"Of all the epiphenomena, you were my favorite." This is a line -- or the title of a poem written by a young man named Flynn, who, I found at some point from Kamran, had died. I have been trying today, without much success, to recover his other name; all I've got is Flynn, and I don't know if that's his first or last. But I do remember that the poems I'd read of his were very good, and had lines that stuck like ice picks in Trotsky's head, the one about the epiphenomena, or "Isn't that wildebeest coming too near us father...?" Which made me think of other ice picks, too: "maybe I'd like to take a good whack at the pinata," a line from a poem written by a Westover student whose name I don't recall at all. My memory may have taken some liberties with the exact word choices, but the poetic facts are there, intact. And if a bullet plowed through the playground of my synapses, as it does through Anders' in the Tobias Wolff story, what would be the phrase that I'd remember? It might be "Are you speaking French?" what the French girl asked after I had tried to explain to her, at the request of the flight attendant, why our plane was going back to Heathrow instead of continuing on to New York. It was September 11, 2001, and we were misinformed and terrified, releasing fuel into the atmosphere so we could land, and I knew even at that moment what I'd remember most vividly about that day would be the way her face soured at the offensive broken French coming out of my mouth, and my humiliation. Later, I read an article in the New York Times and found another phrase that seemed a likely contender for permanence -- and I wasn't wrong -- written by someone who'd been sitting in a cafe in the East Village that morning. He wrote, "Then suddenly, all the pigeons in the street flew up."
Poetic facts lodge themselves rather unassumingly into the wrinkles of my brain also as images, and I have to wonder what effect my compulsive photograph-taking has on my ability to access them freely out of my imagination. Some photographs feel as if they were my own projections. Gage and Jacob sleeping, no more than 45 minutes after Gage's arrival from New York, Jacob in his T-shirt and jeans, bundled in disheveled sheets on the bed, Gage relegated awkwardly to a corner of the couch, although the whole thing was free, the entropy around them almost visibly in motion in the diffuse afternoon light. And that red spare gas tank. What does it mean, sitting there bright as a lollipop, its phallic spout pointing...
Maybe because he inspires mischief and play, Gage excites my poetic brain, and proximity is a powerful aphrodisiac. This time the three of us sat under Alex Trebek's house, and I got sicker as Gage and Jacob went on endlessly about the differences between New York and Los Angeles. We'd just been peeling around downtown at 2 o'clock in the morning, screaming through the 2nd St. tunnel in Jacob's pick-up truck. Once. Twice. Three times. Gage and I went sliding down the railings of all the escalators around Hope and Grand, with Jacob and the majestic bronze nude watching over us like some complicit chaperons. Los Angeles is a vortex of lost pairs of Ray Ban sunglasses, and "different" is a euphemism -- the woman with the LED-rimmed sunglasses at the H.M.S. Bounty is "different," the ever-bare-chested-daisy-duked Vietnam vet cruising Sunset Junction with his chihuahua is "different," yes -- but why compare it all to New York? Unless to define both cities in the juxtaposition.
Sitting between Gage and Jacob, I meant to define something else: boys throwing snowballs. It's become a short-hand phrase I use to describe a childhood angst of mine, the feeling I used to have watching boys hurling snowballs at each other, and especially if it was at night. There always arose an indescribable yearning to participate in what felt to me like a secret language, brutish, playful, free. My aim was good, and once in a while I could throw as far. Never as hard. But if a boy threw one at me, he couldn't win; if it was as hard as he would throw it at another boy, he'd catch hell for "hitting a girl," and if he lobbed it or missed deliberately... well, I might be relieved, but the purpose, and I, would be left defeated. Sitting between the two boys in Griffith Park, or in the truck, my head on Jacob's shoulder and my arm woven under Gage's, passing beers and cigarettes between us, I was a fool to think I could define my childhood angst. All I could do was relive it.
Fitting, somehow, that the photographs Gage took of me were lost. In fact, they never existed. I am the camera.
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