"My life has been a poor attempt to imitate the man." Dan Fogelberg
Old women. Old unhappy women, wretched like an Olivia Newton John pop song plea. As faulty as our memories may be, the day Elivis died my mother was in my bedroom on my mattress watching the news of it, weeping and I, perplexed, either in wheelchair or kneeling on the floor, with stridency, asked "Mom why are you crying?"
"He was a big singer once, when your father and I were young," weeping in her unhappy indolence of fat, shrewish pale blue eyes, before I was born my mother was a knockout, a near perfect imitation of Sophia Loren. No one used classifications like bipolar disorder, and a trigger was a mechanism for gunpowder ignition. I was born because my mother was friendly with Marie Marinelli, my long suffering aunt, and Marie hooked my mother, my mother in near matricide with her mother, hooked her up with my father, and I was born because my mother miscarried a firstborn son, this attractive Italian couple who knew Fabian, and grew up in the first dawn of conglomeration of superstardom such that Elvis spawned. I was never a fan but I heard the soundtrack of "Falling In Love With You," female rendition, and couldn't work, the baritone of Presley's voice like a tidal wave over the bandwidth of reminiscence, carrying that ballad with the longing of vulnerability, swallowed into the contradictory passion of unity. It is never like that, our desire to envelop in the face of God, yet a corn bred bubba had the voice with the pull of such gravitas.
I wanted Afghanistan wiped off the face of the earth after 9/11. Then after 13 years of war we calmed down, tired of it all, but the Bergdahl swap is an unseemly and sordid business, especially if the lives of soldiers were lost in the attempt to recover their comrade. Kathleen makes a salient argument. That is how she makes a living, without room for now militant reactionaries like me, always diffident about President Obama even when I voted for him, but in this instance, I disagree with the swap. Suspending judgment on the issue of desertion, that I have to do, as how does an American desert in a wasteland where men are patriarchal savages? Men who live on medieval prescripts, addicted to heroin, like dogs, and no better than rheumy eyed dogs?
I met an Afghan girl in high school, a refugee salvaged by Carter. To her, overwhelmed as she probably was, I wonder if I was even doubtlessly human, how I registered in her mind, or what the word cripple amounts to in Farsi. She registered to me, barely, as a foreigner. Too young for the implications, my parents, Nicholas and Joanne, were a stunning couple. Sequins and tuxedo, Sophia Loren and a sharp Kevin Spacey. In his prime, mio padre was more the handsome than Spacey. I do not want to lose my father, falling in love with you. A white man who could sing like nigger, with all the conviction of it, for. I. Can't help. Falling in love with you. Never in my life has this happened, not like it happened for Presley, whose daughter must have had an interesting time of it in the bedroom. Her father dying in a pool of his own vomit, a man who was an international headline in an army uniform, melting in my dead mother's breast, my eyes burn, my histrionic fists beating on Jerry's chest, while he wrote me factual letters from Romania.
Why are you crying, these mine spastic burning eyes?
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