where do you put it?

your snot? you pick your nose at a stoplight and what do you do? fling it out the window? rub it onto the steering wheel? under the seat? i paste 'em behind my legs, smudging in layers of crust that read like tree rings, dating all deposits. or on my sock. who's gonna look at my sock? on foot i smear lamp posts, like insect sperm, glistening on an aluminum pole. when i'm sick and the spew of phlegm is infinite and no surface can retain it, i fill a grocery bag with little bird's of discarded tissue. rubber cementy boogers are rolled into bee bee's and flicked across the living room floor. hard fingernails of nose shale i drop like bark onto linoleum. what else? i'm a watcher. i want to see what others do. a kid in chapel, in 3rd grade, had one finger knuckle deep, eyes glassy, as he withdrew a glob and pasted it as if with a paintbrush across his school sweater, a diagonal tape worm Pollock-ing a narrow filthy front. my next-door-neighbor threatened: 'i bet i can make you moo-oove.' 'no ya caa-an't' 'yes i caa-aan'. a perpetual snot river ran out of his nose, down his upper lip and into an open mouth, green-yellow slugs. he'd gob 'em up into a french twist, like cotton candy, raise it over his head and that's when you ran, the boy at your heels snorting his nose off. a friend in high school, shuffling up a receiving line at a debutant party, flobbed an oyster onto the exposed tit of the girl who's tiny Chinese hand he was shaking. it landed like egg yolk and quivered as if wondering what to do with itself. her mom, all brisk Philadelphia efficiency, whisked out a hanky and dabbed the doo doo off the tit. 'never you mind,' she might have said. my dad, squirming like a salmon against the current of grey flannel suits on their way to work, was fighting for a seat on the commuter rail. he harked back a flapjack of goo, collecting it in his throat and zinged a slo-mo parabola at the idiot running in front of him. the target clapped his hand on the back of his neck as if shot. dad surged ahead, knees pumping and made his train. and then there's the pocket hanky conundrum. in college my East African room mate had grown up in Zanzibar. over there you press finger to nostril, close it off and fire your product onto the sidewalk, grass, tarmac, toilet, wastebasket or desert sand. he thought it unclean to save the dried deposits in a hanky. so i adopted his slingshot approach. i loved it. it made perfect sense, but it got me into trouble in Central Square. i was mid-snort, head down and didn't see the kid approaching, hand up for a high 5. friend, fan, who knows? what i do remember is that my ju ju flew like a mortar onto his brand new Converse All-Star. i will never learn. i am, as the girls at Doyles say: 'gross'.

getting old is no fun

my father's brother, my Uncle Karl, was one tough guy. he was an athlete who played football for the Giants and held the punting record there for decades. he was a soldier who, during the war, drove an ambulance for the American Field Service in Italy. he was a fly caster Rambo who broke his leg a mile from his car and crawled back the full distance on elbows. he was an illustrator who lit up a book on fly fishing and a free lancer who produced architectural renderings so he could raise his family without the uncertainties of being an artist only. he was a romantic who loved his wife madly and who, deaf as a door knob, had her hit a cowbell to get his attention. he didn't get along with my dad. they'd yell at each other on lakes, scaring the fish away. they'd yell about work. they'd yell about anything. Karl loved to paint, dad hated the bank but did it for the dough and the phony prestige. he ragged on my uncle for not 'knowing the value of a buck', but Karl had the balls to be an artist and dad wished he'd written books. Karl was a moralist who hated hearing that my dad cheated on my mom, but who reversed himself when she divorced him. why couldn't she gut it out? back n forth they'd fume. it made my little boy's head spin until i'd watch him paint. usually they were water colors propped up on easels in snow fields near our house in Connecticut. he'd work with quick, sure strokes, pipe in mouth, eyes squinting at a tobacco barn in the near distance. unlike my dad, a word whore, Karl was a man who spoke with his eyes. one look from that mashed in football face and i knew i'd found a grown up who understood me, who recognized the art idiosyncrasy in my character and who sussed out a sensibility that few had guessed at (including myself). he knew that i'd make unconventional choices as i sorted out wherever-the-fuck i was headed and was ok with it. when we'd leave his house after a Thanksgiving/football weekend, he'd nudge me aside and signal acknowledgment with a wave of the pipe, a gandalf trail of smoke that let me know that i'd be fine, no matter what. as if to say that the odd path can be the right one. to listen to my heart. to keep at whatever strange interest seduced me. sadly, after college, i saw little of the man. i was caught up chasing my whims all over the game board - Peace Corps, architecture, teacher, hippie, actor. none panned out until i began, unexpectedly, to write songs. Karl heard about it. could i send him a tape? were the songs honest? not sure his ears could hear, let alone judge what i sent him i felt a peculiar certainty knowing that my early work mattered to him. then his kids grew up and scattered. he lost his dear wife and began to lose touch with the real world. he believed that credit cards were free money. he sand-castled an Everest of debt. not able to hear, he mistrusted strangers and became paranoid, fearful and accusatory. chronic vertigo tumbled him down stairs and he broke his ankle. he shuttled through hospital, rehab, a nursing home and assisted living in a downward spiral that whirl-pooled him away from his beloved self-sufficient life. the ankle wouldn't heal. the doc cut bone from his hip to fix it. took a year and a return to the hateful nursing home. old ladies cackled about his 'hot legs' and winked. nurses made fun of him behind his back and were inattentive. the medics messed him up. when he got Pneumonia they doled out the wrong drugs. he became delusional. he'd pop out of bed, wheeling his chair, spying and making remarks with nobody paying attention. 'lets go for a dip!' he'd shout. 'there's a pool upstairs and we gotta see Rick! he's up on the 2nd floor, we gotta go see him. c'mon Karen! (his daughter)'. she'd listen. shrug, teary-eyed, not knowing what to do, his life narrowing to nothing. his vertigo came back. he fell, broke his hip and was trapped again. it was hard for his kids to show up, their lives hurrying along with their own families to look after. he grew distant and dark and no one could find a solution. he didn't want anyone to save him. a blood clot in his heart (a pulmonary embolism) could have been averted had he been properly hydrated, but the docs failed again and he died. he must have hated this humiliating conclusion to a lion's life. he had become the dad his kid's joked about, even as they loved him. as for me, i never went to visit. he died in that fucking rest home, bullshit about the last mile he could no longer crawl. my dad, like Hendrix, puked into his lungs on a Christmas Eve and choked to death, alone in a hospital in Boston with no kids, no wife, no girlfriend, nobody and parallel to Karl's isolated demise. the brother's Kinscherf - a Russian novel from New Jersey.