Oleander
For 25 years my father lived on a street named Oleander.
I spent some summers (mostly uncomfortable) in his house of cigarette smoke and loud talk radio.
I always left the place teary-eyed and coughing. The walk from the house to the car offered a brief release from the smoke, but that ended when we entered the car. Windows shut, the cigarette smoke rapidly filled that smaller space. The smoke snaked over the dashboard toward me. It slithered over my eyes, coating the left one (then the right) like rancid eye drops. Closing my eyes cooled them for a moment but only seemed to make the smoke absorb more thoroughly into my eyes. I inhaled it, too, but never seemed to feel the smoke in my system until the headache arrived.
My father left us in September, 2005, leaving me mostly responsible for the property on Oleander. A week of deep cleaning barely created the illusion that the cigarette stink was gone from his apartment.
Regarding the building on Oleander he had, over the years, sent me letters – bulletins – describing work and activities associated with the property. I never knew what he was talking about. New shingles. Evicted tenants. Landscaping. Garage door?
Those letters passed me by, the words swirling like cigarette smoke on the type-written pages.
For as long as I have known the word I assumed oleander was some pleasant flowery thing. Why would a city name a street Oleander if not for its innocuous pleasantry, like Maple and Elm?
The oleander plant is beautiful, it turns out. It is also insanely poisonous:
“Every part of the plant is dangerously poisonous, and death has occured from using its wood for skewers in cooking meat.”
The word “Oleander” is virtually synonymous in my mind with my father. To me it was practically his middle name. I never knew the full name of the street – Oleander Drive? Avenue? The letters I sent him never included that designation, nor did the return address on his letters. By addressing letters simply to “Oleander” I felt I was letting it go with a lift, or a knowing flourish.
The street itself confused me. I would drive to my father’s house, looking for Oleander, thinking that once I found the street I would have no more turns to make. Then I would encounter Oleander’s off-balance 4-way intersection that forced me to turn the wrong way. I never remembered that turn in the road until I got there.
Researching the word “oleander” in botanical resources feels creepy. It is almost like I’m digging up new information about him. He, too, probably would have defined “oleander” as some kind of frilly plant.
The technical name of the plant Nerium oleander reads like his forgotten middle name. Nerium? Some people called him Tom but no one called him Nerium.
Months after he died I typed his name into the Internet, looking for the obituary my cousin and I wrote for his birth town newspaper. I did not find it, but I had no reason to presume it would have washed up on the Internet. Instead of the obit I found a bullet-point paragraph he sent to the alumni newsletter of the military academy he attended in east Tennessee. It skips many things (of course), but it also reveals things about him I never knew:
“Served 23 years U.S. Army retired 1077 as CW3, MI. US Army Security Agency, Chitose, Japan 56-59, Army Attaché Office, Vientiane, Laos 59-60, Army Attaché Office, Brussels, Belgium 61-64, Defense Attaché Office, Warsaw, Poland 65-67, DAO, Accra, Ghana 68-70. Cross trained as investigator 1970 and assigned Washington, DC. Joint Army Navy Air Force Attaché Office, Vientiane, Laos 73-75. Defense Investigative Service Field Office, Tampa, FL 75-77, retired. Hired as civilian special agent July 78 with service in Tampa, Valdosta, GA and Daytona Beach. Numerous temporary assignments such as Miami, Key West, Cape Canaveral, Chicago, San Diego, Pasadena and Las Vegas. Married 62 at Brussels, Belgium. Two children, Diane now 35 and a free lance medical transcriptionist in South Florida and son Mark, 30, a webmaster for Time Warner in New York City — anybody@sorabji.com, recently featured on ABC News. I retired from civil service in 92 and pass time traveling and attending to four rental properties in Daytona area. Would love to hear from former cadets CHMA.”
I do not remember anything about the “numerous temporary assignments” or the cities to which these jobs sent him. He once mentioned Las Vegas in passing when I spent a week there in 1995, but I did not have the impression he spent significant time there. I know we stopped in Las Vegas on our cross-country Winnebago trip in 1973, but we just passed through.
“CW3, MI,” means Chief Warrant Officer 3, Military Intelligence. He was in cryptology, or “crypto” as he called it. He long claimed to have intercepted and decoded coded communiques from the communists while stationed on an Army ship near Chitose, Japan, in the 1950s. I do not know how true or how significant that story is. The 2-1/2 years since he died have helped confirm my lifelong suspicion that he tended to exaggerate.
I remember dad talking about catching up with fellow alumni from his military academy and even his grade school. I didn’t think much of it until I realized that he did not really know anybody from those days, and that he hoped to rekindle friendships with people he had not seen since he was 10.
∞
I knew an artist who groused that his life’s work could fit neatly onto a single compact disc.
“My life’s work,” he said with a grim, cheesy smile, “fits onto one CD. One piece of plastic.” I later imagined him flicking that shiny CD into his kitchen sink with the dirty dishes.
He had actually described a condensed version of his project. The total of his “life’s work” would fill hundreds of CDs, and my understanding is that his legacy today comprises hundreds of cassette tapes sitting in the room he called his “hubble.”
His “hubble” was a converted closet in which he created the project that occupied much of his life for nearly 15 years. He showed me this room the first time I met him, and I remembered that space a year later when he made the “life’s work” comment.
At the time it impressed me that he produced his lifework entirely in one room, in one place. I was a huge fan of this artist and maybe a little excited to see where the mad man worked. At the time I equated his use of one room (and one room only) with a singularity of purpose that put his work first with little regard for environmental niceties.
My present work space is a corner of my living room. I sit on an old, falling-apart office chair that tilts drastically to the right if I sit a certain way. Yesterday I pulled a lever under the seat, raising the chair 4 of 5 inches and providing a clearer view out the window. A Posture-Pedic pillow meant for human heads at sleep instead cushions my ass at work.
Today I work on this. These words are my day’s work. The works of your days become, of course, the work of your life, and most of my work is done at this table, on this spot.
I report to work by 10am each day. The commute from my bedroom to here, usually uneventful, includes a detour to the kitchen. If I wear anything before noon it is a solid colored t-shirt and a torn up pair of pants with holes in the crotch and at both ankles. I am 40 Goddamn years old and I dress like a 22-year-old hipster barfly. I write poetry into a book, a form of masturbation that produces a more permanent discharge. Today’s masterpiece:
woman inside my bible radio, voice crackling like a frozen river, tells of suicide jesus, suicide satan. "destroy me. destroy me!" daddy was charismatic, loved the women. possessed of smoothness. possessed of alcohol.
Someone once referred to a set of my photos as my “work.”
“I see your work up there,” he said.
It seemed strange to hear my photos (on display at a restaurant) described as my “work.” It seems strange to think of anything I will produce anywhere in my life as “my work.” I have done plenty of “work” but to call it “my work” sounds inappropriate.
I had several window offices in Manhattan but none compare to the one I have now. It is not the 8-window corner office spectacular I had in midtown, nor is it the floor-to-ceiling view of Central Park I had at the 9 West 57th Street building. This view is better than those, and better than any corporate window office I can remember occupying.
The view of Central Park was like a picture from a jigsaw puzzle or a post card. The view of Radio City Music Hall, too, was one for the tourists. Those views did nothing but present themselves, and they bored me. Most beauty bores me.
A beauty-related conversation I had with someone at the Central Park window has stayed with me. I was in my early 20s when my boss (a woman in her 40s) told me “You deserve the best, most beautiful women in the world.”
At the time I took the comment in the spirit of flattery with which she intended, but today I want to find that woman and tell her that beautiful is boring, and that beautiful is usually a pain in the ass.
∞
I should be a farmer, because I love the smell of polecat.
Better known as skunk, this “American musteline mammal” is said to eject an “intensely malodorous fluid when startled.”
To me the smell of polecat is anything but malodorous. I find it bitter but rich. To me skunk is a savory aroma even as it gently turns my stomach toward vomit. It is of the earth, thickly organic, and to me it smells like life itself.
From a young age I remember the smell of polecat. I encountered the scent on many car trips outside of Tampa or through central Florida. One time my mother and I stopped at a roadside fruit stand on Highway 27 near Miami. Like many such vendors found along Florida’s highways this place sold honeydew, strawberries, watermelon, and other such stuffs grown on nearby farms.
We stepped out of the car and could not help but notice the powerful smell overwhelming the place. The smell was so rich and fragrant to me that I actually thought it was the smell of the honeydew or the strawberries.
“What’s the smell?” I asked, breathing deep. The vendor, smiling nervously, said “polecat!” Having never heard that word I thought polecat was some kind of sugar cane or abundantly sweet thing grown with honeydew and watermelon.
Filling my lungs with the earthy air I said “That’s really nice.”
I did not understand why but the vendor and my mother both looked at me with crinkled brows, quickly changing the subject to strawberries.
Later in the day I learned that polecat was skunk. I was told that most “normal people” would describe the stench as foul, putrid, acrid, and other such incisive obloquy.
I silently, happily disagreed.
Most recently I encountered Eau de Skunk en route to New York from Boston. The aroma, so foul to everyone else in the car, woke me from a light sleep. Conversation stopped and the car fell silent as the smell of polecat filled the air. The sudden silence of conversation revealed to me the sounds of the vehicle in motion: wheels thrashing, wind urgently pouring through the narrow opening of the sun roof.
My voice stepped into that silence with “Skunk! Man, I love that smell.” I breathed deep to prove my love for the scent the others found repulsive. Glances of uncertainty, light chuckles of disbelief passed through the car, inviting me to elaborate.
“I love the smell of cow shit, too. And horse shit, when it’s a well fed, healthy horse. That stuff even looks amazing.”
I wanted to tell the story of the night a friend and I, 18 years old, drove to Elfers, Florida; a town of mystery and insularity that captured our young imaginations. I could not get to that story before someone changed the subject — to what I do not remember. Strawberries?
A year or so later I spotted a giant mass of shit at Calvary. Far too big for dog shit, I wondered aloud what earthly beast could have dropped such a mammoth lode, and why would such a creature have passed through Calvary. I briefly imagined clydesdales or other ceremonial horses that might be part of a funeral procession, quickly dismissing such an unlikely scenario.
Then, as now, I wished I knew more about shit. Anthropologists, I would think, could identify the source of most dung laid before them. This turd at Calvary, shiny and dark (almost black), had been artfully deposited with a sphincterial twist. A Hershey’s Kiss shaped flourish exactly in the center reminded me of how a bartender might draw a shamrock in the head of a pint of Guinness.
I would probably feel differently about skunk juice if I was attacked and soaked in the stuff. Skunkblast in one’s face sounds like no fun at all, but the smell of skunk from a safe distance ranks high on my list of earthly delights.
∞
The food service industry long ago co-opted the phrase “all the way” to mean “everything on it,” though I am not aware of any dictionary that defines the phrase in that way. “All the way” has a meaning similar to “supersize,” another fast food term now used to describe things that have nothing to do with food.
In food service “all the way” usually means “everything on it,” a potentially ghastly request should a malcontented chef take the order literally. “Everything?” asks the chef. “No problem!” he says, burying the burger under heaps of every spice on the rack, unsmashed bullion cubes, and (just for the hell of it) a few unpopped popcorn kernels. “Hope you like olive oil on your burger!” he warns as he pours Berio Extra Virgin with one hand and sprinkles Comet Disinfectant Cleanser with the other.
Why does this phrase interest me? Because “ALL THE WAY” is found on one of my all-time favorite receipts, the DININGROOM HOT FOOD PRINTER check of June 3, 1999.
The receipt is hoarse. The blood red letters record a seemingly contradictory order: MEDIUM ALL THE WAY.
In the history of the English language this may be the first occurrence of the phrase “HOT FOOD PRINTER,” a fantastical contraption that literally prints food. I seem to remember seeing the phrase on this receipt and using it as a conversation piece: I had recently read about devices that would some day function in ways analogous to printers. Instead of using ink cartridges these devices would use cartridges filled with other types of organic matter, making it possible to zap into existence simple objects like silverware or jewelry, or even food.
“CHK 181″ echoes a magic number in my life: among other happy coincidences “181″ corresponds to my preferred mailing address for the last 17 years (PO Box 181, NYC 10185).
“DININGROOM” fits the spirit of the dinning room typo common around my neighborhood.
My inspiration to amass and publicly share my receipts came in 1990, at a diner on Canal Street. I ordered a bowl of soup and a Sprite.
The receipt, carefully hand-written by the waitress, alleged I had ordered
1 GLASS SPITE
1 BOWL SOUP
Spite! Had I known what I was drinking I would have asked for a bowl of hate to go with my spite.
1990 was well before the web became a public outlet, and even before I ventured into or even knew about online services. Public sharing of receipts, however, was nothing new. Found objects (receipts, shopping lists, notes to self) had been a staple of poetry ‘zines and literary publications for generations. My idea was to save these scraps of story-telling detritus in overwhelming quantities, a project whose spirit coincidentally suited the infinite copy space of the web. As my life’s experiences accumulated I imagined turning to this mass of paperwork and mining it for memories or story ideas. I also imagined that the quantity itself, this massive list of lists, would create something new.
∞
Friday it took several minutes of scrolling through the word swarm to find a word of any meaning to me. Today numerous words compete for my interest. I can’t decide among minaret, godspeed, wonder, and interdigitate. Hmm.
I’ll go with “wonder” because, coincidentally, I have lately begun to question the meaning of that word as used virtually everywhere.
“Wonder” appears in all levels of discourse, and is used to raise doubts and ask questions. “I wonder what that means,” a question asked in the form of a statement, is a common usage matched by the first half of the definition “to be curious or in doubt about.” The latter half of that definition is seen in “I wonder if she really meant that.”
I recently started noticing these usages of “wonder,” knowing of course that all modern dictionaries include definitions of “curiosity,” “wanting to know,” and the like.
Webster’s 1828 English Dictionary does not include such directly interrogative meanings for “wonder,” rather describing it as an emotional reaction to mysteries of grandeur defying human comprehension.
Modern definitions of “wonder” granularize these earlier, broader definitions, turning it into an introspective concept of self-interest.
I will not get to the bottom of this today, but my instincts suggest that “I wonder” is weak phraseology. Using “I wonder” to ask a simple question takes a concept of unfathomable mystery and co-opts it in a manner that attempts to elevate the intellectual status of the questioner.
“Wonder” refers to the incomprehensible. Invoking the incomprehensible to pose a simple question subtly attempts to lead the question toward no possible answer; implying disdain or fear of the answer; or even disdain of the person being asked the question.
I wonder what it all means.
∞
In my sophomore year of high school I impressed fellow members of my Latin class with my knowledge of the English word derived from the Latin lugubris.
None present but I knew the English word lugubrious, and none but I knew that it meant “mournful” or “sad.”
I learned the word “lugubrious” at Sewanee Summer Music Center in Sewanee, Tennessee. The orchestra was preparing Rimsky-Korsakoff’s “Russian Easter Overture,” and I played the bells part. I don’t recall if I asked to play that part or if it was assigned, but pianists did not play in the orchestra that often so it was somewhat memorable for me on that count. I attended a few rehearsals and played the bells in the final performance of the festival, an experience I recall when I hear that overture on the radio.
During one rehearsal the conductor explained an indication in the score. I don’t have the score at hand, but it read something like “lugubrio” or “lugubria.” Rimsky-Korsakoff, the conductor explained, wanted the passage played “lugubriously.”
The conductor grinned a bit as he described lugubriousness. He used words like “maudlin” and “bathos,” summoning chuckles from the orchestra of high school and college age musicians. He moved his hands, cupped, fingers upward, in a circular movement as he described “lugubriousness.” He mock wept, holding his fists to his chest, imitating the over-the-top style of emotional catastrophe seen in silent films and in most of my relationships with women.
I remembered this incident in Latin class one day when the teacher asked if anyone knew what English word derived from lugubris, a word appearing on a Latin vocabulary list for the week.
I raised my hand and meekly said “lugubrious,” prompting mutterings of “what the … ” from the other students who had evidently never heard this word. Some of them looked my way with wrinkled brows and looks of bewilderment, asking aloud where the hell that came from.
Their surprise had as much to do with the relative obscurity of the word as with my virtual silence in that class up to that point. I never raised my hand or spoke up in that room, and it must have seemed strange to the others that I broke my silence with such a learned sounding word.
I recently encountered the word in an environment far different from a high school Latin classroom or an orchestra rehearsal.
I was on 43rd Street in Sunnyside, Queens, walking toward Calvary Cemetery.
43rd Street passes under the Long Island Expressway, merging with Laurel Hill Boulevard. The sidewalk ends, and to get to Laurel Hill by foot you walk over a circular pedestrian overpass.
The path to that pedestrian overpass, by the way, offers a pretty cool view to the Empire State Building, rising up like a rocket from Calvary’s skyline of the dead.
At the center point of the overpass I spotted a toppled wooden
chair. On the floor nearby I saw some burned candles and a couple of framed
prints of surrealist paintings. One of the prints was of Dalí’s The Lugubrious Game, the other
Magritte’s The False Mirror.
I recognized the Dalí as a Dalí, but would not know its name without help from a friend with whom I shared this story and these pictures.
Though not quite bizarre I did think the scene strange. Someone had set up a chair overlooking Calvary Cemetery with candles and surrealist paintings placed nearby. The chair, on its back when I found it, was a decent looking piece of furniture (fully intact), and not the sort of thing you’d necessarily expect to find dumped off the L.I.E.
Tired from walking, I set the chair upright and sat on it for several minutes, looking toward the cemetery and breathing.
I noticed activity underneath the overpass. I looked down and to the left to see a man hanging laundry on the branches of the leafless trees and bushes. He had a few pairs of shoes set out to dry (it had rained the night before) and a number of aluminum trays containing small amounts of food (and rain water) littered the ground around him.
I did not make much of the situation but I did feel that I might be sitting in the man’s chair. The arrangement of the chair and the paintings and the burned out candles was odd, but not so compelling that further interpretation of this place would reveal more than met the eye.
I stood up and walked the remaining length of the overpass, leaving the chair upright, and continuing my walk toward Calvary.
∞
I fell in love with the Intracranial Cavity of Mary last year. When I found her high atop Section 2 at Old Calvary last summer I guessed she had stood there for well over 100 years, her skull cavity collecting earth and her quiet stare not flinching for longer than any of us has lived.
I coined the word “decraniated” to describe her gaping, shattered skull.
On days when white clouds blanketed the sky above I found that the jagged yet softly weather-worn outline of her skullblast blended in with the whiteness above.
I imagine Zechariah Sitchin, five-hundred-thousand years from now, finding these pictures of Mary. Analysing the pointed flap where her left ear might be Sitchin would conclude that Mary was a Vulcan. Images of pointy-eared human/alien crossbreeds, Sitchin would say, have endured across millennia as subconscious evidence that humans long to connect with their space alien ancestors.
The next time I visit Calvary I will plan to leave something for Zechariah Sitchin inside Mary’s head. A coin or a trinket might suffice, but I want to leave something from which conspiracies could grow.
Such an object (evidence of some cosmic mystery) would turn this silent statue of Mary into the focal point of a miracle when someone thousands of centuries from now finds these words, finds the statue of which I speak, and reaches in to the decraniated skull of Mary to find something earthly where her brain used to be.
∞
Drotchel, an obsolete term superseded by the equally obscure Drossel and Drazel, lead me to the word Dross.
Dross is a word I’ve used in mumblings to self and inside my head, but nowhere else. It is a word I love but am shy to use. The closest I came to using this word was the day I met a guy whose last name was Bross. I kept the story inside, though.
I know “dross” from the 2nd grade. A girl with long curly hair, sitting cross-legged on the floor, was doing some kind of arts and crafts project with long streams of paper. I don’t know what she was building but as she constructed the project she threw some streams of paper over her head and behind her. Some of the paper landed in her hair, adding to the fun.
This paper, a teacher repeatedly stated, was “dross,” defined as “worthless or dangerous material that should be removed.” As the girl threw the paper away another girl picked it up and moved it, and the teacher would say “Ah, dross!” I think the dross was used in another project.
Because of this incident “dross” has always carried a certain joy for me. I saw the girl as a genius at work casting refuse (I mean dross) to the winds as she crafted a masterpiece.
The teacher’s words, meant as gentle encouragement, burned the word into my mind at a young age.
My only use of it (never verbally, only in my head) has been “Ah, dross!” I say this to myself when something spills or tumbles, as when a box tips over unexpectedly and its contents scatter, or when a carbonated beverage explodes upon opening after being shaken. I have also thought “Ah, dross!” (with a mental sigh) to describe the emotion that invisibly explodes when an individual is spontaneously provoked to anger.
I know now that the more common definitions of “dross” would not be used in describing a grade school crafts project, and this makes the teacher’s repeated use of the word a little odd. Watching the girl toss papers over her head the teacher evoked dramatic images of “scum or refuse matter which is thrown off, or falls from, metals in smelting the ore.”
A more precise word related to “dross” might be “recrement,” meaning “superfluous matter separated from that which is useful.” I doubt I will use this word as it sounds too much like “excrement.” The girl of the paper project was not tossing recrement, but dross, and that is how the memory remains.
∞
I have nothing to say about something once I’ve said it. A story told once is told for all time.
I don’t know whose philosophy it might embody, but I believe that a story told is a story told, whether heard by one, by millions, or by no one at all (the story forgotten the instant it was whispered through the creator’s mouth).
Stories told in my mutterings to self, experiences written into a notebook, secrets shared with a random drunkard at a forgotten pub – tales like this are told, and to repeat a story or even an idea is some kind of compromise.
I have felt sickening remorse at telling a story and feeling it was wasted. Stories from raw thickets of my gut, saved at an early age for someone I could trust, stories that make my throat tighten just to think about them – some of these stories have slithered away to people who could not care, the consummation of these stories were grotesque failures.
But those stories can not be told again. A story told is a story told.
I tend to forget there are people on the other side of this screen. Live humans thinking things, doing things, looking at this mental rotgut and squinting.
On an obscure level I imagine that story-telling and the gift of memory exist in a realm of purity where readers do not exist.
I am reading a volume of Bukowski’s poetry these days. He disappoints me when he stops telling a story and addresses his audience. Words like “reader,” “critic,” and “writer” sound laborious and heaving coming from Bukowski.
“gold in your eye” would have made its statement more impressively without the finger-wagging at the “critics / the writers / the readers”.
They are good, though, the Bukowski pages. He and Robert Lax have me writing poetry, something I thought I would never do again. I forgot how much power a blank line can carry, or how simply indenting a word can infuse it with new meaning. I like Lax’s ideas of the poem as an object of contemplation, the words turned into a thing.
Bad poetry, though, slithers onto the page and molders there like an unflushed turd. That, in fact, is how those stories felt after I wasted them.
∞
A transitive verb meaning to make banal, to insipidify, to make tritebear.
Sitting among 9 or 10 people in the student lounge in college I, for some reason, got hung up on the word “banal.” The word came up in conversation, and I think my fixation on the word came in response to the genteel way the others pronounced it: Buh-NAAL.
Sitting among friends but also among people hearing me speak for the first time I repeated that word in the spiteful, bitter way of emphasizing the BA. BAY-nul, the second syllable rounded down to sound like the word “null” got cut off before I could finish saying it — like I swallowed the last L.
One of those people hearing me speak for the first time was a guy named Bob. I knew him only from seeing him around the place, and I thought of him as a very serious, even humorless type.
So it surprised me that he was heartily amused by my “Banal” fixation. We became pretty good friends after he remarked that he had never heard the word pronounced in such a way.
“That makes it sound like … the worst thing you could ever be!” he said.
I remember noticing how he arrived at that phrase, at that exact wording, how he briefly trailed into ellipsis mid-sentence, rummaging for words more articulate. I sense that he settled on the relatively weak (but not quite banal) “worst thing you could ever be” to avoid sacrificing the timing of the conversation for the sake of more exquisite verbiage.
In response to Bob’s comment someone else said “It’s like ‘anal’ with a B.” That might sound inappropriate in some contexts but it was all in fun at the time.
Musicians all of us, words like “banal” and “insipid” circulated in the vernacular as terms of utter disdain, but few of us had the haughty wherewithal to use the words with any sincerity. Words of such withering dismissiveness were the stuff of music critics and such whose wrath we all perhaps anticipated or dreaded at some time in our future professional lives.
Had I known about the word “
By breaking “banalize” into two words (paramecium style) I could have changed the subject to “Bette Davis Eyes” and we could banalize that song and not Tchaikowsy’s Second Piano Concerto.
I don’t remember the conversation ended, or if it wandered off into tangential conversations among the gathering, perhaps continuing to this day, hundreds of generations on, in unknown chatter among people who would deny any connection to me, to Bob, to the very word “banalize.”
∞
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