The background of such a madman is at least of clinical interest. I strain to find something good to say. Does such a personality evolve from insecurity, a feeling of worthlessness churning beneath the facade? Mason's father didn't find his handsome mother tied to tracks. He was not deceptive — and that's not a family secret. You be the judge. Mason, here speaking: My father comes back to me often. He came back last night; with a flat wide nose, a plate in his lip, a sculptured skull, looking through a mask. From the inside of his head I now look out at you: you are wearing my face, yet you are not me. I lost a forefather in the bush — on the q.t. — one in the gas station while the Cadillac was being filled, the oil changed. My father has grown fat. He's a model of virtue yet he has cloven hooves. He smokes and rubs his red eyes. He has forgotten the taste of innocence: he has nothing to declare. His head and especially his sad eyes are not truly his own. He is up against obstructionists. He is a fat, fat man sunning himself in the sunchair. There's wet, cut grass before him: something he has accomplished: the beer he holds is his reward. My father liked seeing my mother, when they were still together, in summer prints. Now he is discussing symbolism, the conflict and exchange between Church and State, the value of a muse, with his smart girlfriend, a college dropout. His African nose flares, just slightly: this happens when he's tense, excited. He now looks less like a prince of rogues. His complexity is authentic. Skin? The inside tissue of darkness turned the blowup-blue of the Black Hole. Every night I dream of my father — now that he's, how'd ya say in Anglais? dead. Is he dead-dead? I ask ‘cause he comes cloaked in his own flesh, even now. See him coming across the night sky which is like a sheet of fifty-by-fifty black metal — used in bridge construction. He's dangerous yet undefined: he has nothing to confess. He's wet from the rain falling from the white moon. He's reachieved innocence through having emerged from that romantic ooze of damnation known otherwise as Getting-Along. The setting is not bleak not a trap and there is no charm in the spell he conjures. My father is still sad. And still. Sadness swallows him. He is also a stranger to me, as I am to my sons, my daughters. He's slightly on the lunatic fringe, yet somehow free of dereliction. At least
he believes in me. He's a stranger coming in lightning, crossing the construction site. My father gives in to a dream of the werewolf. His howl sticks in his throat as he pulls himself to the edge where he falls peacefully into a muddy swimming pool in a backyard in Atlanta. I am in Chicago. A foghorn is the last sound he hears. The light from my welding rod, his last light: this is lineage. Then he recovers for me: old Clootie. Infernal Angle. There's no bilking in his action. My father's face multiplies in the night. Is there such a thing as interchangeability with one's father? I could not imagine my father a hero — Salt of the Earth. To his generation he is a constant threat because that whole generation was caught in the act—and he wasn't. He is the Marquis de Sade, the eternal infidel, Lucifer, victim of meddlers and muddled affairs. I sleep dreamless in self-defense, taking transmigration with Kafka seriously. Outside the dream, in a barbershop, he looks out the window: through it, the Deer woman walking up a path. She could be Painted Turtle's mother. All flat surfaces. My father's metabolism is slow. He worries about his feet and his heart and his ribcage and his fingers — he has arthritis. He worries about the chemical balance of his body — yet he isn't health conscious exactly, sees no trapdoors, steps on no thin ice, does not have the “Bullfrog Blues.” The moon outside above the road lights the way for my father, like D.H. Lawrence's, when he is stumbling home drunk. Except my father does not drink — is not a drunk. A lame duck, yeah, but not a scoundrel. My father has a gun in a gun-holster strapped to his chest. He is unbelievably like a Hollywood gangster in the way he carries himself. Yet he has no hideout, no illusions, no contact man, fix, hype, buster-and-screw man, no biter, no acetylene torch. He says don't be like me, be an artist. In the sand my father finds a skull-bone. He places it on his dresser. He watches it for a week then decides to paint it yellow. Why yellow, which yellow? What kind of paint? My father often feels unloved — and loved, by the wrong women, too passionately. His secret life is inflamed with the quality of hurt. His facial muscles won't relax. The nurse takes his blood count at the free clinic, his girlfriend counts his socks. Holes. A peewee soft-song man sings outside his window. He waits for the train. It arrives late. Although it is late it's still the seven-forty-seven. As though walking into a hornet's nest, he steps up onto it. Through the window he sees the rotten roof of the station. It's raining. The roof leaks. On the platform eight virgins are collecting for the March of Dimes. At his foot is a shopping bag. In it: the infamous skull-bone. He's a bagman. Smell the cool wet morning? Where's he going? He gets off in the city. We watch him walk with his bag. Slightly stooped. He enters the Magnan-Rockford building. With one of the keys on his key-ring he unlocks the basement door marked Janitor.