Yes, I might say I have seen a good deal at the age of fiftyeight. I've been married, have grown children, and am not proud to say I'm a grandfather. My kids are raised, the wife has remarried. I have no filial responsibilities. There was a pretty little number about thirty years my junior whom I'd been seeing, but I was jilted by, of all things, a full-blooded American who practices Hinduism and thinks he's some sort of ascetic. He collects welfare— which my salary pays for— and claims he transcends being, a concept difficult enough to formulate, let alone attain. Of course he is thirty years younger than I am also, but he doesn't have half the drive and stamina. Well, then, let them have one another. Charlotte said to me at our final parting, "You're just too nervous for me to be around, Charles. You never relax. You're always on the go. What do you think you're accomplishing, anyway? Tom is so —

"Listen," I said. "Don't tell me about that hare-brained ascetic of yours who sits on his butt all day harmonizing with nature while I feed him. I've got a job to do, and it's not easy. I've got deadlines to meet."

[...] I took his comment to mean that those who did not belong to the Nazi Party had their strength before Hitler's advent and had maintained it. I found this quite a stimulating attitude on the part of many Germans. Of course, some had followed the party, but even in these I saw a begrudging sense of having erred. After all, it was not so long ago that Germany was officially an occupied territory. Of course, the youth had experienced none of this. They wanted new cars, television sets, sports equipment and so on, just like the Americans. They had merely supplanted one false value with another, but the second was less harmless -- or was it?

[...] I kept mute, for our mere walking along, and my knowing where we were going (which place I wanted to attend anyway), and knowing also that the professor felt it to be a surprise all brought a great joy to me, which joy I was certain was the germ of our very gaiety in living. If only I could make such a state more constant -- but it was too late for me. I'd seen right down to the very core of being.

The church as well as man's pride keeps the population explosion going, only the very richest are entitled to adequate medical treatment, and the very attitude of so-called big business is to turn its head away from any disastrous truth that does not drastically affect us today. For them, tomorrow does not count, but here is the catch. Tomorrow is here. Tomorrow is today, for even if we aboutfaced, we are already too late. I'll admit these facts are accessible to one who cares, and I am one of those. That is the very reason I can't stand to sit by and watch all this go on. It is intolerable to me, and there is nothing I can do about it. I have tried to slant my articles to point to the truth, but they were censored. I had even thought of starting my own paper, but I could not get circulation.

The entire object of my bringing these things up was to see if there was one ray of hope, a chink in my argument that would lead me to change my mind. I find none, as I am sure the reader does not. I certainly felt like the man who plays Russian roulette, but I had no chance, so to speak. In this little gun, there was only one chamber. I was sweating profusely. The final moment is not funny. A sunbeam from the window had touched my table. I raised the gun up to my temple. I'd memorized the very spot.

Drinking in the bar put me under a double pressure. I didn't want to leave the bar. I had no place to go. People— even friends—were tired of seeing me. Tired of loaning me money or having me drink up all the booze in their house or talking all that ragtime talk of the past and the good old days, tired of the old stories, just generally sick and tired of a pest and in some ways a stranger who was on a different circuit and one that had only one direction— downhill. Mainly I couldn't go back to the room. If I had been able to sleep, it might have been OK, but not to lie there and look at the the ceiling and the four walls in a room that was to be my coffin. The constant vision of my runaway wife. Christ, I couldn't be drinking over her. We hadn't slept together for the last five years, and the last two were miserable. Maybe one preferred misery over lonesomeness.

At night I saw the rats— hard to concentrate on them as the with small angels spelled them off in relief. Small angelic girls with pouty girl faces and the curly golden hair and the straightup wings attached to their backs. My wife had been gone for over ten years and the loneliness didn't come after her departure; no, not until two years ago. We did not get along, and our last years together were a mess, but the mind has the ability to dispel bad memories. Often when I thought of her recently it was Easter. We were on the Marina Green, and my daughter had a Japanese kite high in the sky. My wife was in a pale lemon dress and a floppy white hat and had a white parasol. She had legs that were show-stoppers— even made old men turn around ---and we walked hand in hand, and the girl held my other hand, and as we ate my wife's leg brushed mine and it was intentional. I lit her cigarettes for her, and the girl blew out the matches and we were together like a communion. Often she lapsed into silence and her eyes sparkled and we knew, she knew, I knew, I loved her, and I knew that she knew, and whatever was in my face and the pressure of my hand on hers told her we were one and the church ceremony that had united us made us one and our daughter was a replica of our love and our passion. And after we ate in the Basque restaurant we danced to the accordion player, and he played La Paloma over and over, and the girl sucked on a rootbeer with a straw, and the glow in her face responded to our movements ... La Paloma over and over again.

Her lips were sensual and soft and her teeth nippy and bitty as she consumed me alive. I could hardly watch her nibble asparagus without getting a hard-on. At the same time her cooking im- proved. The nights we spent trout fishing, camping out, and lying in our sleeping bags on the cots, and she listened in silence as I pointed out the constellations to the girl Orion, Cassiopeia. And the sunsets at the bench and the wild abandonment in the surf, caressing and rolling in the surf. The time under the trees in Muir Woods during the monumental rainstorm when my blue blazer shrunk. The Marina Green with me stroking atop her barely under the arcs of the headlights of the commuters going toward the bridge. I whispered, "This is insanity. We have a house and a bed only four blocks away!"

We turned each other on — no whips or tying up or swinging arrangements with other couples, none of that bullshit. Just the expansion of our love into the physical.

Born a Leo,
Cancer was his
rotting sign.

Build of a lumberjack,
soul of a sailor,
brains of a bolshevik,
dreams of a savior;
crucified by coronaries,
tormented by tumors.

Tobacco-stained smiles.
A snarling slap
during drunken interludes.
Bear hugs across
the funny papers
on Sunday morning.
Standing in the
luminous hospital hallway
I saw him begin to crumble,
but never saw him
fall.

that winter stepdad lost his job
people became thinner
their eyes worried
thinking of the crash
steelmills shut down
streets shabbier
shuffle of panhandlers
in front of the theater
a woman in evening gown and tennis shoes
looking for fun, mister?
as if there was any fun left anywhere in the world
as if some magician had plucked four out of five cars
off the streets
no butter, steaks, oranges
no coffee, tea, or milk
tailormade cigarettes had vanished
two people committed suicide
in our building in one week
they didn't even know each other
an elderly woman who plugged the keyhole
the gap under her door
turned on the gas
the hungarian,
goulash cooking on the stove,
when he did his dive
from a side window
head first.

No one has seen the captain in weeks, and there's a rumor he doesn't even exist. I caught sight of him once, shooting into his quarters. Large bandage on the right side of his face reminds me of the Van Gogh self-portrait with mutilated ear. The other rumor is he was a U-boat commander in World War II. He has a torpedo build, but I think it all stops there. The strongest and craziest of all the lunatics on board is Calvin McNaught. Fortunately, he took a liking to me early on. Says he's a fallen Catholic from "Upper Ireland, the Occupied Part." A hurler's build— agile, strong, fast, lady-killer, body of granite, angular-cut face under curling black hair.