Jerry Can - Grass Ass - Thou & I
By Mitchell Krockmalnik Grabois
Jerry Can
Sometimes I wish I were still out
on the back porch, drinking jet fuel
with the boys --Tony Hoagland
1.
Gasoline smells like gin, sweet and clear. I've loved that smell since junior high, when me and Pollo Murillo and Hector Delgadillo huffed it from a jerry can in Pollo's closed garage. Isn't jerry can an incandescent word, transcending its simple language?
Delgadillo said I was Mexican. I said, I'm a Jew.
Delgadillo said: You may be a Jew in your shaved-off prick, but you are Mexican in the soul, unpredictable, combustible.
Then he passed me the jerry can, no worries about bogarting that. There was plenty for all.
Murillo ran off a mountain road. Delgadillo went to prison and got shanked by the Aryan Brotherhood.
Fuck them. I'm a Mexican, and I will wait for my chance for revenge.
2.
Revenge was sweet as gasoline. So was the judge: Not Guilty by Reason of Insanity.
But if they were going to put me in the nuthouse, I was going to need my collection of Bertita Harding novels. They had power. They would keep me alive: Karl and Zita of Hungary, Austria's Franz Joseph and Elizabeth, the Mexicans Maximillian and Carlotta , Duse and Da, whose tale age cannot wither, and the glowing story of Clara Shumann.
But my wife, a Lithuanian, whose hands were superlatively strong from decades of milking cows, tore them from my grasp and shoved them into the Fat Boy, where I heard them crackling in anguish as she held me away. My fat wife didn't agree with the judge's ruling. But she didn't have a law degree. She didn't have any degree. She was both stupid and ignorant, and had never read a single Bertita Harding novel.
I would have burned my hands retrieving them and not cared at all. All I could save was my favorite, the story of the Braganzas of Brazil, who created independence from the Empire of Portugal, which I had hidden in my patterned brocade vest, which I wore over my cummerbund.
The hell with you all. I was never cut out to be a farmer. When they release me I'll take Bertita on the open road and together we'll find a green paradise, something like Ireland.
Grass Ass
1.
This is not a job I ever expected to have, but I couldn't keep farming, not enough land, machines too old. Now I retrieve dead birds from the base of wind turbines and stuff them into plastic sacks. I keep a weekly death tally and give it to my boss on Friday, birds common and uncommon. I'm not supposed to tell anyone else what they are or how many. It's a big secret. I'm like a secret agent or a private eye. If I tell anyone my ass is grass.
Today is deep winter, always my favorite time of year, more so now that the icing conditions have halted each of the 56 turbines that now dominate our world, the way the sky once did. Silence today. Death stops for a while.
Yes, I have a job. Everyone needs a job, but as I cross-country ski along the unplowed road, I am again reminded of what has been taken from us.
2.
They took my zither away from me when they got me in the bughouse. They said I was disturbing the other prisoners. But how could the celestial music that issued from my thin fingers disturb the already deeply disturbed?
I would have cured them with music, though I could never cure myself. That is often the way of the world: Jesus died for our sins.
Thou & I
1.
I never speak of my ability to see patients' secret selves, their real selves, except with my Unit Director, "Fez," when after work we go to the Rail. We sit at the bar and watch the beer sign's blue waterfall perpetually renew itself and, after enough drinks, my tongue becomes loose.
You've developed X-ray vision, huh? Fez says. A few shots of Wild Turkey and you Viet vets invariably get weird.
Fez has this thing-he pretends that I'm a Vietnam vet, which offends me-it dishonors the boys who did go to Nam, with all its ugly violence.
But Fez persists, despite my protests: I ought to fire your ass, Ribinthal--you're the biggest looney in the bin.
Nuttier than a schizophrenic?
Damn straight.
But he won't fire me. My job is safe, if only because of the hiring freeze, which is as entrenched as the Arctic.
2.
My trying to convince Fez of the truth is like Rabbi Nachman trying to convey wisdom to his disciples.
The disciples of the blessed Rabbi Nachman of Bratzlav (b. 1772), the last Jewish mystic, listened to his wisdom stories, then later tried to write them down, but they were logicians more than poets, litigators of texts, not painters, not skilled at mosaics, and they did a poor job of it. Like Fez, they were too dense, clumsy and technically unskilled.
So Martin Buber retold them in all freedom. A cynic might say that he replaced Rabbi Nachman's wisdom with his own.
He retold them to I and Thou, to I and I.
I shake out my dreads, eat a tuna sandwich by the side of the road, no mayo, in the heat of the day, drink water from a gourd as a wild mule walks by, a wild pig. I think about wisdom, in which I no longer believe.