.

He didn’t look much, if at all, older than the image on that license. And that was the story about him on this block: somehow he didn’t change; maybe he’d gained a few pounds and lost a few curls of hair, or grew some hair. But he never seemed, in any story I heard, to grow older or younger. And I heard he had another son, possibly by the woman I call mother.

32. What They Say

Something’s making sense now. Actually, a few things, all of them having to do with why I left this block and won’t come back—at least I don’t expect to—once I’ve buried mother.

I’m seeing now they’re all related—or at least I can explain them in the same way I never expected this. I think I understand now why I don’t watch TV or read newspapers or magazines, or why I hardly ever read novels. And why I don’t think I could ever develop a taste for opera, or most theatre. True, I’ve been to only one opera: something about a girl who kills herself when her parents forbid her from seeing the boy she thinks she’s in love with.

And I’ve been to a few plays, of which I now remember only two: The Tempest and Macbeth. They’re the only plays I’ve ever really liked, and I’ve read them a few times even though I never learned how when I was in school. But the productions I saw of those two Shakespeare plays got them wrong in the same ways most teachers do. One made Lady Macbeth into Cruella de Ville without the 101 Dalmations; the other showed Caliban as a slave (and Prospero as a slave master) with frilly collars. As for Lady Macbeth, there had to be something more than wanting her husband to become king so she could enjoy the spoils to her if she stopped herself from killing the king when she had the chance because he, in his sleep, reminded her of her father. The production I saw left that scene out! And Caliban—I mean, what can I say for a character who is trapped in the wrong body, who says, “You have taught me language, and the profit on’t is, I can curse”? You learn, you get an education, you understand, you explain, and what does it get you? There’s no escape, my friend, as Adam would say. No escape from this block, from my mind, from my bones. In the production I saw, that line sounded great; so did his “The Isle Is Full of Noises” speech. Yet—maybe this was the actor’s fault—it didn’t sound right coming from him, as it does when you read the play.

The other plays I’ve seen, I don’t remember at all, not even how I came to see them. Someone might tell me that it’s unfair, based only on those plays and that one opera, to write off all the others.

Which isn’t what I’m doing. I simply have no need for any of the others, or for newspapers, magazines or TV. (When I hear “TV,” I think of what many people think I am and will be until my surgery is complete.) And, for the same reason—I realize this just now—I’ve never had any affinity for children or anyone much younger, chronologically or emotionally, than me. This, of course, rules out almost any male I’ve ever met and most folks who fancy themselves as artists.

And my explanation, I’ve just come up with it. It’s something Adam might’ve told me if I’d been a bit—actually, quite a bit—older. It’s something mother might’ve told me if she could’ve expressed it. Then again, she couldn’t’ve, unless she’d gotten off this block. Here it is: A fish, even one who’s learned to talk, could never tell you it’s in water. Take the fish out of its element and it dies. But to tell anybody where you’ve lived, or what you’ve lived in, you have to get away from it.

And what I just realized now—The reason why I’ve never tried to describe mother, Adam, Mrs. Littington, the woman whose name I never knew or any of the other people who lived on this block, who stayed, who left, who were driven away, is this: Tragedy is romantic only when you’re not going through it. The dead can’t aggrandize their sacrifices or mourn their mistakes. People who never knew there were any other paths besides the ones they followed can’t trouble themselves over the turns they took; women who know only bearing and rearing children, and men who know only how to beat, leave or forget them never tell stories—not their own or anyone else’s. Some may simply tell people they know, which is not really the same thing.

So I don’t need—or want—those contrived tragedies about star-crossed young lovers. If Adam’d made movies, Sophie’s Choice wouldn’t’ve been one of them any more than the boys who fight each other , beat the other boys who couldn’t fight them, harassed and raped the girls—and me—could’ve come up with another West Side Story. One was more than this world ever need; I say the same for Sophie’s Choice or anything that’s been written, sung, acted or made about people dying in flash of glory and youth. Even the least intelligent women I’ve met know better than that; almost no man does, or can. Adam was one of the few exceptions I’ve ever known—perhaps the only one.

Now I realize why cemeteries don’t disturb me—why, in fact, I feel more comfortable in them than almost anywhere else. And why one was the first place I visited when I got back to this block, and was in fact the only place I could’ve gone to before I came to the funeral parlor, the only other place to which I could’ve come back on this block. No one can inflate, deflate or conflate, much less exaggerate, the bones inside the boxes there. The dry ground is blistered with white slabs etched with the years, the dates of births and deaths of the ones who’ve become them when there was nobody to remember their names. Some bear crosses, others the Magden David; most of them, in the final hours before they turned to numbers and months in limestone, professed—if they hadn’t already—faith in God, Yahweh, Allah, Ha’Shem or one of the other 99 names of the being who remembered the one thing they took from the cradle to the casket: what their mothers called them. Everything else—including the lives to which they gave birth of from which they took one additional breath—decomposes before their bones. And they had only names: their own and one of the ones in which I—and sometimes they—never learned to believe.

And once I bury my mother—when I leave this block for the last time, I expect—I’ll have no more reason to use the name she (Or was it the man who fathered me?) gave me or the one her father left her with.

The graveyard at the end of the block furthest from my mother’s place was the one place where I knew I wouldn’t see or hear misconceptions, distortions or outright lies. Or so I thought until I saw a tombstone with these dates, August 5, 1967—June 18, 1992, under a name—whose? I’d heard it before; it was even mentioned when people spoke about me or my mother. My first name—my old one—no middle name (like me) but not the same surname mother and I shared.

The date of death: the last day I spent on this block. Cold and rainy; there were always days like that just before the summer officially arrived but after a heat wave that came too early for the season. I was on this block and nobody—except for one person, who wasn’t my mother—knew about it. At leas I don’t think mother knew: She never mentioned it.

But the birth date: Where did that come from? It didn’t belong to anybody I knew—too late to’ve been mother’s, much less Adam’s. And it’s more than two years before Adam’s death, the date of which I never could forget: December 23, 1969.

I recall some of these times: the summer when it seemed that all the boys that were too old for high school but too young for just about anything else disappeared from this block. And another man, whom I’d seen before, appeared. He wanted something—I didn’t know what—from mother, which I didn’t think she gave. And I was glad about that.

Mother’d never tell me who he was. She’d only snap, “You’re asking too many questions!” When he wasn’t staring at mother, he was gazing at me, especially at parts of my body I couldn’t understand why he wanted to see. Why did he peek through the peephole when I peed? Or stand by the bathroom door while I changed from my school uniform into dungarees?

One drizzly overcast afternoon, he’d somehow gotten in the house. I don’t remember hearing a knock, a ring or him arguing with mother. I heard the door click. Usually, it meant mother, but somehow I knew that day it wasn’t.

Before I could scream, he clamped his hand over my mouth and unbuttoned my jeans. “Tell your mother and I’ll kill you!” he rasped.

And on that last day on this block—the one mother doesn’t know about, I over to the cellar of a house just down the block from the one where mother and I lived. People my mother once knew were no longer living there, nor was anybody else. When he was inside, I crept down to dust and a ray of haze that entered the broken glass of the portal.

“Freeze!” He did.

“Don’t turn around. “ He didn’t.

“Put your hands behind your head!’

“Don’t say a word.”

31. The Providers

People’ve always accused me of not being thankful. Maybe they’re right. Some—sometimes the same people—have said that I’m grateful when other people aren’t.

So will I ever change? About those things, probably not. The hormones haven’t affected me so; I doubt that the surgery will. But at least I can say that I don’t feel guilty over the ones who accuse me of not being thankful and I’m not going to exalt the ones who realize that I’m grateful.

I still think of Thanksgiving: a time when people are supposed to give thanks….for what? For the food on the table? And whom do people thank? God, or whomever they worship. The Almighty Father: That was one of the names God had when I was growing up. Why should they thank a father for giving them something to eat? What kind of father wouldn’t?

The ones on this block, that’s what kind. Actually, they don’t deny physical nourishment. My father didn’t. Like him, they disappear; sometimes they die: In any event, one way or another, they’re not there for the women or children. Even the ones who don’t go out for a pack of cigarettes and never come back usually fail to provide sustenance—as opposed to belly-filling—for their children and wives.

And everyone grows up starving—the women cluck and the children peep until they realize that it’s useless; it won’t fill, much less fulfill, them.

In TV, in the movies, there are families where the father stays and the children are nourished, body and spirit, and the woman lives under his wing: under its shadow and protection. And they’re all thankful to him, whether they’re saying grace or whether he’s paying admission to enter the various realms of fantasy.

And the fathers who lead their charges, their wards, their concubines in prayer—To whom do they give thanks? To whoever signs their paychecks—or gives a loan or a gift—so they can buy food? They never thank themselves for working as hard as they do. Someone always says it’s the fathers who work hard. No doubt many do. But we never get to see the women running, lifting, bending, scrubbing, cooking or exerting themselves in everyday tasks. So tell me, who provides what for whom in those families?

But what they never say—because they didn’t know , because whoever puts the words in their mouths didn’t—is that they aren’t thankful to their mother, the one who brings them into this world, because they can’t be. They can only be grateful for that, and for the other events over which they have no control. For example, someone who can actually help them, and does, may appear in their lives. For that they should be grateful.

Yes, I’m relieved, in a way, that I’m about to bury my mother. But of course, I’ll be grateful that she existed, even when I didn’t care whether I would the next day.