Читать книгу This Place of Prose and Poetry - Lucian Krukowski - Страница 8

When I was young, my mother and I lived for extended periods in my aunt’s house, one of many red-brick two-family buildings on east fifth street in Brooklyn, which my uncle had bought with money he made running a saloon—free lunch and a nickle a beer—during the great depression.

The reasons for our frequent stays were always the same—battles between my mother and father. But intrusive as these reasons are on the memories I have of that time, the story I want to tell is not about them—rather, it is about a dead horse.

The year was 1934; I was five, and the streets were filled with push-carts and horse-drawn wagons moving up and down the streets, selling ice and coal, fruit and vegetables. A little truck whose backside was loaded with ice and dead fish, would come once a week—announced by the cry of “fishi-up.” The fish were mostly flounder, and the little Italian fish-monger (in a Slavic-Jewish neighborhood) protected himself from criticism by his inordinate skill at filleting: “Why, you can see daylight through the bones.”

There were also some who came to buy what little we had—their voices punctuating our young shouts with the stentorian cry, “Buy-cash-clothes.” And then there were the street musicians, transient but festive decorations on the shapes of poverty.

I particularly remember one such group whose leader had diseased eyes—I could tell; they were red and crusted and didn’t move. But he walked slowly down the center of the street, playing most marvelously on the violin (much better than my father, I thought) while an accordion and a singer accompanied him on either side. A young boy, my age—perhaps his son—scurried to pick up the pennies, wrapped in newspaper, that the women would throw down from their windows.

The only motor vehicles I remember were the huge black truck that delivered ice in summer and coal in winter, and the small electric truck (a technological miracle) that whirred along the avenue bringing Stuhmer’s Pumpernickle to the corner grocery.

Each brought along it’s own fantasy: The coal truck had sliding chutes on its sides under which thick dirty men would position barrels and fill them, making clouds of dust. The barrels were then wheeled up the alleys between the houses and emptied into coal bins like the one in my uncle’s basement—three barrels of large soft coal to one barrel of the small hard stuff—the mix for burning depended on how cold the weather was. Although I knew that the house belonged to my aunt, the basement with its stove, coal-bin and shovels, belonged to my uncle.

The bread truck was the opposing principle to the coal trick in the contest for the future of our young souls. This truck was small, spotless, and rectilinear, and it was painted a golden brown, the same color as its bread and the uniform of the driver.

I found out later that the truck was an early experiment in electric vehicles. It made a soft whirring sound as it moved slowly down the street, and it seemed to us to float above the turning of its wheels. The driver was also small, a somewhat bony man; he sat very straight on a backless stool, steering with a bar and two large pedals; and he seemed so immersed in the good fortune of his job and his responsibility as emissary of the Stuhmer Company, that he never looked at us when he drove past. Nevertheless, he was the wind-gust that contested with the coal-lump for our allegiance.

The women of the neighborhood would often talk about the relative virtues of the coal-man and the bread-man, and their concerns seemed centered on the relative size of body and hands, and the cleanliness of each, especially the fingernails. The women thought their conversation to be quite beyond our understanding and they sometimes expanded it to other matters that led them to laugh in ways I had not heard before.

I laughed with them—even when they frowned and tried to shoo me away. But, of all the children on the block, I especially hung around to listen, for it seemed to me important to know which men the women preferred—although they often changed their minds about the one when the other truck would reappear.

The other vehicles that came down the street were not as magical. They were situated somewhere between the borders of our lives, between the extremes of coal, ice, and eating, and so were more familiar yet less instructive—less emblematic of our needs.

But the ordinary vehicle this story is about was once transformed in an extra-ordinary way—and it took on a magic far beyond the others. It was actually not a truck, this one, but a wagon, pulled by a slow horse and driven by a heavy man with a thick face who was deaf. The wagon carried a load of watermelons, and it only came by in summer. As the deaf-man drove the wagon down the street, he would shout out “warramerroo”—not a word, of course, but a signifier we all understood.

One very hot summer’s day, I was standing on my aunt’s stoop when I heard shouts and saw people running. I ran after them, and in the middle of the street, just down the block, I saw the watermelon horse, still in harness, sprawled flat on the hot street in front of the wagon—quite dead, as it turned out.

The women came quickly from their houses with pots of water that they poured upon the horse—it was midday, you see, so the men were working; and those who had no work would stay hidden indoors until after dark. When the water did no good—did not revive the horse—the women turned upon the driver and berated him for not taking better care of his animal—for many of the women had come from farms in eastern Europe and knew about such things. The old man, hearing nothing, but surrounded by flushed gesticulating women, waved his arms—at the horse, the melons, the heavens—and uttered loud croaking sounds which punctuated the spittle and the sweat running down his face.

Eventually, a wagon from the Sanitation Department came along, also pulled by horses—which to my amazement took no notice of their species-mate—and the dead one was cranked up and taken away. But the city wagon was quite long in coming, so we all (half the neighborhood was there by now) had a good while to gape, recapitulate, and explicate—to offer competing versions of how this natural disaster came to be, and how it would fit into our lives. To me, the horse seemed much larger dead than living. Before, he was just an ordinary wagon-horse, about which mothers would say: “Don’t get too close or he’ll step on your feet or kick you.” Now, dead, the horse was not only monumental, but also unique, for he was my first dead horse—my first dead animal—although I had already seen dead people in their open-for-view perfumed coffins.

But this horse was lying dead without a ceremony or a wake. I looked carefully at the twisted neck still dangling in its harness, and the head with its opaque eye, the tongue spilled out onto the pavement, and I watched the green flies as they settled down to feed upon the moisture of its sweat. But my greatest interest was in the view from behind—following the crease between the haunches that travel from the opening beneath the tail, and culminating—my first portent of natural sublimity—in a huge black penis, quite stiff and longer than my arm. The swollen balls that supported it seemed as big as the watermelons they once swayed in front of—only darker.

Although the women said that such a thing is not for us to see, they also were interested, and they seemed not to mind, after they shooed us off a bit, that we snuck back and looked some more. I was much moved by the spectacle—indeed, entranced—beyond the point I would ever reach in front of human nakedness—but I was also puzzled. How could this most powerful pecker, this super-model of my early morning tugs and dreams, this exemplary priapus, be on something that is dead—how could an erection come into being just when its body dies?

Peeing, as I realized later, is the enemy of erections; it imparts a dual function to something which should be autonomous, free of the mundane task of waste-disposal. My pecker always seemed restless when I peed, as if it were over-qualified for the job. But when it was free, not working at peeing, it became the least physical thing about me, for it provided a clear contrast between the ecstasy at its tip and the grunge of ordinary life. Is the pecker—despite what the tight-ones say—an instrument of the higher things? Do they (those wet mysterious emanations) become clearer—more doctrinal—each time it (the pecker) gets bigger? Could it be, then, that the pecker in its final erection is the launching-pad of the soul—the sturdy sign that shows us the straightest way to Heaven?

In the dead horse lying on the street in the summer’s heat in Brooklyn, I had found a bridge between my earlier and later life, and for the first time I realized that I was a traveler on that bridge as well; and I thought that dying wouldn’t be so bad if one had a cock and balls that big to show.