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Short Stories and Prose Poems by Louis E. Bourgeois
A Voice from the City
And why,
Nephew, does this engine make you sad?
The night before the Communists invaded the city my uncle sat at the stone table and was transfixed by a dozen ripe bananas lying there. “Aren’t they wonderful, Nephew? Isn’t it wonderful that we should have such fruit in our house? We are luckier than all the kings who ruled Cambodia—they could have all the bananas they wanted but as sated as they were, they could never eat them.” My uncle was not an optimist; he had simply grown unclear in the head. He didn’t sleep, he sat up all night at the stone table staring at the bananas—two days later they dragged him to the outskirts of town and shot him in the face for wearing eyeglasses.
1975
On
a Hill at St. Andrew's Cemetery
The sky is heavy with gray. There is tar in the
air. Someone burns tires. Crows call.
Hawks rise toward the highest sky. In the distance, wild screams of children
playing. And further, someone hammers steel. Trucks groan and sputter along the
interstate. Squirrels and a dog bark from the same backyard. A dove flies
before my eyes, as a plane glides over Oxford.
Stone is all around, each with a different name. Dry leaves and new
grass cover the ground. Crickets scrub
out their chorus. The dead tell stories. The sun is going down.
After 30, Life Is Filtered In Black
There's a ghost on the page. I mean, I can't see the boy walking between pines anymore. Nor can I see the mist rise on those early morning hunts when the berries bloomed for the last time. I can't hear my mother call from the window anymore. Her voice falling through the early September dust. I can't smell the azaleas along the ditch where I caught crawfish for hours during the hottest months of summer. I can only remember a name that is no longer mine.
The
Animal
A man without arms was eating lettuce in a diner. We all stood around him and watched. He didn’t seem to mind very much. He looked up from the plate with innocent eyes. Someone in the back of the crowd exclaimed, We should kill him for not having any arms. In turn, another said, We should kill him for having such innocent eyes. And yet another said, We should kill him for eating alone. The armless man ordered seconds and the crowd gradually dispersed.
The Gar in the Tub
The dark canal was filled with trash. You
caught a small gar with your hands. You walked home with it through the
nightmarish streets of the neighborhood.Your mother was at the door smoking
hash and peeling onions. She said nothing to you as you walked in with the gar.
You filled the grimy tub with brown water. You poured some salt into it to keep
the gar alive a little longer. You threw the gar into the tub like you would an
iron spike. It caught its breath and hovered instantly. I came from across the
street. Past your mother, now sufficiently stoned. We walked through the
terrible house with its rusted refrigerator and stack after stack of local
newspapers and National Enquirers. I opened the door to the bathroom. You were
sitting on the toilet, looking into the scum-filled tub, the gar staring back
at you. It was then that I knew you were poor, even though we were neighbors.
1977
Apt
Pupil
My Master read the sonnet I wrote for the day’s lesson. He shook his fist at me like a fool and turned all red in the face, as if the poem was poisoning him. He said, STICK TO THE REAL!!! That was the last straw. I told him I’d rather believe in God than be loyal to the Real. He took a swing at me and I reached into my gunny sack and came up with a thick bladed knife and stabbed him in the neck. He fell down hard on the sand and died after a few minutes of heavy panting.
I took my notebook out of his clinched fist and left him in the desert for the buzzards and coyotes.
As I walked away from my dead Master, I felt light and overwhelmed with Intelligence and Joy.
The Uprising
The thing that could never happen began to happen—his characters became audible, they rebelled. One exclaimed, “I want my legs back, and my teeth. And while I’m at it, where do you get off giving my skin this green hue?”
Another said, “Why do you always make me fall in love with the wrong man and leave me pregnant every time? A dozen failed loves and a dozen bastard children. What did I ever do to deserve such treatment?”
Yet another exclaimed, “Why did you have my father killed in some war he didn’t even believe in? In your stupid narrative, you said my father was a pacifist! Couldn’t resist the sophomoric irony? You create us and make us suffer for your own amusement and self-interest. Un-create us you son-of-bitch!”
He didn’t respond to their outburst; he had the horrible realization they were right. He never considered why he had created them, he just did it. It was just something you did for money, fame, or merely to pass the time. Yet his characters put a notion in his head he’d never thought about, and it would not go away; what if it is wrong to create? This idea went against all he’d been taught to think, yet for this very reason it seemed all the more plausible. What if creating upset some universal balance of nothingness? Then a worse thought came to mind that truly made him quiver, what if he himself had also been created, and like his characters, he was created for someone or something’s amusement? These ideas wracked his brain for days. Finally, he could be silent no longer and he said out loud to his books, “Once something is created it can’t be un-created!”
For two weeks he couldn’t sleep and for two weeks his characters became more and more amplified, more and more rebellious (for none of his characters had been made happy). He really didn’t care what they thought; what truly bothered him was the possibility that he was created for no better reason than he had created his characters in his novels, stories, and plays.
He gathered all the books in the room that he’d written and turned the pages of each and apologized to everyone as he went along. He threw each book, one after the other, (and there were many books, he being one of the most prolific writers of his generation) into the blazing fireplace. When he threw the last one in, he sat sternly, aglow, in his emerald chair, loaded one of his heavy revolvers and blew his brains out forever and forever.
And so far as can be discerned, no character even whispered so much as a word to him.
A
Thought Late In Summer (Paris, France)
I have grown too old to live among society. I will take my few meager things and head for the woods. I know of a place not far from here where there is a pond in the deepest part of the forest. Hardly anyone knows about it. I will go there and build a small cabin. There, in total isolation from the brutality of man and woman, I will exist like a tree, a rock, the stillest pond. I will think of these forty years of life as a dream lived out to the death by someone else. The nearness of death is our sweet sonata.
And the grass grew
‘round his brain
--
John Prine
Vietnam filled your head with strange
images. A lonesome tiger moaned on a hill. Armless boys and girls played in the
village forest. Constellations shone at noon. Showers of fish and crabs poured
onto the marketplace at Dien Phu. Undaunted by the surreal, you swore to kill
them all until the fog cleared and your arms turned to rubber. You did this;
man, woman, child, and beast, no matter. This pleased you. It kept your head
clear and your feet on the ground. Then late one evening on the outskirts of
Tau Phu, you watched the horizon fall apart like busted stained glass, and you
knew you were in trouble and would not live long.
They shipped you back to
One night you left a note on the cold
kitchen table. You walked the two miles to Lake Ponchartrain barefoot and
shirtless. You wore a turquoise jaded cross around your neck, and your hair was
long and brown to the middle of your back. How the stars did fall that night on
the beach as the shrimping boats pulled their midnight trawls. The smell of
creosote pilings was thick in the air. Looking into the sky for the first and
last time, all you could think about were horseshoe crabs and how, when you
were little, you played with armadillo bones beside a dry ditch for hours. Your
father pulled up in his ’56 Lincoln just in time to hear the shot crackle
through the salty June wind.
1970
Downtown Hanoi
for
1949-2005
The drive home was darker than usual; there were stars and only a hair strand of moon. My uncle drove and smoked hash from a short ivory pipe and listened to hard rock at top volume on the stereo. I sat in a tense silence. I didn’t like loud music or the smell of hash, even though I was used to both. He turned down the stereo and said to me, Why you always so nervous? A boy your age shouldn’t worry about nothing. It was then I saw the first of the crabs. I saw them before he did and it sent a chill down my spine. I’d heard under rare conditions crabs will migrate from one side of the marsh to the other in search of saltier and less polluted water, but this time was the first time I’d seen it happen.
As we drove into the crabs, the crunching of the shells grew thicker and my uncle just laughed and laughed, and laughed, and for some reason the bursting shells made my eyes water. The further we drove, the more frightened I became. The more frightened I became, the more my uncle laughed. You see, my uncle had seen things, or rather, had heard more than was good for him. He’d only been home from Vietnam for about six months. He had served as a radio operator guiding B-52 pilots over their designated targets and attempting to lead them to safety if they were in trouble. He heard men’s prayers from way up in the sky and then heard their screams as they went up in smoke and headed straight for the ground. He heard the distant crackle of death, and the voice of guilt as a ton of beautifully wrought silver bombs were dropped on some silent village. He heard more than most of us—he heard too much—and now those voices were in him and he had become them. He complained of deadness in the mouth, as if he was constantly tasting cardboard or Styrofoam. The incessant smell of burnt copper, he claimed, stayed with him no matter where he was or what he was doing.
We stopped in the middle of the highway and sat in the car in silence and watched the crabs crawl through the headlight beams. He was crying huge whelps of tears. It was the first time I’d seen him cry. My God, he said, I’ve never seen anything so awful in my life, so beautiful. And then I started crying; I cried because even at that young age I understood that boyhood is not real and there is no such thing as Patria.
1975
A Day in the Life
You are old enough to speak and feel but you have no real thoughts and you can’t believe how annoyed you become when your stepfather watches The Lone Ranger and The Three Stooges with the television at top volume at 5:30 in the morning before he goes to work where he welds all day long on black-hulled ships from around the world.
Your mother goes to work too, she does something at the State Department and you’re an only child and school is out for the summer and you have to spend your days alone and your nights hidden because your mother and stepfather are doing the unspeakable in the dark and when the lights come back on all they do is watch television; Quincy, Bonanza, and Charlie’s Angels, mostly—or, it’s Sunday again, and no one but you attends mass even though Our Lady of Lords is only at the end of the road, and when you walk back home all they do is watch the Saints lose another game once again in the Superdome.
But it’s mostly the weekdays that are torturous. You’re not quite old enough to be truly turned on by your stepfather’s Playboy collection but you thumb through them anyway because you know it’s something you’re not suppose to be doing. Even at the age of eight, you are genuinely startled that the pages of Playboy actually smell like the nude women on the page.You also notice how your step-father’s sacks of gunpowder which he uses to reload his shotgun shells are as intoxicating as the scent of the slick pages of Playboy. Then you rush from the room because you feel like someone is watching you, even though you know that no one could be watching you, but already Catholicism has damaged you forever.
You are a strange child of course, but what child growing up in the 1970s in a working class household is not strange? But you especially; for the school’s test reveals that you are somewhere right in the middle of precocity and stupidity—you read on a college level but your analytical skills border on retardation.
You find strange ways to destroy the time between the moments
of solitude and the visits by your parents—you kill honeybees with your feet;
you smash them until they can’t so much as flicker a single dying wing. You
gather a handful of them, and crawl under the enormous white wooden house that
your mother rented ever since she left your father three years ago because
Father was a wife beater, although not a child beater, and you are conflicted,
somehow arrogant, because he never beat you, only mother. You are under the house
and the cool mud-packed earth feels good on your skin. You bury the bees with
all the rest of the bees you’ve killed during the summer—you’ve pushed a twig
in the dirt for each bee grave you’ve dug. Perhaps this is the world’s only
You spend hours on the bayou watching many things that eventually bore you and so you turn and go home but before you get to the gate of the huge chain-linked yard, you walk to where there’s thick brush and tall pines, where there is a pit of trash; some of the trash is very old, going back to the 1940s. At the pit, you break ancient bottles of Dixie Beer, Nehi root beer, and Milk of Magnesia bottles by the dozen. You feel guilty about what you are doing, but you do it just the same because you love the sound of busted glass, there is nothing better than breaking old bottles, even if the bottles are so old that they’re sacred; a car pulls up the shell laden drive near the dump, you think of the naked women and of the smells of the pages of Playboy and of gunpowder and you’ll think about it later on tonight when they’ll go to bed and the strange sounds will come from the walls again, like they do almost every night, and then the long silence before the sounds start up again; you think how magnificent it’s going to be when you climb out of your window and escape into the grassy yard where you’ll jump ten feet in the air and run faster than any animal on earth under the heavy moonlight.
1978
Accident
And I opened my eyes slowly to a circle of faces looking down at me like images from a previous life; mother, father, uncle, brother, best friend, Cora…I reach up through the harsh hospital light toward beautiful dark haired Cora and I notice that the left side of me is not working, nay, is not there at all, and the right arm is tied viciously, not loosely, to the hospital bed.
These voices, some clear, some not, some familiar, some strange; clopping of shoes and the rhythmic digital tone of hospital equipage—
I’ve closed my eyes again to think—for how long have I not been here? For how long have I been unconscious? Two days, two weeks, two months?
I know almost instantly what’s happened—I know I can see and move my toes—I can move my body, it’s the arm—the left arm is gone—can I live with that? Perhaps. If that’s all there is: how many people did I kill on the highway in my souped-up Asian sports car? Perhaps none—but maybe more—
I would like to speak, but they have gagged my open mouth with tubes—this must be the Tube Factory—there’s another tube going straight to my heart, that’s the Morphine Tube—I know that without even thinking about it because Morphine has been my only friend the whole time I’ve been here—
I have so much to say and so little to say—I somehow manage to gag up through the phlegm and tubes and blood the word “pen” and sure enough I open my eyes and sure
enough here comes a nurse with pen and paper—they untie me and I somehow manage to write:
--MARDI GRAS--
then laughter from the crowd—that’s right. I was headed to Mardi Gras when this terrible thing happened to me on the highway—they get it too—they understand what I’m attempting to say, I’m trying to say:
--DID I MISS MARDI GRAS?--
I fall back on the pillow and they tie my arm to the bedrail again—I want to go back to Morphineland again—when I am there anything might happen, both good and bad. Once my father brought me a drum fish and a rifle and broke out crying in a convenience store. I cried too, but without remorse. Another time, Cora brought me a broken deer antler and an ancient faded picture of myself, and she danced on the periphery of a field where, in another life, or perhaps in a future life, I hunted woodcock and gathered box turtles during a heavy downpour.
Yet another time in Morphineland, there is my mother and only brother—frightened to death about something and I’m able to say to them:
--We could sleep if it wasn’t for all the Murder going on around here--
And somehow they are comforted by this and we’re all a family again sitting in front of the television watching talk shows from the mid-1970s,
And once again in Morphineland I am there with an uncle of mine and we are driving along Highway 90 West toward Chef Menteur then smashing blue crabs with huge red oars as they struggle across the white asphalt seeking whiter and saltier water—the crabs bleed gallons of red blood as we crush them to pieces—and it is this very uncle who carries with him a piece of the original cross who I’m most frightened of–if I can survive this scene I can survive anything.
Eventually, I find out that no one was killed—only I was killed, but came back to life three times, and then a fourth time, until I got tired of dying I guess—the car, however, is destroyed, peeled back like an open sardine can, I’m told. They tell me two weeks have passed since Mardi Gras, the night I died, and returned to tell about it—I’m apparently in competition with the Savior—but the Savior has nothing on me now; I’m now quite technically a cripple and scared from head to toe—Christ never lost an arm, only his life, and then not really his life, since he was a god-man—I now inhabit a permanently destroyed body, this is the beginning of Destiny.
They finally bring in a mirror—I’ll not go into detail regarding what I saw in the mirror, except to say that I was impressed, whereas they thought I’d be horrified; first looking into the mirror I saw clumps of flesh sloppily stitched and grossly stapled (plastic surgery for the working class is 3rd rate). I very much look like Frankenstein, at least in terms of my forehead. I look hard at the empty sleeve as if it were a new fashion I was trying to come to terms with—I look hard into the beautiful face of nineteen years of age which was me—then they turned out the lights for the night, and a new world erupted.
1989
Crabs
Stupid, stupid, stupid, Cora said as the car gained on us. I’d just thrown a liter bottle of beer out the window and it crashed into the windshield of an oncoming car and now Cora was scared to death and calling me stupid. My friend Mike was in the back seat, he didn’t say anything at all as the car chased us. He just had a dumb looking grin on his face because he’d been stoned and drunk for hours. Just like me and Cora.
I didn’t have any reason for throwing the bottle, it was still half full, I just wanted to see what would happen. The car by now had passed us and drove out of sight; it was then I knew we were in trouble. A couple of miles later, there was a road block of several large looking cars. We were forced to slow down and take whatever it was that was coming to us. We didn’t have a gun or any other weapons to fight back with.
We stopped and even more cars came and lined up across the road. They seemed to storm out of the cars all at once and sort of trotted towards us; a whole group of black men and women, some children too. Cora was crying by now, and still whispering almost inaudibly, stupid, stupid, stupid. I was afraid, but not nearly as afraid as Mike who much to his dismay, had completely sobered up now that he was looking down the barrel of a nickel-plated revolver. It was pitch dark except for all the headlights so it was easy enough to see what was going on.
The guy whose windshield I busted came up to me where I still sat at the wheel of the car He wasn’t very big and he actually looked sort of pleasant as if he held some kind of white collar job. I rolled down the window and said to him with a slight tremor in my voice, Look, it was an accident. I didn’t mean to bust your windshield. He jerked open the car door and grabbed me and I kind of slumped to the ground, mostly on purpose. Cora was still in the front seat with her head slightly bent down as if she was praying, which is exactly the kind of thing she would do in a situation like this, she still believed in God. I was already an Atheist. I converted a few months earlier when I was in the hospital for six weeks after getting busted up in a very nasty car accident. Although I really wasn’t as afraid as I should’ve been, I slumped a little more toward the ground and shouldered the fender of the car attempting to show as little confidence as possible. The man, who was pointing the revolver through the window at Mike, suddenly jerked open Mike’s door and pushed Mike down into a kneeling position outside of the car. It was then I straightened up and said to the guy whose windshield I’d busted, I’ll pay for it, I promise! I’ll give you my license and I’ll have
the windshield fixed tomorrow. This girl in the front seat is the Chief of Police’s daughter. We’ll all be in trouble if you don’t let us get out of here now.
He calmed down some and went to his car and a moment later came back with a scrap of paper with his phone number on it and his name. He demanded my license and I reached into the back of my cut off jeans pocket and handed it to him. He said, I’ll give this back to you when I see you tomorrow to have the glass replaced. Then he went back to his car and got in and everyone else did the same thing at the same time. The one pointing the pistol at Mike was one of the last ones to leave. Before he put the pistol away, he said loud so we could all hear him; It’s a good thing that girl is with you two, you’re a couple of lucky motherfuckers.
On the long dark ride home, Cora was cold and silent. Mike lit a joint and after taking a very long drag from it, passed it around and Cora finally took a hit and she began to warm up some. I kept going on about how quickly they were able to get all those people together to form a road block. Even the cops couldn’t have worked that quickly, I said. Mike kept going on and on about how he had never been so scared in his life, and Mike was no stranger to such situations having already been arrested several times for shoplifting, petty drug offenses, even stealing cars, and he was just barely sixteen years old, two years younger than me and Cora. A couple of miles before we made it into town, Cora finally spoke up for the first time since the incident, and said, How, Lucas, could you not believe in God after what we just went through? What happened to you just a few months ago should make you believe in God. I replied, I died four times in the hospital. Do you understand? Four technical times I was dead. And I’m here to tell you, there’s no such thing as God. There’s just a kind of thick darkness you don’t want to go into, that’s it. No light, no tunnel, no clouds and harps and all that shit. Just nothing. Just darkness. I’ve seen real Nothing. Certainly someone who’s been as dead as I’ve been should know a thing or two about God.
The next day, Mike and I left early in the morning to check our crab traps. Cora was back home still sleeping soundly to the drone of the big window unit that kept the house freezing even during the hottest parts of June in Slidell, Louisiana. It was my father’s house and the three of us were staying there since he’d left not long after beating his second wife to a bloody pulp a few weeks earlier to go back into the Navy for the first time since 1972, two years after I was born. Cora and I both moved in after dropping out of high school together and Mike had just recently moved in to help me run the crab traps I’d stolen and set out in the bayous and lagoons along the Bayou Sauvage in New Orleans East. June is the best month of the year for crabbing and we had plenty enough money to pay back the black man whose windshield I’d destroyed the night before.
Mike and I ran the traps and baited them and sorted the crabs
in the wooden hampers before we got back to the boat launch. It was a good
catch and the prices were still good because it was early in the season so the
market wasn’t flooded yet. We weighed in at the seafood market where we’d been
taking our catch and Mike and I both walked away with a hundred dollar bill a
piece. By the time we got back home to my dad’s house in
The three of us drove back to
I pulled out a pocket full of twenties and laid them out one by one on the cold wooden table. It was two hundred dollars to replace the windshield. Sylvester reached down into his front shirt pocket and came up with my driver’s license. He flicked the license down on the table and I took the license and slipped into the back pocket of my cut off jeans that were worn and faded from crabbing every day for a month straight in the summer sun. Mike dug around in a gray duffel bag he carried with him where ever he went. Sylvester looked me up and down for a moment and said, I didn’t know you had only one arm. I said, yes, I was in a car accident not long ago and the bones in my arm were crushed into many pieces and they had to amputate it. That was only about three months ago, but I’ve made a quick recovery. He’s tough, Mike piped up. Luke is the toughest son-of-bitch in the world. Then Sylvester, who seemed a bit taken aback by this new found knowledge about me, said, in a slightly tremulous voice, I wouldn’t have pushed you around last night if I’d known you were crippled. I didn’t notice last night you were missing an arm. You see, we look after each other in this neighborhood. Hell, we can even feel when someone’s in trouble. This whole neighborhood’s got eyes, we’re all real close. The fucking Klan lives only a mile or so down the road, but we keep them in line, we don’t take any shit from them. I thought you were one of them. I said, It was just a stupid thing I did last night, that’s all. I was just drunk and showing off to Cora. I had no idea you were black. All I saw was a chance to break glass. I just can’t resist the sound of broken glass, there’s no other sound like that in the world. You see, I died four times on the operating table in the hospital and I haven’t been the same since. I sometimes think I can walk on water and air; I don’t give a damn about people at all since I died and came back in pieces. Yet, I’m always happy. I can’t explain it at all. You being black had nothing to do with what happened last night.
There were a few moments of uncomfortable silence after I finished talking. I guess they’d never heard anyone talk like that before. Mike rolled a joint right in front of everybody and he passed the joint around and all of us got high. We talked about the night before, already the distant past. As we were leaving, Sylvester ordered a hamper of craps from me and a quarter bag of weed from Mike. Sylvester said we were welcomed to the neighborhood anytime if we wanted to party with them. As we drove back home in the very same car we were in last night shaking with fear, Cora leaned over and kissed me hard on the mouth and said I wasn’t stupid anymore. I could see Mike in the rear view mirror. He was smoking a cigarette and looking well.
1989
Hammond
for beau christian bourgeois
The cemetery was small and fenced in with solid black iron. The streets were mostly cobblestones and the nights often foggy. My cousin and I spent our days studying French and reading Sartre and Kierkegaard. At night, we wrote outlandishly long poems until we went blind. Then, we’d walk the pathetic lonely streets to the town and get drunk at the bars until we regained our sight.
One
night, we walked home with the
I pulled the trigger six times into the speeding train, thinking how lucky we were to be Existentialists, and knowing that this very moment in time had nothing to do with money at all.
1996
The house, now a church, had concrete walls and enormous archways and halls dividing the rooms. The place was always dimly lighted. There were cockroaches all over the floor and on the walls, that’s what I remember for sure because that’s what frightened me the most at first. My next memory is of my Acadian step-grandfather sipping from his cheap beer and cheaper gin in the large den, only lit by the grey light of the black and white Philco television. Apparently, my parents had dropped me off for the night. My step-grandfather didn’t speak much, he always wore his army fatigues from his time in both Korea and Vietnam, Korea because he was young and could fire a rifle, Vietnam because he was from Marksville, Louisiana and could speak French well enough to communicate with deserters of the Viet-cong. Korea left him all but deaf and Vietnam all but speechless. This is the night of my first memory.
It wasn’t fear I remember most at the root of my first memories, it was sadness, childhood sadness. I sat alone on the concrete floor in the adjoining hallway where the back door was and played with the roaches and an old rubber ball half gone, bitten in two by some dog I suppose, the faint voices of the television behind me. There was just enough light to illuminate the darkness. My step-grandfather’s beer and gin filled the air, deepening my already deep melancholy. Every now and then in a kind of depressed but controlled drunkenness, he would call out to me “Où à tu, Lucas?” and I would answer “On the floor, Papa.” I was around three years old. I could understand simple commands in French but was not able to speak it. It was 1973, a year I remember only from certain angles in the shadows.
Finally, he fell asleep. The television went off the air–as television channels did in those days before cable and satellite dishes. My parents would not be coming to get me on this night. I was still on the floor, unattended, forgotten, in the cold concrete house on the outskirts of Slidell, Louisiana. It was then that Gogo came to me. How to describe him? Clownish, at least the hair of a clown, but it was silver, not orange or red. He was puppet-like, spindly and mechanistic in his haunting movements, standing about eight inches tall, and speaking incessantly without forming any true words—his mouth just moved and only the air of words escaped from his thick red lips. At moments, I thought he was trying to speak to me in French, and at other times, I thought he was trying to speak to me in Spanish, the language of my maternal grandmother, but only English thoughts came to me. Most of the short time of Gogo’s existence I spent showing him the cockroaches and he showed me the inside of himself which was a mirror with emerald trim. I saw myself over and over again in Gogo’s magnificent mirror–a brown-headed boy with heavy but fine hair and a perfect Gaelic nose. Gogo would point and I would offer him a cockroach as thanks for showing me his mirror, the inside of himself, but he didn’t seem to like the roaches and he would point to my mouth and I would eat them, as many as I could find, until finally I got sick and threw up all over myself. It startled me and I began to fear Gogo, to the point of real tears. Eventually, I quit crying long enough to somehow gather the courage to pick Gogo up by his silver hair and flush his wicked body down the toilet. I have yet to hear from him since.
The next day they came for me but it was late in the evening. My step-grandfather had gone fishing that morning and brought back a string of fish, mostly gar, shoe pique and carp. Around noon, we had fish and rice for lunch, with water and coffee to drink. He took up the dishes from the Formica-topped, steel-legged table. I remember the methodical clanking of the dishes as he washed them.
He went to his chair and smoked his pipe for awhile. He drank a beer and fell asleep with the sound off on the television. I stared out the kitchen window for awhile watching an old lady from across the street feed her cats. She had dozens of them, different colors and shapes. She seemed to me to be very far away, as far away as my arms and legs, as far away as the sky. I have always been intoxicated by distances.
I slipped out the back door without waking him. The yard was large and was not fenced in. Rozo cane grew along the fetid ditch that ran along the front yard. The cat lady waved to me. In response, I threw my half-ball in her direction, it lopped into the ditch. I went for the ball and the cat lady told me to stay out of the ditch. I stuck my hands into the viscous black water to find my ball, water bugs and crayfish swam about. I felt ancient, as if I had never been born. My step-grandfather was standing at the front door. I saw him before he spoke, then he said, “Lucas, rentrez maintenet.” I went to him without saying anything. He picked me up with his short but strong arms and sat me in his huge white zinc tub. A roach began floating in circles in the yellow brackish water, and I picked it up and tried to put it in my mouth when he slapped me lightly on my face and said, “No Lucas, c’est caca. C’est caca!” For whatever reasons, those were the last French words he ever spoke to me.
My mother and father came for me and I climbed into the back seat of the white beat up Falcon. The inside had that old car smell, like the inside of an old person’s Oldsmobile or Fairlaine. But my parents were not old; they were young, good looking, hostile, slightly backward, and very tense. Normal attributes of the upper working class of Southeast, Louisiana. My father was recently discharged from the Navy fleet at Long Beach, one of many fleets in the Navy that didn’t see action in Vietnam. My mother was the first and only high school graduate of her family. That day, I remember her long autumn hair and red pantsuit, and his thick mustache and wide violent eyes.
We went down the long and dusty semi-rural road. Lines of pine trees mostly thin and short rolled rhythmically, the sky was a dark blue fading into ochre, crimson, and purple. I have never forgotten that sky. It was the first time I was mesmerized by it. I remember feeling as if I had become the sky or that the sky had become a part of me. There was sadness and glee, as if I could walk on air but in tears. It was then I became aware of the sound of nothingness and time. The song “Mr. Bojangles” was playing on our push-button AM radio:
I knew a
man Bojangles
And he danced for you
In worn out shoes
Mister Bojangles
Mister Bojangles
Come back and dance
again
The song blended with the colors of the evening. The evening and the song and the moldy smell of the car made me dizzy. I had the strange sense that I might disappear at any moment, but it didn’t frighten me. It was as if my body was being purged of all details, only the real poetic stuff of existence remained.
My father turned down the radio and slowly came to a stop in front of the mailbox of a large one-story brick house. “Mr. James died of a heart attack today,” he said to my mother. From the back seat, I could see Mr. James’ wife pulling flowers at the edge of the yard. Like the cat lady, she appeared to me to be very far away, as far away as I could see before she disappeared into the evening air. I imagined how the flowers would taste. I imagined my mouth full of purple petals, as I still do when I see such flowers.
It must be that I had seen Mr. James before or imagined I had seen him, mowing his lawn in a pin-striped suit, a spindly man pushing his mower to and fro, his short overweight wife androgynous, taciturn, and silent, edging the sidewalk and fertilizing the front yard’s shrubs and flowers. The two of them, very quiet and nondescript, without want or ambition of great things, working together and speaking indirectly under the ambiguous sky of Slidell, Louisiana–he dead ten years before her, she living well off the insurance money with no hope of finding a replacement and existing in the shadow of his obscure memory. Perhaps I had only imagined him; he very much resembled Gogo, the apparition I had destroyed the night before. The poet-child takes in and digests phantoms, and produces phantoms all his life.
We arrived at home near sunset. I climbed out of the car and could hear a dog barking from a long way off. I remember seeing the quick movements of bats speckling the sky, although at that age I did not know they were called bats. An uncle of mine was sitting on the front steps of our two story bungalow, a triangular looking home made of cheap cinder wood. He was drinking a Dixie beer and smoking a cigarette. He looked and talked like Johnny Cash, but he was a foot taller and skinnier. I had never seen him before and still don’t know why he was waiting for us on the front steps. My father took a beer from my uncle’s Styrofoam cooler and they talked for awhile in the waning evening light. I remember my uncle telling how one evening a snake crawled under the door of his house while he and his wife were watching television. I also remember him saying how he wished he was back in the war overseas.
The Slidell sky was shrinking quickly on this day in 1973. I envisioned dragons eating up that sky. I looked into the horizon. I stared at it harder than I had ever stared at anything before or since; staring into the horizon until it almost drowned me.
When I was eight, my mother finally got tired of the beatings and left my father for good. I remember the final blow; I was standing outside looking through the front door window at my father mercilessly pounding my mother’s face into the cold checked tile floor of our run down two-bedroom brick house on the outskirts of Slidell, Louisiana. All I could do was pace up and down on the three brick steps leading up to the front door and hope he wouldn’t kill her.
A few days later, my mother and I were firmly entrenched across town in a H.U.D. housing project where we stayed in a duplex with my maternal grandmother who had just suffered a major stroke a month earlier. Her name was Olga and after the stroke she spoke in beautiful streams of aphasiatic sentences. From her I first came in contact with poetic utterance. She spoke as one who lives on the horizon, uttering lucid lines with proper form but no content. She was a hard-drinking New Orleanian who smoked four packs of Pall Malls a day and ate incessantly every hour of her waking life. She weighed three hundred pounds at the time of her stoke. Olga was abandoned at an early age to a convent of angry nuns somewhere in Covington, Louisiana. She was my initial poetic education, but I’m quite sure she never read a poem in her life. Years later, I played her a recording of Ezra Pound reading from The Cantos. Pound’s voice rattled through the clinical air of the hospital when, after about a minute into the tape, my Grandmother turned to me and said, “Is that the kind of shit they teach you at college?” These were the first coherent words she had uttered in
years and she gained my respect completely. After she died, I dedicated my first collection of poems to her.
My mother left my
father in late spring of 1978, and at the beginning of the summer he lost his
job of ten years at Airco, a helium and oxygen plant
in
As violent as my father was, he never laid a hand on me. He once punished me for climbing around on the roof of a small metal shed we had in the backyard. As I jumped around on the roof, I finally fell through scraping up my face on the rusty, jagged edges of the metal. He scolded me, not particularly severely, and sentenced me to my room until the next morning when I had to go to school. He made light of the punishment by making a game of it. He inscribed my name and a prisoner number with a black Marks-A-Lot on one of my white t-shirts, and slid my meals under the bedroom door. I think my father felt guilty for his part in bringing me into the world.
We were straight up
working class folk living in
In the months after my
father lost his job and my mother, he grew his hair long to the middle of his
back. It was thick, straight, and
blue-black, whereas before, he sported a bowl cut mandated by Airco. My father was very dark complected,
like me. The Acadian French and Spanish blood with a dash of Cherokee and
Chickasaw was clearly accentuated under the constant exposure of the
In order to supplement his meager unemployment checks my father took up gar fishing. In many parts of the country, gars are considered trash fish and an annoyance to most anglers because they have to cut their line