Saturday, October 30, 2010
I had a book of poems by Cormac McCarthy. At first I was excited about it, but disappointment quickly supplanted my excitement: McCarthy was like Raymond Carver in that his poems weren't as good as his prose. In the dining room of a student coop where I used to live I threw the book away. Since it had become a large, bloody slab of plastic-wrapped beef, it hit the bottom of the trash barrel with a sickening plop. "You shouldn't throw it away," I thought. "You know how you are: you'll wish you had it back. Besides, the trash won't be taken out for weeks. The book will rot and stink." And I knew that throwing the book away would somehow make me a suspect in the recent disappearance of a ten-year-old boy. A drug-dealer--a fourteen-year-old boy with scraggly blond hair--approached me and, brandishing a knife, demanded the whereabouts of this missing boy. Then I was on the lam in the back seat of a car driven by one of my students. We were careening around slummy, nocturnal streets. Drug-dealers shouted jeers at us and pelted the car with garbage which my student windshield-wiped away.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
wow.
freak out.
what do you make of it?
Maybe just "freak out." Or maybe it's about the anxieties aroused by teaching. For example, my occasional fears that because I'm eccentric/bohemian/single, I'm perceived as morally unfit to mentor young people, many of whom shock me with stories of the brutal and squalid circumstances from which they've emerged--or in which they're still submerged, in some cases. (Well, no, not "shock." They afflict me with a malaise.)The garbage-hurling and windshield-wiping clearly come from the film Taxi Driver. The rotting meatbook may come from something I said recently: "A stack of ungraded papers starts to smell like rotting meat." (I think I was cribbing Roethke.) A putrescent dream! Glad I woke up.
Post a Comment