Fuck the PAST, it’s NOT NOW. Nothing NOT NOW is real.
Quiet & not moving for many minutes. I have trained myself to do so. & my eyes to penetrate the dark.
Shining the flashlight which is the CARETAKER’s flashlight into the corners of the attic. Where shadows leap like bats. Smiling to see how, when light moves, light you hold in your hand, bright as starlight you make shadows leap. The shadows are there all along. BUT YOU MAKE THEM LEAP.
Crouched there at the window watching the MOON move out of sight. The way a dream will move & you can’t stop it. Heart beating fast & hard. & beginning to feel horny. Excited, & blood seeping into my cock. I am not so safe in the attic as in the cellar where I have my work bench. I have moved my things to lock in the big drawer of the work bench with the CARETAKER’s tools.
This space in the attic is like certain dreams I used to have where shapes meant to be solid start to melt. & there is no protection. & there is no control. Unlike the cellar which is safe UNDER GROUND, the attic is far ABOVE GROUND. The concentration of COSMIC RAYS is higher at higher elevations on Earth than at lower elevations.
The suggestion was made by Dad that I clean out the attic to reduce the fire bazard & I said O.K. I will begin that task soon. Right now the cellar is my Number One priority.
Now we are going to turn over a new leaf aren’t we son & I said Yes Dad.
7
Of all of them, of Mom & Dad & Grandma & my sister Junie it has been hardest on Dad I know. For women, it is their nature to forgive. For men, it is harder.
Upsetting to Professor R__ P__ to learn certain things about his only son & these things a matter of public record. How does your client plead, the judge asked, & the lawyer Dad hired for me said, Your Honor, my client pleads guilty.
In my heart I did not plead GUILTY because I was NOT GUILTY & am not. But it was a RACIAL MATTER, too. The boy was black & Q__ P__ is white & the lawyer advised Dad this was a delicate issue in Mt. Vernon right now & the courts are carefully monitored, just be grateful we didn’t draw a black judge.
But I am on good terms with the family again. This is a relief to all concerned. I have been driving Mom & Grandma to church & have attended four Sundays in a row. I have been driving Grandma to senior citizens’ affairs & visiting friends. I have told them how sorry I am that I have hurt them. & how much it means to me that they trust me. I will live up to your trust from now on I told them.
The drinking is the cause of it & that will be terminated from now on.
It is fucking hard for me to hug them! Especially Dad. There is a stiffness in all our bones. But I do it & I believe I am doing it O.K. Mom & Grandma & Big Sis Junie were crying & there were tears leaking from my eyes I didn’t wipe away.
When Judge L__ pronounced TWO YEARS there was a long moment when nobody spoke or breathed before he added SUSPENDED SENTENCE. Judge L__’s eyes which I had no choice (my lawyer so counseled me) but to look at reflected severity but also kindness.
Judge L__ is a fair man & not vindictive & not to be pushed around by special-interest groups it was said. He is known to Dad & Dad is known to Judge L__. I did not ask but Mt. Vernon is a place where important men in the professions know one another & it may be they belong to the same club or clubs. Dad has membership in the Mt. Vernon Athletic Club downtown not far from the courthouse.
Afterward Dad shook my hand so hard it hurt & did embrace me & there were tears in his eyes behind his glasses like his eyes were loose in their sockets like jelly about to slip out. Handed me the keys to his car so I could drive the family home.
KEY TO DAD’S CAR (ACTUAL SIZE)
8
It has been hardest on Dad because R__ P__ is a name known to people. In Mt. Vernon where he & Mom have lived for thirty years & in Dad’s profession where he is a distinguished man.
I don’t mean that Dad is famous like Einstein or Oppenheimer or Dad’s mentor at the Washington Institute Dr. M__ K__ are famous, or a great genius in his field but he is well known & admired & has many graduate students wishing to study with him. His Ph.D. is in both physics & philosophy or maybe he has two Ph.D.’s & they are both from Harvard unless one is from somewhere else, Dad was at a lot of other universities & knows a lot of people.
Before I was born when R__ P__ was a new Ph.D. he received a fellowship from the Washington Institute in D.C. & there he was befriended by the research scientist Dr. M__ K__ who won a Nobel Prize in 1958. In something like neurobiology, or cell biology. On the fireplace mantel of the house in Dale Springs where I grew up there is a photograph of men in evening dress & one of them is Dr. K__ & one of them is Dad so young it’s hard to know who he is & these two are shaking hands & smiling toward the camera. Pinpricks of red lights in their eyes from the camera’s flash. Dr. K__ is a balding white-haired old guy with a goatee like crotch hair and R__ P__ could be his son is what you’d think. Serious & intelligent & only twenty-nine years old but already he’d published some papers as he calls them. & already married to Mom (who is not in the photograph).
This photograph of Dr. M__ K__ & R__ P__ is to be found in three places: Dad’s office in Erasmus Hall at the University & at the house in Dale Springs & in Grandma’s house on a dining room wall with mostly family photos. Visitors stare at it and say Oh! is that?— & Dad says Yes it is. Blushing like a kid. I didn’t know him that well really—but he was a great man, he touched many lives & he certainly touched mine.
When Dr. K__ died a few years ago at the age of eighty there were obituaries in Time, People, the New York Times, even the Mt. Vernon Inquirer. Dad clipped them all & had them laminated & they are on a wall in his University office. There was an obituary in the Detroit Free Press I saw & I should have torn it out & saved it for Dad but I forgot or it got lost. I was in Detroit where I go sometimes & stay in a hotel on Cass where I’m known as TODD CUTTLER a guy with curly red-brown hair & a moustache & he wears a leather necktie & looks kind of cool but also kind of a square, an asshole you could put something over onto if you tried. I was with Rooster & the two of us high & laughing leafing through the newspaper which always makes me laugh in the right mood & one of us was turning the pages fast & hard like a kid trying to rip them unless it was both of us & I saw this face on the obituary page NOBEL PRIZE LAUREATE DIES & I poked Rooster & said This guy is somebody my Dad knows & Rooster said Yeah? No shit?