One summer, Paul and I visited my parents in the states—the cemetery in which my former existence lay buried behind familiar yet strangely renovated building facades. I thought somehow that seeing the physical remnants of my childhood influences would teach me something about how I’d come to be who I am.
Let’s take the same tour of Main Street, Downers Grove that Paul and I took, shall we? There’s the Walgreens drugstore over there on your right. I worked for a winter unloading crates and ringing up envelopes of old ladies’ coupons. That’s when I was in love with Derek. He called me at work once just to say, “I love you.” Brenda worked the registers with me until she was mysteriously murdered one night by a group of teenagers who pulled her car over pretending to be cops. She always thought it was cute that I had a boyfriend. She said, “Winter’s the best time to have a boyfriend, isn’t it?” Derek would follow her to the grave not many years later.
Oh, yes, and over here is the library. I remember when my mom signed a permission slip to let me use the adult section before I’d reached the required age. I checked out lots of books on Egypt, sexuality, and vampires. Once I got a book on cannibalism, having only the vaguest idea of what that was—something clinically yet deliciously horrible.
And over here on this side of the street is Baker’s ice cream. Well, it’s not called Baker’s anymore, but that’s the storefront, all right. Mary and I worked there when we were 13. She had a crush on me, which only seemed to be exacerbated by my revelation to her that I was developing feelings for boys and thought I might be a homosexual. I knew Mary from the “teen club” run by our Catholic parish. Those were the days just before my stint at the seminary.
Downers Grove pulsed on, even six years after I’d left it to go to New York to live with 4 Chinese roommates in a roach-infested apartment near Brooklyn College for $250 a month… Wow, that was a whole other gravestone erected in my memory: the greasy donut shop by the Newkirk subway stop on the D line, the mailbox near Ocean Avenue where I dropped off my letters on the way to grad school, the Brooklyn accents, and the summer pollen in the air…
I can only isolate and highlight these memories, and that detracts from, even eliminates, the overlapping effect with which they are infinitely layered in my brain.
There’s a quick flash of Frank, for example, at the entrance to my second Brooklyn apartment, the night we bought fresh pasta at the grocery store where they sold glue traps for rats and Catholic votive candles with prayers in Spanish. His exact smell and texture are recorded along with the precise density, odor, and taste of a hundred breads and bagels, one from each bakery in the greater metropolitan area of New York City.
There is the scratchiness of the weeds along the avenues (pronounced aeh-vah-newz), and the heat presses everything down to the asphalt while gangs seem to be (and are) watching from around the corners. There is “wilding” happening somewhere down Avenue H. The subway clatters by, and someone hollers “Yo!” A boom box splits the thick atmosphere with a thicker beat. Frank’s eyes are soft like his fingers and his beard is freshly trimmed. There are pink plastic bags in his hands, which we’re about to leave on the table in his kitchen—where his sister has left him a message about letting out her orange cat. Or maybe he leaves the bags on the counter in my apartment—where Tonya has left me a message that she’s gone to her girlfriend’s house and won’t be back until tomorrow.
Maybe that was the night we made love in Tonya’s bed while watching her politically correct lesbian porno tapes. Or maybe it was the night we decided to eat out, had a fight in the street, and never spoke to each other again…
All that and so much more in just a flash of a second. My stupid hands are incapable of getting down everything to the last detail, and so it’s lost forever, or semi-preserved in this half-assed version that only captures a fraction of what was important.
If I tell you about pink grocery sacks, they might seem like roses. But they are just plastic sacks and that is what made them useful to us when we carried them to and from each other’s apartments.
And if I tell you about Frank, I’m forgetting about Bob, who’s there in my mind scarcely a half second after Frank, followed by a long procession of people, objects, odors, images, stuff: Tom making love to me in his basement apartment, the Chinese paper lantern in the center of my bedroom, my brown cartons of records hauled from Chicago in a yellow U-Haul with my father behind its wheel, Linlan’s live lobster in the greasy refrigerator, Michael in front of some graffiti-covered wall in the East Village holding a folder of his difficult poems, Paul taking my picture on “my old street corner,” campfires burning somewhere in Illinois, my mother and I taking our dog Fuji to the vet to be put to sleep… the whole discordant chorus of noises which has accompanied me through this life…
On my best 70 wpm day, I can’t type as fast as I remember, and I still can’t forgive myself for that.