There is a large photograph of my sister Harriet and one of me shot in the 40s. They were professionally taken, and shot outdoors at 222 Oceanview Avenue in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn. We lived on a corner house in a basement apartment on Brighton 2nd Street. In Harriet’s photo she is shot at an angle with a long stemmed rose in one hand, very well done and very beautiful. Perhaps she was four. I was eight.
It is most likely i will never return to that address ever again, although the molecules shed from my family and I permeate the walls. I believe we leave spoor. So much happened to me here, and so much was done to me here. The first coats of neurosis were appliqued on my self. In the photo of me you can see the young pre-pubescent boy still innocent, still only mildly conditioned.
Before I moved to Arizona I had planned to return home, to capture in photographs the supposedly edenic state of my childhood (I never did.) In the photograph taken of me I am wearing a short blue plaid jacket, just to my waist, my hair coifed into a pompadour and parted to one side, my eyes vividly hazel, my front teeth in, but with a space between them — never attended to, and my face aglow with innocence, unclouded with worry and angst, an unraped soul. When I look at myself iI see a child not yet totally conditioned, more open than closed, aswim in life, presenting itself to me daily as a young boy. When I turn to my sister’s photo, she grasps that slender rose and is softly alive, untroubled, in repose. Both photographs capture more than who we were; they capture us before we were crushed by woe and wear. In my picture I see such opportunity for myself, a great and eager thoroughbred, frisky, pawing at the ground, itching to run.
As I look back time and event, what we call experience, has been corrosive. I have few regrets. it is what it is, it is what I have been given. I have used writing to take flight from out of that world, the one which makes us rueful, regretful — and rageful. Moreover, it is not by design, it is all happenstance or just bad luck or error that I was reared in ways that now limit me. Naw, not so much. My parents were as blindly ruled by the fates as I was blindly ruled by them. They did not live coherent lives. Come to think of it, who does?
I see parents, rearing, nurturing, more or less, as collectives — masses of dumb-blind and random actions that on a sub-atomic level, if you will, bombard and crash into one another, bringing about disparate energies: matter changes. I view my life in particular, and all life, in general, as aimless, random, mindless — and numerous, interactions. Frightening to contemplate, but at least it gives mom and dad a break, takes them off the hook. So, instead of blaming our parents for their malign influences, it might be less satisfying to consider that all is flux.
Most if not all of the individuals of my childhood, their gestures, incidents with them, their attitudes and ways of being, are all gone now, laid to rest. Uncles, aunts, grandparents, parents, cousins, family friends are all gone. A blizzard of feelings and moods about them are stilled. The ticker-tape parade of my life has turned the corner on the block and has dissolved from movie to a single photograph, a still! Gorgeously sad it is to contemplate all this. All that sound and fury, hurly-burly, thousands of influences, all gone — except in my one solitary mind, my experience. To remember all this, to remember the ALL of it, is to tremble at the face of time, that elusively rottten scoundrel that ulitmately lays us low.
Kane utters “Rosebud,” the emotionally-charged sled, with the gravitas of an entire childhood subsumed within it and I ponder what my “Rosebud” might be. What one word subsumes all my being. When my mother was weeks away from dying, her ovarian cancer traveling to her brain, she was visited by a woman cousin. The household shrouded in anguish and pain for my mother, in “conversation,” my mother now attenuated and sallow beneath her housecoat, just blurted out from the disturbed neurons of her brain, “Father Knickbocker.” Incomprehensible, agonizingly humorous, sickeningly inappropriate, these were her last spoken words. Speech and conversation had disintegrated into shards. She suffered terribly for a year in 1960. I was 20, my sister, 16, two babes lost in the woods, critically unprepared for life. Our father, sadly, was the third child. All her life had come down to “Father Knickerbocker.” Forty seven years have come and gone and I cannot metabolize that horrific event. So I stay away from it, much like the autopsy report of my wife, Rochelle, in which her body parts are clinically described, the coroner in one instance, referring to her “pendulous breasts” — the ones i had touched and made love to. I have seen, I have had too much trauma in life — and it persists. I have it now: “Enough!” This is my rosebud.
There is a dark, dark recess in me, a wizard place of newts, frogs, gristle and bone, that expounds the desire to just die. I am not suicidal, and not depressed. It is just a feeling that says life has been too much for me and that I wish to cede, throw in the towel. And yet I go on, carry this weight with me, Sisyphus on his knees, grieving and grief-stricken. For most of my life I was unaware of the depression; for most of my life I was unaware of my very tortured soul. I am now aware of the travail, and I have mercy for my soul, eaten up as it were, by the rats of time and event.
I will stop here, for the agony of it can be tasted by me; it is as if I have something to throw up but it only comes half way up my gullet, stops, then recedes. I have the sneaky suspicion that all my writing is but an eruptive metaphor. I weary of ingesting life. It has not been good to my system. . .I am feeling very distressed now. Writing is not only cathartic; it is purgative as well.
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