Comedy (iii)
In the alphabet game, my daughter’s started saying—
chanting — B / my name is / Bear-kiss, which she’s obviously
picked up from my dad.
I recognize it immediately, a variant
of Bechus, which also I suspect probably isn’t spelled how I
have it written here. I suspect none of the living family knows
the right way. We don’t know the alphabet.
So much of my
historical sense of us is transliterated, phonetic. Christmas Eve
after grandma died, we all took turns saying khara, yalla khara
for, I don’t know, practice? For reassurance? We did this,
periodically, for hours, cackling. Channeling.
For the first time
I realize my child, like me, was born at the crux of so many us-
es.
I have to ask.
It is embarrassing to ask questions of a
fraught life. To hold one’s self up to be authenticated like a
clay pot at auction. Sometimes these questions end in tragedy,
a death at the foot of a tree, a word against a word. Arms fear-
tingling, I ask, Bear-kiss is Bechus, right?
& my dad says yes!
Bechus, like Jim Backus, the actor who played Thurston Howell
III & the famously nearsighted Mr. Magoo. No shame, only
joy.
Bechus (generic) is the jovial fool in our lexicon — the man, the
myth, the utter ledge who showed up to his first day of work &
was guided in Arabic-accented English to introduce himself to
the shift captain like —
“My ass; your ass; kiss my ass;
Bechus,”
& then does it, like actually does it! In my head, he
bows with a flourish, how a courtier might.
Use it in a
sentence: ok — [two small girls dawdle, taking the best part of
an hour to lace up their clearance Reeboks] “Bechus! Other
Bechus! Come on!”
(var. in the Bechus house, substitute “Jabaily.”)
This was at the shipyard, I half-ask, drunk on confidence. No,
no, says my dad, the shoe factory.
Bechus is my sense of being a
fellow particle in diaspora; a first day, a factory, an underboss,
almost Falstaffian hazing, one’s turn at being the fool. A
theory of communal ass like the Cheryl Lynn song, like my ass
is your ass, your ass is my ass.
It is not idyllic. More like being thrown
off a dock & calculating underwater how to steel one’s face for
the walk back.
My ass is here to stay.
I look up the origin of
Backus, which village, if Northern like us. Brother Magoo!
Brother Howell III!
It is an English name. From bak hus, the
bake house, a trade name for a baker. Dead end.
Our Bear-kiss /
Bechus / Backus was possibly a Bakhos, like Bacchus, the foolish
& wild Roman god of wine, or perhaps related to the Lebanese
city of Bakhaoun.
Home (per Google maps) to such highlights
as Mr. Sandwich, the Chicken Breast, Bakhaoun High School,
& the Palace of Dreams.
* * * * *
Preparation of the Dead Girl or Preparation of the Bride
For a person who doesn’t believe in ghosts, I sure have a lot of thoughts on their possible mechanics. Example: if I move houses after a loved one has died, will they know where to find me, or does their presence assume a locality (see: the Romans’ lares)? Will they recognize a child they’d never met, or instead assume that I am attended by a growing rift in time? That I talk to this rift, saying no mouth, saying goodnight, do you have enough light? That I tell the rift I love you & bend to kiss its bright unstable head?
When I was a child, my town fought an incinerator. We held homemade signs saying “Kiss My Ashes.” An older girl, Karen Boyle, built a tiny Braintree overlaid with concentric bands of color to mark how sick our townspeople might get. I think she won a medal. We moved house from orange to yellow. The smell I associate most with this time is smoke from the meeting room where they fought for clean air carried home in the cables of a sweater. We held hands across the Fore River Bridge. We kept fighting, & won.
Does that sound like an ending? Now a new company is talking about building a plant on Fore River. A compressor station for gas, different, but not. There have been disasters on the estuary before & since. Oil & metals. Some children who swam there have organs fraying in their chests. A barge — run by, shit you not, Lafarge — spilled the liquid insides of a number of cows so huge my brain just cannot. Tallow spills may be cleaned mechanically or by hand, which I imagine requires ropes, nets, & many, many hands. Not, as I wish, a massive spoon-ex-machina skimmed across the estuary’s cooled soup. That the company tasked with cleaning Lafarge’s mess was Clean Harbors, the same one whose incinerator we blocked, at least satisfies my taste for irony. If you can’t be soothed, you can always be petty.
Preparation of the Dead Girl or Preparation of the Bride, indulgent as an album’s split track. Courbet, its painter, left the world as we all do, all his work left to its care. As far as Courbet’s knowing could carry him, the girl was dead. She was dead & then made marriageable, badly resurrected by an agent, white dress layered over her naked body. If all you ask is the money, good art is sold art. Good art is not huge & unsalable, it says. Good art relinquishes its space in the showroom, it says.
The girl’s attendants aren’t so much mourning as doing or not doing. Resting, washing, folding. Some girls worry with their hands. Every dorm has a girl who untangles necklace chains for the whole floor. It is not patience or goodness but stubborn drive in need of a channel. The girl’s neck was still so obviously limp & wrong. No dress hides that. It is obvious, right? She looks like a wrung-out goose hoisted up for the yard to see. I see the occasional gull out where I live now, under a small mountain 90 miles west. Nothing here smells of salt. Our fish ride in vans out the Pike every day. January, estuary, march. What’s an ending? Anything might be undone.
* * * * *
Roxies in Savasana
Paul has, I’ve noticed, stopped asking us to fold blankets
in hamburgers (stubby) or hot dogs (long). Now it’s always
veggie burgers, tofu pups. In savasana, how very dare me, I
don’t stop grasping at the swirl that could reveal any card —
the deep, eerie math of the cosmos, alchemy, the Great
Horned Owl calling from the scrub on clock-confirmed
midnight like it knows; but, no — it’s giving me Roxie’s
on the Southern Artery, where as children we never wanted
to go. Its high sour blood spell, speckled tile, the cool deathful
troughs of shrink-wrapped chuck we’d press for its bizarre fluidity —
to the new mind anything is a toy! — followed by Fifi’s inevitable
zinha, don’t do that — the sickly chill, tripe like honeycomb lace. Oh,
baby, no need to screw up your lips at every spoon-plane. Is this
failure? Oh, sweet heart, no. Blood arrives. It swirls & goes.