WHAT IS NOT THERE? by Hans B. Hallundbaek

My childhood is what is not there.
I had a childhood of course, we all did. But I have spent most of my life running away from it, faster and faster the older I got; like seeking the pot of gold at the end of the ever escaping rainbow.

If twenty years ago you had asked me about my childhood, I would have tried to convince you that it was great, just like I had succeeded convincing myself.

But one day in a silent retreat at Mohonk Mountain House mediating and reminiscing I finally realized in a flash that I had a lousy childhood.

I was born in the height of the depression of the thirties on the flat, poor, windswept west coast of far away Denmark. A typical weather forecast would say: Tomorrow rain all day, possibly interrupted by heavy showers. I do not recall that we had umbrellas in those days, so I guess we just got wet.

But of course the weather was only a small part of the issue. We were occupied for five years by the Nazis, who had decided to build the largest military airport five miles east of our house. That was not a problem until the allied forces three years into the war got their act together and with much determination bombed the airport with scheduled regularity, first by the cover of night and later in day time raids.

They would come in from the west over our house on the way to the airfield. Brigades of flying fortresses B-19 or was it B-23’s, cruising in tight formation at 15.000 feet on their way to the target. Five minutes later these flying bird-machines would lay their strings of eggs over the airfield. They would drop from the opened bomb bay and they would whine demonically as they hurled towards their targets. There in rapid succession they would explode with large thumps. The vibrations shook the ground for miles and reached all the way to our house where we huddled in the basement. I was five and I was scared. My parents prayed and tried to comfort me as I struggled to be brave.

In retrospect the bombing raids, were not the worst part of my childhood, for I was told the Americans were there to liberate us.

The worst part was that I was convinced I was a mistake. Technically I was, for I was born the youngest of four children, and 9 years after my next sibling, when my parents were in their forties.

This meant that they must have had sex at that ripe old age of forty, which was not well thought of in a old fashioned Lutheran church community where each Sunday morning the priest assured ignorant poor farmers and children alike that they were born sinners heading  straight to hell unless we were washed in the blood of Christ.

I do not know how the others took that idea, but for me it was a disgusting thought and the supposed light of Christ’s love never illuminated my childhood darkness.

THE SCENE BEHIND THE SCENE by Vera Kaplan

"Massah Kaplan! You gots to learn to take what you can git when you can git it!" the nurse told the swaddled newborn as she carted him back to the baby ward in his bassinette, unfed. My son, even then, seemed disappointed in his mother, gazing off into the distance, refusing eye-contact, wailing through his diaper change, and lastly refusing my proffered breast. 

That is the scene I see behind yesterday's, when our son turned thirty-one. Happy Birthday, Abram, my shining, July 4th sparkster! 

My husband had gone to the train station to pick him up, when I noticed the long awaited download of Abram's first song album had arrived via email. I wanted to hear the new songs during this brief alone time. As the song list appeared on the screen, I felt I was witnessing a birth, three years in gestation. We'd paid thousands of dollars in "doctors' bills" - the engineers' fees, the audio time, the producer, the album cover and the mastering. Now I was pushing a button to access my new grandchild - this long-promised ten song album, untitled, but with "Izaac" on the cover, after our son's middle name.

Song after song, Abram's breathy Tom Waitz/Captain Beefheart-meets-Regina-Spector voice sent rays of recognition and pain radiating through me - cut #3 - "Bourbon and Cocaine" describes blow by blow (excuse the pun) how to process cocaine on a mirrored surface and snort it off a sex partner's intimate parts. Cut #1 - "Grown-ass Little Boy" points the finger at his father for not having taught him how to be a man. Cut #10 is the cruelest cut of all: "Lampshade Blues" equates being sent away to a program for drug-abusing teens with our ancestors having been deported to death camps in WW II Europe. He might as well have titled the album: How to kill your parents in ten easy pieces.

The dog barked, announcing Abram's arrival, and I quickly shut down the computer. He couldn't help noticing the look on my face as I got up to hug him and wish him a Happy Birthday. 

"Mom! I'm an artist and a writer, and all I was trying to do was craft a good song. Don't take it as autobiography - It's not about me!"

"My dad wasn't there, but he taught me to hustle"

"My mom was so sensitive she sent me away, but she taught me to feel, to feel, to feel...." These snatches of

syncopated, sock-it-to-me sorrowful irony swelled and reverberated like sloshing water on my brain.

"Oh, Mom! Were you listening to it on the computer? You should get Dad to play it for you on the good stereo speakers." 

"Oh, I will!" I promise. "Congratulations, Abram. I hope you get a lot of great feedback. Your voice is unique.

I've never heard anything like it!" I say what is true, in bright tones that I hope mask the tough time I am having.

At dinner that evening I order lollipop lamb chops, medium rare. The family converses. Later, I look at my plate and at the prone carcasses spooning against one another there. Bits of pink flesh are still attached to the bones. I can't remember picking them up, tearing at the flesh with my teeth or the satisfaction of chewing and swallowing the meat. I only know I'm still hungry, aching for a sweet desert.

"To feel, to feel, to feel.... She taught me to..."

SECRETS by Dan Martin

Everything about Lisa had to be a secret, where we met (at a yoga retreat in Costa Rica) and that at the end of the week we exchanged email addresses, and that  she even gave me her home address so I could send her my book, which I addressed formally  to “Mrs. Lisa Velarde,” and wrote:  “Dear Mrs. Valarde”  and a few inane lines like “It was a pleasure meeting you…and I hope you like my little book”  above my signature on the inside cover, in case her husband opened the package.

And that she had recommended a book to me, The Glass Castle by Jeanette Walls, an amazing memoir detailing the author’s harrowing childhood, which seemed to mirror Lisa’s own life, abandoned at an early age by a borderline psychotic mother who was in and out of mental hospitals and finally died when she was 10, and a more or less sane but inappropriate and narcissistic father who once hit on one of her friends in high school.

And that after that we exchanged phone numbers and began texting each other, first once in a while and then nearly very day, and that we then we started calling each other, first just to say hi, and then the calls began to stretch out to 10, 20, 30 minutes, sometimes an hour, before the phone would suddenly go dead, which meant that her always suspicious husband Lou had come home.

And that I started to live for those calls and texts and emails. And that maybe she did too.

Everything had to be a secret because there was something about her and me and the two of us together, even though we were 3000 miles apart, she in LA, and me on the east coast, sitting in a bar one night telling her things I’d never told anyone, about my son who was struggling again in life like he had growing up, unable to fit in in high school, how I’d come home from work hoping he wouldn’t be there, cause that would mean he had finally been invited to a party and wouldn’t have to spend another sad, lonely Friday night with me.

And she understood, maybe because of her own 10 year old son who had a rare bone disease and was in and out of the hospital. But to me it was cosmic, synchronistic, my own private late-in-life miracle: “Where have you been all my life?” I said into my cell phone, really meaning it, and then I said it again cause she hadn’t responded. Whether she hadn’t  heard me or was just speechless at the trite absurdity of my words, I didn’t know. But I repeated them anyway. And then she did respond, with what sounded like an embarrassed laugh, but I didn’t care cause she’d  been saying things like that to me too, about our special connection and how we’d always be part of each other’s lives no matter what. And I had believed her.

But  it turned out that Lou had been monitoring her texts and phone calls and emails from the beginning, even had seen the video she’d made the night we all went out together in Costa Rica, and I was in it. And even though there was nothing intimate going on between me and Lisa on the video, just my presence had sent him over the edge.

She called me on a Saturday night, and left a message to call her the next day, and when I did Lou answered the phone and I knew all at once that my job was to convince him that it had all been innocent , that we were just friends, sharing books and family stories, and I thought I was doing a pretty good job, talking about our kids and our families, and telling him that I was going through a divorce and that he was a lucky man to have such a beautiful woman like Lisa who loved him so much.

That last part was a mistake, I knew it as the words came out of my mouth , knew that he would take it the wrong, or the right, way, knew that he would see that it hadn’t all been so innocent, and not just what had gone on on the beach on the last night in Costa Rica, but more important all that had happened since, that I was attached to his wife in a way I shouldn’t have been, but couldn’t help being.

She texted me later that day, a cryptic message, that had always been her style, “I’m in for 72 hour observation,” was all it said. Turned out that after I had hung up the phone with Lou they’d had a big fight which got physical, and he had tried to throw her out of the house and  she had run up to her room and locked herself in. And he had called the police, told them she was suicidal and had locked herself in her room with dozens of bottles of pills, powerful narcotics she was taking for depression and anxiety. So she had been dragged out of the house by the police and involuntarily committed.

A few days later she sent me a text saying that she and Lou and her therapist had all agreed that she should cut off all contact with me. Didn’t even say goodbye cause I guess Lou was monitoring her messages. That was pretty much the end though we did secretly text and email each other once in a while over the next several months, until I got an angry email from her saying to never ever contact her again.

Way back in the beginning Lisa had sent me a birthday present, a “lovely,” that was her favorite word, that she said in her lazy California accent that got to me each time I heard her speak. It was a soft tan leather bound journal, that she’d found in a catalog in England and had sent to me at home cause I told her that my wife never ever got the mail.

I had just got out of Court. I hate going to Court, hate wearing suits, and I always try to settle all my cases in part I think, though it sounds stupid, so I don’t have to go to Court. But this time I’d had to go, it was an unsettleable family Court Matter, about custody and visitation for my sweet but dim client. We did well in Court and I was wanting to share my triumph with someone, so I called home, and my wife answered the phone and I said, like I always did: “What are you doing?”

And she said, “I’m opening a present from your girlfriend Lisa.” Said it just like that, with no emotion, the way she was about everything, so I didn’t know then, and don’t know now, though we discussed it several times afterwards, whether she was mad or sad or indifferent about the fact that Lisa had sent me a present, with a little card inside that said, “I love you….Lisa”, didn’t know what my wife really thought cause we had been living apart emotionally for a long time.

And buried under the tissue paper inside the box was a bigger greeting card size card, that explained and expressed Lisa’s  love in ways no one had ever done before, told me things about myself, wonderful things no one had ever said to me, things I had always hoped were true, thought might be true, but didn’t really think were true, cause no one had ever said them to me before.

I don’t know if my wife found or read what Lisa wrote on the bigger card.

That was the real secret. 

OUR TIME IS SHORT by Ernie Welch

"Et in Arcadia Ego." - Guercino, c. 1620
 

Not all roads lead to the cemetery.  Some folks are lost at sea, others consumed in fires, or they just walk out the door one morning never to be seen again.  Some though have their feet planted definitively on the graveyard path.  As obvious and natural as this journey may seem, it may be veiled with fear, ignorance and secrecy. 
 

I like the specter of death.  By that I mean the classic image of a hooded skeleton with scythe and hourglass shadowing our every move. We all cast a shadow.  Here is one that requires no sunlight.  One need only to establish an intimate love and it will shadow that love.  And like a dress-up doll it comes with a variety of costumes.  For example, it can look like two doctors come with bad news.  "The cancer and fungal infection will run their course soon.  There is no more treatment, we've come to tell him we're sending him home."
 

Now I've never been one smart enough to shirk responsibility.  It was my place to deliver the news.  I told the doctors I would speak to him.  "Time to go home, buddy.  We're done here at the hospital."  When he spiked a fever a few days before he died, his mother wanted him back in.  The script on this was written and rehearsed.  He would die at home.
 

The closing act was a waiting game for his mom and me.  That week OJ's Bronco went rolling by on the screen.  I was going to work, while Hospice sat with him during the day.  I was, and am, so trapped by my job, for reasons different then from now.  I couldn't tell anyone at work my partner was home dying of AIDS.  I had to teach classes and act as if all was fine.  He drew his last breath with his mother at his side.  I was a few feet away marking finals.  Grades were due shortly, they had to be done.

 It will forever be surreal to me that last week.  Marking papers, proctoring finals, night runs to the pharmacy for morphine, catheters and chucks, waiting for the final act to be played out, his father's ten minute visit to kneel and pray and my closing his eyes one last time.

WALKING by Christina Franke

I walk up St Marks Place toward Second Avenue.  I'm young, very young, with a soft pretty face, long wavy brown hair, sad, watching, alone, wearing a baggy sweater, walking in the cold winter sun, looking at the people who walk toward me, looking at the men, the young men, thinking, "Is this the one?" "Is that the one?" and a young man with a face I like catches my eye and looks at me, reaches out his hand to touch my hand and smiles and says, "You're a girl I could fall in love with."  And I look at him and I smile and keep walking.

I walk on Avenue A between Ninth and Tenth, in the black cotton dress I wore all that summer, the dress I’d bought in a little store over on East Fifth, a dress with a drawstring neck, in black cotton, a cotton heavy enough that I wear it without a bra, walking in the heat, feeling almost naked in my cotton underpants and black cotton dress, my shoulders bare, arms bare, hot, my hair long and limp from the heat.  I walk, thinking about nothing, looking at nothing, and a small, wiry man comes up beside me and kicks me in the shins, kicks me hard, mumbling something I can't understand.  I stop walking, shocked, hurt, looking around, tears suddenly covering my face.  I stand on the sidewalk with all the people walking past, ignoring me, ignoring the crazy man who is now a bit ahead of me, still mumbling, walking fast, not kicking anyone else.

I walk downtown from Fifth Avenue and 28th Street, all the lights off, everyone walking, the horns honking, the Empire State Building black, the sun going down, the streets getting darker and darker.  I walk downtown to my neighborhood, to East 11 Street, up the dark stairs  of my building, into my dark apartment and I heat a can of bean and bacon soup on the gas stove, the telephone not working, with no tv, no radio, only knowing what I see and what we all see, that New York City is dark, that the lights have gone out.  I try the phone over and over but can't get a line so I leave my apartment, not wanting to be alone in the dark, and walk over to Avenue B looking for my friend John Efferson, the crazy poet who has an apartment swarming with cockroaches.  I pass a group of men standing in the dark around a large metal drum, full of fire, the light of the fire lighting them, warming them, and one of them looks at me, and says, "Get off the street little girl, you shouldn't be here, get off the street."

MUSK AND MANHOOD by John Ellis

We had a punching bag set up in the garage of my Orange County youth. And boxing gloves that laced up your forearm. This was the domain of my dad and my brother. Dad kept the garage door closed of his makeshift boxing academy, creating this familial sanctum, private and secluded from the neighborhood boys, and expressly for us to learn to fight. After all dad was a football player, and boxed too. He was part of the tough-Jew club, not the nerdy, get straight A sort. My brother, fearless of punches coming at him, learned to pound the orb hanging down, 1-2-3, 1,2,3,4. 1-2,…..with a brutal rhythm that scared me at age 5 and 6. I’d flinch when my brother hit the bag, and I was several feet away!  I don’t remember dad spending much time with me in here, in his mighty world of musk and manhood imagined by a hard ball hanging from a hook-- with our ping pong table pushed to the side, making room for the sparring.

You can smell the car oil on the floor from our ever-present fleet of white Dodge Darts that dad bought used. Here in this indoor-outdoor room, that bridged the inside -- the world of mom, all that was artistic and erudite, that spoke to my sense of self, that spoke to fun and beauty and acceptance -- to the outside world -- pick up football games, ‘Smear the Queer’ on our front yard, fights with the neighbor boys that I stopped winning by age 7 because I didn’t know how to predict a left hook to the Adam’s apple after Jeff Byars’ dad must a’ taught him a thing or two in their garage.

When it came to fighting, I wasn’t a natural. But my brother Frank was. We fought. Brutally fought, my entire childhood. And well into my twenties.  Some highlights:  crouched in the corner kicking Frank off of me, the only thing strong enough to protect myself, my solid tap-dancing thighs, so he couldn’t start walloping me. I felt so helpless and brutalized by my brother who was almost 4 years older, completely overpowered. He would get a kick holding the pillow over my face until I panicked, thinking that I was going to die. Attempt to protect myself: throwing a solid brick at my brother’s face. It didn’t hit.

AN EASIER LIFE by Debbie Smith

“A harder life isn’t necessarily a better one,” my dad said, sitting in the diner one Sunday after church. We had been discussing my upcoming marriage. I was trying to explain to him that I knew what I was doing, that even though Chris had serious emotional baggage, that I was capable, up for the job of being his wife and mother to our as yet unborn daughter. I was eighteen at the time. Eighteen year olds are that blessed mix of being so sure and so unsure simultaneously.

What my parents were offering as an alternative was an easier life, no doubt. They were more than willing to have me live at home with them and the baby, finish college, and wait and see if Chris and I would work out as a couple, since we had only been dating for less than a year. All of their options made infinitely more sense than me signing up for the whole package, wife and mother all at once. I understood what Dad was saying, I knew he wanted what was best for me. And yet, there was always that side to me, the side who looked at the two sets of monkey bars on the playground, the lower placed rings which I already knew I could conquer and had during recess, and the higher rings that were more spaced out and therefore more difficult but, oh man, when you swung from one ring to another, you had to gather up your momentum and really stretch your arm out so far and so fast that it hurt all the muscles in there but it almost felt like flying, at least close enough, and wasn’t the only flying dream I ever had set in that very playground? Those rings were what I wanted to try. Even though, yes, I’d fallen more times than I could count, gotten gravel and dirt stuck in my knees and sometimes my hands burned so much but I loved those rings in a way that was almost wrong.

So sitting in the diner with my mom and dad looking so worried about me, I was already noticeably pregnant by this time; my dad already knew by the look on my face what my answer was going to be. That even though a harder life wasn’t necessarily better, and it would be harder, harder than the eighteen year old me could ever ever imagine, that that life was the life I’d already chosen. I’d chosen it when the stick I had peed on in the fifth floor shared bathroom of Dablon Hall, my dorm, turned out to be blue. That that life with its fights, frustrations, joys, heartaches and its ultimate destruction by an affair twenty two years later, that life had already happened even way back when on that Sunday afternoon in the Croton Diner.