Buzz Poole
liquidsecret@yahoo.com
Power is such a potent aphrodisiac
My mother said, busted entourages
Have no love, and she closed the book
Virginia’s fingers ran over the poorly Xeroxed print as many times as her eyes, fading the ink of the San Quentin letterhead and the letter’s list of acceptable items for inmates to receive either on visiting days or via mail, both subject to thorough examinations. It was committed to memory what she could and could not give to her son, but she clutched that paper like it was the only key out of a room closing in on itself.
The letter was the closest to contact she had had with Donnie since she watched the back of his body disappear behind a heavy wooden door nine months ago. And the letter was not even from him, but since receiving it she held and caressed the paper as if it were Donnie himself. He had not said anything to her at the arraignment. She called his name as two bailiffs ushered him past the empty jury box. No eye contact even. At least once, the letter verified this, he had thought of her, giving over her name and address as the person to contact if any issues arose between him and the outside.
Now, the letter folded many times over, permanently pressed in her sweaty palm gripping the steering wheel, Virginia shuttles her little beat-up Barracuda through traffic in an uncharacteristically urgent fashion. She rumbles into the Walgreen’s parking lot, the shocks sound like glaciers cracking as she drives the right tire over the sidewalk’s curb. Now. Now, I can do something for him.
Inside, she paces across the swath of linoleum aisles pregnant with jumbo bags of candy and spackled murals of shampoos and hair dyes and toothpastes. Under the fluorescent lights she wonders if this is what the cafeteria is like in prison. No muzak. Do the floors squeak when wet soles walk on them? What does he eat? Does he sleep in the top or bottom bunk? Does prison even have bunks? Where are they?
Clear plastic tubes filled with green and red candies straddled by a rouged Santa waving his pointy cap like a rodeo cowboy shock her ¾ boxes upon boxes of them hedged behind Brita Water Filters as if poised for an ambush. She remembers that Christmas: A milk moustache as white as his gapped teeth. He was so happy and excited the night before; they had laughed and laughed as she jokingly kept telling him that it was way past his bedtime, even though she kept refilling his milk and he kept drinking it. Anticipation and total belief: Santa would bring toys but only because of Mommy. They both tired of the charade at the same time. She was exhausted. He had to pee. Donnie insisted that he sleep in her bed. Spooning, she faked sleep to watch and feel his fidgeting, to listen to his own attempt to fake sleep. He did sleep for a bit, his subdued breath whistling out of his mouth through his teeth. She never felt so warm.
Surprisingly, Donnie’s favorite gift was a stocking stuffer she included more as a gag than anything else. What could a six year old do with a rubber pair of sunglasses? He wore them all day plowing across the dunes of crumpled wrapping paper with his GI Joe Desert Tank; he wore them to school and would cause scenes in class when teachers asked him to take them off inside.
Once, in lieu of the principal’s presence, the office secretary had sent Donnie to wait for Virginia in the cafeteria that doubled as an auditorium. Slouched over on his folded arms at a corner table she noticed the limp American flag covering part of the menu board and how the flag looked livelier than Donnie. They left in silence.
The denim jumper, navy blue stockings sag from underneath, looks like it was slept in. Virginia stands there sanding her forehead with the heel of her hand, the same hand that holds the now unfurled correspondence. She draws the attention of a normally apathetic clerk who looks more scared than helpful.
“Do you need any help, ma’am?” Virginia hears the question but feels swallowed in silence. Her rubbing encroaches on the filament of black that is her right eyebrow and the darkness of silence projected on the back of her eyelids, the entire void is needled by flashes of bright darkness, like a kaleidoscope, and everything feels like a bad ride going too fast.
“Where are the sunglasses?” she says. Her teeth clench and her wiry lips appear to not even exist. “You do sell glasses right?” She feels herself coming back and in her hair draped like a nun’s hood smells the dog and cigarettes.
“You can go back towards the pharmacy; there’s an eye doctor. Is that your prescription?” He attempts to lift the flap that looks like a dirty old cloth and she returns.
“No.” She whips her arm down and stamps her foot. She stamps it again and again, emphasizing her three syllables, keeping time with the desultory John Phillip Sousa march droning from the ceiling: “I need shades.” From over the rims of her own glasses her eyes finally meet his. They look like chalkboards heavy with the residue of erased yellow chalk suspended in spider webs of red. “My son wants sunglasses.”
The clerk points to a display case that marks the line of an aisle. She looks and sees a white plastic tower of sunglasses bejeweled with lenses and mirrors. Reflected in them all is the same smile she will see when Donnie puts on the pair she will buy.
Non-metallic, no wrap-arounds, no mirrored lenses. Non-metallic, no wrap-arounds, no mirrored lenses. With mantra like dedication Virginia recites this as she fingers every pair, working her way up the columns of shades she checks each pair. On the entire rack only two pairs fit the guidelines issued by the good people at San Quentin. She can’t picture Donnie wearing white almond shaped frames. She opts for a pair of red zebra-striped plastic glasses, the lenses a pink zinfandel tint. The red and black will look good with his pumpkin colored hair. She loved the feel of her fingers sweeping through it. As he grew he didn’t. She tried and tried, clamped it between her fingers, the locks pulled taut from his scalp as she begged and cursed him simultaneously.
And I said it was time to stop
I needed to stop
It had to stop
Eyes steal glance at clock
I can’t stop
I nod as slightly as she whispers
This is all broken
A busted entourage of two
A time one such situation ensued Donnie ran to his room and slammed the door with such force, such anger, she felt it and the five or six strands of his hair dangling from her fingers flickered on the current of rage, the day’s last sun lighting the strands. She had asked what he was doing. Hunched over the kitchen table, head bowed she thought he had been praying. She didn’t know that he liked to write. He didn’t want to show her. And he didn’t want her to run her fingers through his hair. Or to touch him. And he stormed off leaving this behind.
A boy, his mother standing in the line snaking back from the photo counter, mistakes Virginia’s droopy smile of self-reflection for one of those Oh isn’t he adorable grins. Unable to distract his mother from the tabloid she mindlessly flips the pages of, the boy maintains eye contact with Virginia who reminds him of a sad puppy, but old. She does not react. He begins to dance. It’s a funky jig replete with flapping arms, some spins, shimmies. Virginia notices none of it. The shape in front of her moves, but all that she sees are her memories, one after another of all she ever ignored, all she turned away from all because she could not love. He never let me.
The boy spins and stops with his back to her. Wobbly but near his finale he breaks into a moonwalk, really more of a backwards shuffle, like if you could set a chicken in reverse. Neither of them have their bearings. His shoulder bumps into Virginia’s hand from which the glasses now dangle from her fingers. The shades slide from her fingers, like weights off a balance. As they fall to the floor she feels the plunge back into the reality she cannot even escape in her daydreams. Oh no, and it is impossible to tell if she is responding to the fall or the sound of the cracking lenses under the heel of the boys sneakers, as they both happen so quickly.
“You broke my glasses!”
“What? I didn’t break nothing. You dropped ‘em.”
“No, no you should have been watching what you were doing.”
He looks at the glasses on the floor. “Whatcha want those for anyway? Hella ugly. Who’s gonna wear them red zebra stripes?”
“They’re for my son.” She too stares at the glasses. “He’s a crank addict. He’s in prison.”
“You know, mine, my boy went to prison and he came back with sunglasses. Didn’t have any when he went in. Nope. A boy can get himself any old thing he wants in there if he just got some money.” The woman imparting big-house knowledge resembles a slightly inflated raisin with glasses. She waves a wrinkled arm like a game show model displaying prizes, as if anything Donnie could want, that any inmate could ever desire is held under Walgreen’s roof. “Send him some money, dear. Whatever he wants.”
The boy, the woman, and Virginia all stand around the glasses.
“It’s too late. I think he’s done brain damage. It doesn’t matter.”
Virginia bends over to pick up the shades, almost losing her own glasses off her nose. The boy watches her and in watching him watch her, she notices the hand of his mother sweep over his head down his neck and come to rest on his shoulder. She squeezes it with the force of love that he welcomes. His smile, his neck canted into the mound of her hip, the gently shut eyes: that embrace of love.
Virginia cannot be mad at the child. He’s not Donnie. Donnie was never this boy and I was never her. Towards the boy she feels a tenderness, foreign, not the remorse and regret and worry and self-hatred she until this moment basking in the radiation of actual familial love has always associated with children. This is all I can do. It’s all I’ve ever been able to do.
Despite the girl at the register’s suggestion that perhaps Virginia doesn’t want to buy a crushed pair of sunglasses, Virginia does not heed the advice. She insists that these are the glasses she wants. The girl handles them so gingerly one would think the glasses could possibly be damaged even more by the slightest gust of wind through the electric sliding doors. At last, Virginia gets her change and receipt.
Not too long out of the parking lot, the flow of traffic is killed and the cars stand in a rigor mortis. The last of the late October sun maintains the illusion of heat on the chilling air. The glasses, swaddled in the letter from the prison, sit shotgun. As heavy on her mind as the exhaust slowly collecting in one stagnant cloud of dirty closeness, the cracked glasses beg attention. Beg with an intensity Donnie never displayed aside from his habit.
A traffic report alerts her to the situation she is already stuck in, as if advice at this point can be of any assistance. Virginia turns off the radio. The car murmurs and she suddenly cannot bear to be so alone with herself. Inching along, the traffic’s trickle has led her onto a portion of pavement sliced by the final light of day. It is blinding. Confronted by it she cannot face it. To embrace and push away: her ideal. The light hurts and again the tears come. Without thought, as if they were a regular part of her daily accouterments, she grabs for the glasses and hastily places them on her face over her regular glasses. The velocity of her motion and the awkward presence of another set of glasses attempting to rest on her nose and along the side of her head and behind her ears result in the loss of a red stem. Minus the stem, the glasses remain forced between the preexisting set and her head like an iron spike driven into a rock face’s fissure.
As seen through the cracked plastic lenses, eyes brimming with tears, the sun is a scratched ruby marble, its roll ever so slowly coming to a stop outside a line she cannot see past. Blinking, the sound of her wet lashes slapping together, heard in one of those odd moments of acute internal awareness, like a weird click in the jaw or a throb in the vein that traverses the back of your knee, her repetitive rapid blinks sound like the slap of a wet mop on linoleum floors. She wonders if prisoners mop many floors. Swab the fucking deck. Jesus Christ, it’s not a boat.
Dense little cotton-ball clouds preserve the sun’s light although the sun no longer is visible. They appear as if purple and pink cotton candy have been spun together. Through the glasses, the clouds are the white of reality. The radio is back on although she doesn’t remember stroking the panel. Again she endures a traffic report that tells her what she already knows: traffic is clearing.
And I said it was time to stop