To Cure Pink Eye

I was a very sickly child. Born with a pretty weak immune system (or what I now prefer to call Sympathy Sickness), I was hospitalized several times and housebound for a pretty big chunk of my first year of school. I not only had the chicken pox, but I had scarlet fever twice that year. I also was diagnosed with a bleeding stomach ulcer, a problem that, according to my doctor, stemmed from unnecessary worrying found in a 5 year old boy.

As a child I was obsessed with supernatural powers. I watched every afternoon as Prince Adam and Princess Adora turned into He-Man and She-Ra, those twins separated at birth that would rid the world of Skeletors and Evil-Lynns, that depended on their trusty Tiger and Falcon sidekicks. I yearned to live in Castle Greyskull or Crystal Castle. I wanted so much to be a MerMan or a Teela. But despite my aspirations to be The Prince of Power, I knew that I was too weak and too fragile to find the superhero that dwelled in my little boy soul.

I was a particularly brave kid at school. I was a smart kid. A Red Ladybug, the title given to each child in the advanced reading group. But, I missed a lot of school. I was sick. A lot. Afraid that someone would call me out—the superhero whose proverbial Achilles’ Tendon was his own immunodeficiency.

My aunt Zina once came to our house from California. She brought with her toys for me and my siblings. But the prized possession—the ultimate gift—was a custom-made cape she fashioned out of an old scrap piece of material complete with a clasp at the neck. She explained to me that “all heroes need a cape.”

I became very attached to this cape, wearing it most all day everyday. It gave me powers of imperviousness. I would be the hero that languished to break free from the depths of my mortality.

Without my cape, I would have to find a way to brave kindergarten. My mom wouldn’t let me carry it to school. So, I sat next to the oldest girl on the school bus. Her name was Misty Wilson; she was in eighth grade; she was pretty; and she gave me attention. She always told me “Good morning!” and asked me about my day when I got on the bus in the afternoon. Lucky for me, she was one of the first students picked up in the mornings and one of the last ones dropped off in the afternoons. I became very fond of Misty. She helped me with my homework, she let me sleep with my head on her lap. She was a very nice lady. Then one day, she didn’t get on the bus.

I walked up and down the aisle on the bus with my Gremlins lunch pail and my Gizmo backpack until I finally, disappointedly, sat next to my brother. I began crying. He kept telling me to knock it off, elbowing me in the ribs with his pointy joint. I cried until I thought my eyes were bleeding. And they were swollen. My brother, in exasperation, declared that I had….conjunctivitis. That’s right, folks. My brother told me (and everyone else he came into contact with that day) that I had PINK EYE!

I was 5. I didn’t know what pink eye is. I cried most of that day, thinking someone was going to beat me up because I had a pink eye. I always thought my eyes were blue. I mean, even my teacher, Mrs. Dunavant, told me what pretty, blue eyes I had. I thought to myself, “Could it be? No…wait. No! I’m not…turning into a girl!” I decided that even though I, like most other 5 year old boys, didn’t really use my penis for reasons other than excretory purposes, I really didn’t want to part with it. So, like the little girl I evidently was becoming, I cried. All day. When I got home, my dad asked me why my eyes were all pink. “Eyes?? Plural? Oh my God! It’s spreading!” I cried harder. I started heaving. I fainted from high blood pressure.

My dad scooped me up and rushed me to the emergency room. He explained to the doctors that I had been crying all day— he mentioned the note my teacher put in my backpack, letting my parents know that “Jeremy was unruly in class today. He didn’t want to jump rope with the other kids. Or play leapfrog with the other kids. He preferred instead to sit by himself and cry. He will not be able to enjoy recess tomorrow. Please explain this to him.”—- he didn’t know what was wrong. He told the doctors that I looked pitiful. That I cried. Then I started breathing funnily. And then I “passed the hell out.”

The doctors put me on an IV and set up some meds that would cause my blood pressure to decrease and would stop my ulcer from hemorrhaging. I lied there, weak, destroyed, frail. My father paced around the room. He was panicking himself. I wanted to apologize for being such a sissy all day. I wanted to explain how I just couldn’t make it through the day without my nice lady friend on the bus to comfort and protect me. Instead, I cried. More.

A few days later, having been ordered to stay in bed, my mom came into my room. She was really scared. She pulled the Bambi comforter and matching sheets back and crawled into bed next to me. I didn’t sleep very well, you know, after hearing that there was a volcanic hole in my emaciated stomach that could cause me to bleed to death. My mom knew the trick to get me to sleep. She would get in bed with me, roll over and face the other direction, and let me twirl her thick, curly brown hair around and around my fingers until I, regaining a sense of security, felt comfort and protection and gently nodded off to sleep.

When I woke up, I got out of bed, put on my Teela shirt (you know, Teela, from He-Man), and adjusted the purple, velvet cape my aunt Zina made for me, the cape that my mom always let me wear in bed when I wasn’t feeling well, or when I was sad or scared, the cape that like the magician or superhero that wore it, was magical. I trudged through the house, trying to find my brother. He was in school, unfortunately. Finally, I chanced upon my momma sitting at the kitchen table, coffee in one hand, unpaid hospital bills in the other hand, her head low.

“Hey, momma,” I started. She looked up at me. My mom’s eyes, whose greenness was not unlike Kryptonite, were sad.

I understood immediately.

I ran and sat in my mom’s lap and gave her a big kiss on the cheek. “Thank you, baby,” she said to me, her breath the combination of stale cigarette smoke and black coffee, her skin the scent of Tone soap and Gloria Vanderbilt perfume. “You are just the best boy a mom can have. And you have the prettiest blue eyes in the world.”

I didn’t like the way my mom’s eyes looked. I took off my cape and put it around my mother’s neck. “There, momma,” I said, “That’ll get rid of the pink eye.”

Thanatopsis: Or How I Died

I was sitting by myself in a scanty café when I poured hot, ancient coffee with a low viscosity on the front of my pants. I found this café, COFFEE, while driving myself away from vapid conversation with my vapid housemates. I thought, “Surely, no one will even notice me here—much less want to talk to me.” Giggling, blushing still, part of me was hoping the owner, or at least the person who gave the café its name, had this generic banner painted there because he wanted to give it a quirky effect; I would walk in and be greeted by likeminded individuals: liberal, smoking coffee-drinkers who would rather gouge out their eyes with sporks than drink murk processed by an exploitous corporation. There would be a myriad of beings assembled there at COFFEE: trannies, goths, eclectic rockers (redundant?); mod, gorgeous men who actually look good in skinny jeans and flawlessly sexy women resembling Jenny Lewis will be standing around the semicircular mahogany bar, smiling, laughing about something Eddie Izzard said in-that-one-show; they argue over whether Jeff Mangum will ever record music again. The small, circular tables with mismatched chairs afford intimate conversation. Someone is discussing correlations between Faulkner’s Absalom! Absalom! and García Márquez’s Cien Años de Soledad.

Never-been-readier, I thumped my cigarette across the near-vacant limestone parking lot, the cherry splitting from the fag, as if to say, “We are heading in different directions…” The loose gravel crunched under my boots, and it was rather a feat of accomplishment that I made it to the front door without falling on my ass. Part of a song was stuck in my head. It was there because I put it there; if I were going to fit in with the crowd beyond that door with a WATCH YOUR STEP sign off-center-placed, I would need to think of the weirdest, coolest-sounding song I know but surely not a song that everyone else would know, too…and all I could conjure was “communist daughter.” As I opened the door, I proclaimed, charmingly, aloud:

“Semen stains the mountaintops.”

[As it turns out, Owner was just an unoriginal hack.]

The eight occupants of the room all looked at me as if I had just emasculated a donkey. As a quick cover, I blamed my outburst on a bumpersticker I just eyed on the back of an old Buick as I making a left into the parking lot.

“Idiots!” I laughed.

I managed to make sixteen eyes roll simultaneously…probably a world record for a worldclass nobody like myself.

As I noticed the superfluity of flannel and Brut cologne, I decided the best thing to do was to order a cup of coffee.

The gentleman standing near the cash register—the kind with the typewriter-like numericals—asked me if I desired a cup of coffee. I nodded and lipped the word, “black,” to him.

The man brought me an olive-ochre mug with chips around the rim exposing white porcelain. The coffee smelled of smoky molasses and asphalt. I decided it best to allow the coffee to cool; this steaming bowl of tar would be too much for my delicate palate.

“What’s your name, handsome?”

I raised my head, my eyes meeting those of an obese woman with curly red hair and pasty white skin. Her calf-length dress exposed the varicose veins despite her best efforts otherwise to cover them with hosiery six shades darker than her natural skin color.

I smiled haphazardly. “Cullen,” I offered. “Well, actually it’s William, but my friends call me Cullen because my last name is Bryant. I study literature at Indiana.”

“That’s nice,” she seemed to say with her grin; Her taut lips, dominated by wrinkles, spread across her face and disappeared, revealing teeth with as much variety of color as an ear of Indian maize.

I continued, “It’s kind of grown on me because I actually like Cullen Bryant—the name, not the poet— and well, I like the poet, too, I guess. “Thanatopsis” is one of my favorites, but I prefer the writings of Lawrence Ferlinghetti. His writings of Coney Island are some of the most beautiful in the language and the aesthetic quality really lends its—well, anyhow, I’m not going to go into that detail—I mean, this isn’t exactly the appropriate audience for this kind of talk and— …”

This is where she interrupted me…indefinitely.

She cleared her throat, loudly, a gutturally phlegmish noise that suggested she should wipe her mouth with a handkerchief exited her oral orifice—a sound that came undoubtedly from her bowels. She started, “To him who in the love of Nature holds/Communion with her visible forms, she speaks/A various language; for his gayer—…”

“Hours,” the man at the cash registered intruded. “She has a voice of gladness, and a smile/And eloquence of beauty, and she glides/Into his darker musings, with a mild/And healing sympathy,
that steals away/Their sharpness, ere he is aware.”

“Wrong crowd?” she laughed, not heartily, but mockingly. She began screaming with hilarity—an almost manic howl. I began to feel a burning sensation in my lap. The coffee was smoldering on my jeans.

With no break, the rest of the members of the café began chanting.

“When thoughts
Of the last bitter hour come like a blight
Over thy spirit, and sad images
Of the stern agony, and shroud, and pall,
And breathless darkness, and the narrow house,
Make thee to shudder and grow sick at heart—…”

The lady had escaped unseen and came back holding the barrel of a shotgun at my right temple.

“Earl doesn’t have a bumpersticker, dear.”

I threw up as her finger pulled the trigger.

“The Last Time”

“I feel like a cat on a hot tin roof!”
“Then jump.”
-Tennessee Williams

I looked over at you the last time we were together.
I hadn’t noticed before how your hair sticks up right at the
back, just a few sprigs, right there, on —do they call that a nape?
No, it’s the crown. You
put another cigarette to your mouth, and
deciding it was too much effort to smoke another one,
you placed it between the Bic and the watered-down
glass of iced tea that seemed to be leaking from the base,
the sweat of condensation’s brow running
to find refuge under yesterday’s Times and my copy
of Lolita.

“You shouldn’t wear that shirt” was the last time I saw you.
You took it off to humor me and put on an old gray
Hanes tee. “Is this better?” was the last time we spoke.
We were war and peace in a single bed—
fighting to hang on to one another, making sure the other
approved always, giving grins out of spite,
wanting not to go there—that place where the others
always found themselves, standing on a ledge with
ten toes gripping the pigeon-painted awning.

I jumped.

Below I found that we were ineffectual,
like the one belt loop on a pair of jeans you should
just rip off because it’s not attached
yet you leave it there. Because it’s still hanging there.
You put your belt on around it and go about your
day, making a note to yourself that you should just
go ahead and invest in some new Levi’s.

After a trip to the store,
I stopped by the café to warm up with a cup.
And there you were on the scratched up table,
yesterday’s Times, disheveling a ring of perfect water.

“The Last Time” appeared in the 2007 issue of The Coffeehouse Papers at Lambuth University, Jackson, TN.