Vicious Wetbacks would rise and the army would hand out arms
at Wabash
& Imperial and say boys do your best for your wives and
your God!
The whole shitball would go up and no more taxes, man, no
more gas bill, no more
little bitty drinking problem, no more lump in the
breast, no more supervisor
(The Snoopervisor), no more fat son failing Math, no
more angry tv dinners
where you can’t look your wife in the eye and she has prayed
for absolution
for praying that today your truck will meet a semi head-on
and you will burn. No more hoping. Al will say
something nice
when you rent the ball & the hours will pass & you don’t look
up in the corner where the old Charlies with their baggy old
man pants, their
fedoras even though fedoras are square baby, with their fat
drooping guts,
with their hairy old ears their bleary old eyes, their bad old
breath, their huge
bobbling old man balls hanging in brown lumps between their
splayed legs
as they smoke and sleep and watch you. What
are they nodding about? What
do those old men know?
Those old men know everything
about nothing.
It could have been a factory. A place for eaters of government
cheese. A place
for high-haired women w/ aluminum five pound can of welfare
peanut butter
on their breath. The holy old Charlies come from their sagging
roominghouse beds
whose grandfathers fought in the Civil War, whose fathers fell
into the thresher
near Fargo and had their left legs plucked free like chaff, whose
mothers remembered
Apaches in the hills and the poor Mexicans they
roasted alive.
Jefferson Airplane, Quicksilver, It’s A Beautiful Day,
Blue Cheer.
And there goes Al on his lunch break, throwing a few frames on
lane 6.
He doesn’t go for that sky blue ball, that’s for goddamn queers:
his ball’s
a heavy black & he keeps it polished like a mirrored skull: he
rolls a pure wad
of midnight, cabrones! That man can roll him a friggin’ strike,
the Charlies say:
he shoots that bitch right down the off-side arrow etched in
the wood he
himself polishes three times a day, and that ball
goes like a rocket right at the #2 pin in the formation
& they scatter like phone poles in a twister. Gone.
Wasn’t a split made that man couldn’t score.
Overhead, the chart always said: X X X XXXX.
3.
The grimy glass doors part and the sunsplash makes the
hungover guys
hunched over their chili bowls at the formica counter
squint: red
stools squeal as they pivot away from the light: & here
she comes,
that gas station cowgirl, & she has Nancy Sinatra’s hairdo & she
has white
go-go boots & Deep Purple is singing “Hush” and she has
a checked
mini skirt & a Tootsie Roll Pop in her mouth & Al smiles
when she
moves it to one side of her grin w/ her tongue & wiggles
three fingers
at him & I’m looking at her
from the seats above lane 3. Big dark eyelashes glued on &
turquoise eyelids.
And she has pink lipstick & pink nails & pink tights & pink
cheeks flushing when
my old man lights her cigarette (sucker now on the counter
stuck to the glass
w/ her sweet spit) & pink nipples under her pink bra & pink
blouse & she’s
all the way pink & he puts a pair of 4’s on the deck and locks
down the register
& waltzes her down to the lane. Her ball bag is customized w/
her name in
plastic gems.
She needs to lose ten pounds.
No no, he says. Ah, God, you’re perfect.
I’m not.
You’re sweet as peaches he says, taking her ball out for her,
thinking
about what James Bond could do w/ this girl. Sherbet, she says
(that’s her
husband) tells me I’m fat—I hate to look at your ass, he says, and
she ducks her head.
Well, he’s crazy. And anyone who would call that beauty (little
pat on the rump) such a
crude name is a fool. And
he
deserves
what
he gets.
Oh Al.
• • •
Take the ball firmly in hand. Here, like this. That’s right.
Now hold it right in front, elevate a little, closer to your . . . bust.
Al!
Now, let me get in tight behind you.
Yes?
Settle back into me.
Yes.
Let’s take our strides and let the ball go. Aim it . . .
there.
And they step off, he’s right behind her, and she swings
her arm back
& she lets the ball go, & her thumb makes a loud suction POP! as
it comes loose
& the ball hits the deck like a shotput: BANG!
but it rolls, it rolls, and she cries
bad at this, Al & he says: Don’t worry my dear there’s a first time
for all of us
so let’s gather ourselves & roll another ball & this time let’s
pay attention
to the little arrow painted on the lane & to our follow-through
& don’t
bend your wrist to the left like that & the whole time
he’s thinking about getting close to her pinkness
again.
My mother never saw the Hillcrest Bowl.
4.
Mr. Clean said One thing you never run shy of is stupid sons
of bitches.
He was the day manager. First shaved head I ever saw. And
the first
man named Wally. And there’s a damn sight too many dumb fucks
rat cheer at the Bowl.
Steve Miller Band, Amboy Dukes, Sons of Champlin,
Cold Blood.
• • •
My old man learned English from these sons.
He learned a Pall Mall was a smoke, a coffin nail, a cancer stick.
Or was it a coughin’ nail? The hex of the lexicon for the
Mexican, vexed.
On the rocks.
How’s it hangin’.
Hardly workin’!
What can I do you for?
I’m good. You?
Look at the ass on that.
Can’t complain.
My achin’ feet.
I could eat a horse.
Making love.
Hard-on.
Make that a double.
Easy rider.
Got a light?
The hell you say!
Swordsman.
• • •
Easy ice.
5.
My old man never said “groovy.”
No one who ever entered the Hillcrest Bowl
ever said a word like that.
As an auxiliary text
they called him wetback. Har
hardee. That’s not
funny, jack, calling
a man that. Oh don’t
go getting your panties
in a bunch, said
Shitkick Sherbet
doing a Saturday night
away from his Shell,
watching his gal
roll gutter balls &
doing Southern
Comfort & Coke
w/ three cherries &
a pair of skinny
straws: you can’t take things
so hard, you Mexicans! And
call me Tex. Tex Sherbet.
That’s as good
a name as any w/ which
to betray his small cancer ghost
smoked out to 90 pounds of bones
& coughing, a name
my old man could betray
w/ Mrs. Sherbet because he
hated Texas.
Texas
&
Taxes!
Al, that’s rich.
She was probably at my house
while I was at school & my mom
was at work & Tex Sherbet, black
oil half moons etched under nails, pores
grimed up w/ STP & Camel smoke,
fingers sliced on fans & belts & nails
split on sonsabitching lugnuts
lay back coughing black breath
into a sunny San Diego ward
w/ tubes up his nose & in
his jugular & a bad
flipperty b&w tv mounted
on a bracket—the old
guys watching Bob Dale’s
Million Dollar Movie on
channel 8—ol’ Shitkick wishing
for another smoke as
he died.
Her panties smelled
like flowers
as they peeled down
to slow dance in the shower.
Got to be out
by quarter
to three.
6.
Everyone feared LBJ.
Who was the Boss.
Who wore the same glasses even
& had the president’s ears, the president’s
Texan nose & the president’s
rage.
You better believe when LBJ was in the Bowl the gang stepped
lively & got cracking.
Mr. Clean hit the lanes w/ the long shammy-mop. Norma,
the Queen
of Cheeseburgers, took a spatula to the day-old grease / onion /
cheese melt
on the griddle & dropped her cigarette in a wax paper cup of flat
Dr. Pepper. Al
swamped the urinal trough, dropped cakes in there that smelled
like Beeman’s gum,
carried ice cubes from Norma’s machine in white buckets &
scattered them,
60 hollow targets in the pisser so the guys could aim for the little
holes & keep
their streams in the porcelain & their pens in their
pockets , those pockets w/ their endless
storehouse of sketches: giant penises, drooping nipples,
the round W of the human ass, the blue ink wobbly Y of the
thighs and vagina,
the ten thousand Bic crotches of the Hillcrest, my teachers
of science,
of love.
In the ladies room, secrets lay in bins: the night guy
hurried out with them & kept run stockings for himself.
And after the bins, the backroom. Far away from LBJ, who
worked
on counting machines & ledgers but never crawled the
big iron shadows. That clanging cavern the only safe place
if you didn’t want The Old Man (different, oh yeah, from my old
man) to get in your
business.
I ran the catwalks over the big tenders,
balls crashing a storm surf beneath me.
Man from U.N.C.L.E. plastic guns: gears chewing the night like a
ham sandwich:
levers, delivery arms running the pins laid out reclining
to drop
into cantilevered slots: black, black, clotted black old
grease, metal
shavings, dust stuck to oil as if the Brunswicks grew a pelt
of rat fur. And I
balanced, hanging for a thrill
a foot to brush the crushing
metal, waiting,
for the tenpins
to shatter
under my
perch.
to hear the phone, to hear alarms, bells. A flasher
whorehouse red
above the drill-press and lathe. When a ball in lane 10 jammed
the machine
the bloody bulb blinked until he dropped his magazine and
sighed as he bent
to the black guts of the tender, his knees killing him, his feet
peeling with fungus and grub-white from standing in hard shoes
for 40 years
sore all the time, his back shooting bolts down his left buttock
into his thigh,
his teeth broken in his mouth from grinding all night through
his pitiless dreams.
Dad on his knees reaching into the grinding engines of
the tenders
feeling in the dark for something black
& unforgiving.
7.
Playboy, sure
But also
Pix, Knight, Norwegian
Naturists.
Gent, Adam, Saga, True.
Popular
Mechanics.
8.
Norma, Queen of Cheeseburgers, wore white stockings clipped
to a white girdle. Panties stained yellow after years frying &
coughing—those
little slips when you cough too hard & scrub later & try to hide
in bedside shadows or kick under the chair really fast though Al
never seemed to mind the details, the embarrassing stains, even
liked them, all of them, he wanted you, sweat & blood &
all. Read
you like tea leaves, read your shames and your cough when
you spit
into a tissue whispering sorry lover sorry sorry & he’d ease
his hand
down your sharp spine and light a cigarette for you. Or I would
have—I saw
it in movies every Friday night at the Tu-Vu, me and
Dad &
12 kraut-dogs & a blanket in the Rambler & Dad
saying that’s
the way you make love to a woman when Adam Roarke as
the Hells
Angel leader ran his hand down a bikermama’s back and lit
a joint for her, but my old man said: not that marijuana, do you
hear me,
give her a glass of sherry or a little
Thunderbird.
I would have for Norma, I would have grown up for her if
she’d waited,
but didn’t know the words for I’d lick the back of your thigh, for
I’ll climb under your skirt to smell you at the end of your shift.
She would
blush when I told her I loved her and her hamburgers and she’d
say Al this is
definitely your boy! and flutter her twin bird hands all over the
counters, her cheeks,
her hair held in the pale hairnet in a bun: the second hand
uniform: the white
nurse shoes w/ low socks & a pom-pom out the back of
each: snags
in her delicious ice cream stockings: her little apron with
Norma! stitched
above her left breast where Dad fed & I would have fed if I only
knew the secrets
those naked volleyball players in the magazines knew,
those freaks
caught in mid-air in full-page shots, their genitals levitating,
their wives
stra
nge pale ciphers laughing w/ darkness where I wanted to
dream. Bird hands
burst from Norma’s apron pockets and flew sad circuits of her
throat and hips
& landed on the square hamburger patties or the cigarettes or
a rag
that caught up the coffee rings of wanderers who looked like her
high school love
from Norman, Oklahoma, guys who dropped
a 15 cent tip and shoved off shrugging into
bomber jackets & oozing past the double doors
in GTOs.
Norma from Norman, she would laugh, her hands preening in
the nest of her apron,
her red lipped red fleck on the teeth smile begging someone
to laugh
w/ kindness.