The Secret Life of This Life Now #12
12th in a series of brief essays about the coming and going of a book.
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I recently came into possession of the last 100 or so copies of This Life Now (A Midsummer Night’s Press, 2014), my Lammy-finalist first book of poems. I thought this series of essays might be a good way to persuade 100 or so people to make those copies disappear.
This is post #12 in the series. We move on to the second section of the book, “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Sodomite.” That section begins with an epigraph from James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: “When you wet the bed first it is warm then it gets cold.” These are poems about my childhood. The first poem in this section, and the twelfth poem in the book, is “A Brief History.”
“A Brief History” is a ghazal, an ancient Arabic form that became a mainstay of Persian poetry starting in the 10th century. It was popularized in the United States in the 1990s by several prominent poets, including the Kashmiri-American poet Agha Shahid Ali, who died way too young of brain cancer in 2001. The single most characteristic feature of the ghazal is the refrain that ends each couplet. The refrain usually begins as a rhyme with the last word or phrase of the first line of the first couplet, but in “A Brief History” I opted to go full refrain, as you can see in the first two couplets of the poem, excerpted below.
In 1960, by my mother, my father’s bread is buttered without irony. Then, the word “luncheonette” was uttered without irony. Sodium lamps surround our housing project like a stalag. Home alone, watching Rosemary’s Baby, I shuddered without irony.
I can take a break from my rah-rah 1990s and share with you a bit about my childhood and adolescence in these upcoming SLTLN posts for the “Portrait of the Artist” section of the book. I was born in 1961 in Nassau County on the south shore of Long Island. More about me later. First, the ancestors.
My parents were first-generation Ashkenazi Jews, their parents having come to the United States from the Pale of Settlement around the time of the First World War. They grew up in New York City. My maternal grandfather sold junk from a pushcart. My father’s father repaired shoes. My grandmothers kept house and raised children.
All four grandparents came to this country knowing only Yiddish. My mother’s first language was Yiddish. She did not start speaking English until she started school. My father’s parents were both deaf mutes; they communicated using American Sign Language, in which my dad was fluent. His parents were legally separated when my father was a child, and he and his younger sister and brother spent years apart from each other in a series of foster homes. When my father was 16, he became emancipated and reunited his family, including his siblings and his parents! The older I get, the crazier that story sounds, but there you have it.
My father had a high school education. My mother had a junior high school education. My parents knew each other from the block, so to speak, but I don’t know offhand which block that was—somewhere in Manhattan where poor Jewish immigrants lived. Initially my mom was friends with my dad’s kid sister Frances. Then I guess she took a shine to my dad, or he to her, or what have you.
In a story that has always baffled me, my parents got married in the fall of 1940 and my father immediately enlisted in the army—or he enlisted in the army and they immediately got married; I’m not sure anymore which was the cart and which was the horse—and they headed off together to Fort Bliss in El Paso, Texas, where my father was stationed for basic training. I guess my mother planned to accompany him to wherever he was stationed after basic training? But then the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, the United States entered World War II, my father was “shipped off to Hawaii for the duration” (as my mom used to put it), and my mom came back to New York, initially living back in her parents’ apartment, but ultimately moving out on her own. My understanding is she supported herself as a chamber maid in New York City hotels.
My father came home after the war. My parents moved into an apartment in the Alfred E. Smith Houses, a New York City Housing Authority project on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. My oldest brother was born in 1946. He was a twin. The twin was stillborn. My mother went on to have several multiple births; but after that first time, the survival rate for the multiple births was always nil. All in all, my mom had seven pregnancies and gave birth to eleven boys (no girls), seven of whom were stillborn, four of whom survived. One of my three brothers was born with brain damage, cerebral palsy, and other physical disabilities—“severely crippled and profoundly retarded,” as we used to say when you were allowed to say such things.
If all of that does not sound very auspicious in terms of launching pads for a safe, happy, healthy, and successful life—Welcome to my world. And it never gets much better from there. Writing those words, I feel a certain kind of way. Like I’m trying to manipulate the reader, play or even prey on the reader’s sympathies, try to score as much crappy childhood cred as I can. Am I doing that in fact? I don’t really know. I think it would be disingenuous for me to insist that I am not. And yet, at the same time, I mean—Well, that’s the story. If I told a different story, a nicer story, that, too, would make me feel a certain kind of way. That, too, would be disingenuous.
So I’ll start to wind this down now. Henry was born in 1946. Freddie was born in 1954. Victor was born in 1956. Shortly after Victor was born, my parents bought a house in Levittown, Long Island. Levittown was a planned community in the Town of Hempstead in Nassau County, named for developer Abraham Levitt and intended for returning World War II vets. I don’t remember the Levitt house. My parents went bust and sold the house soon after I was born, and we moved to Luna Park, a Mitchell–Lama co-op in Coney Island (which my father referred to as “the asshole of Brooklyn”). Named for New York State Senator MacNeil Mitchell and Assemblyman Alfred A. Lama—the Albany legislators who sponsored the enabling legislation in 1955—the Mitchell-Lama program used very generous tax abatements to encourage developers to build affordable housing for middle-income residents on property acquired by eminent domain (plus ça change).
In the next installment of Secret Life, you will learn about Supermarionation and what it was like growing up on the site of the Coney Island amusement park where Thomas Edison electrocuted the elephant Topsy in 1903 to demonstrate the power of his newly developed alternating electrical current. I shit you not. It was even captured on film. The good times, they just kept rolling on!
Get your copy of This Life Now, well...NOW! The bargain-basement fireside-sale price of $10.00 includes SHIPPING in the US.
Scheduling Note: I am going to publish posts in this series on Mondays and Thursdays at about noon eastern time. Second Coming posts seven days a week at 6:30 a.m. eastern time.
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Great stuff