A digression beginning in the style of Gertrude Stein

A girl had a little brother. A little girl had a little brother. A littler little brother. When she was two she had a little brother and he had a tail. "Look Mom," she says, "Brother has a tail," and her mother laughed and explained it to her, what did the mother explain exactly? That little boy babies have tails? Probably because the mother does not say words like penis, and she certainly never did and never would say any other words for the right words. If she didn't say the right words, she would certainly not say the other words.

So, a little girl had a little brother and then she didn't, and this is the the story of that.

The little girl and her brother were best friends. You never have a friend like that again. Not ever, not even if the brother grows up, he is not a friend like that. I swear it. When you are small, you can do amazing things with your brother; you can climb into the front window of the butcher shop next door and eat baloney sliced by Mr. Shoudy's own hand, ad Mrs. Shoudy won't even get mad at you. You can pet the Shoudy's cat. That's before the health department shuts down the Shoudy's butcher shop for cats and so forth.

You can ride the arm of the fat green sofa and it is a horse, and you can say things in front of your mother's friends that otherwise, even a moment after they ar eout of your mouth, your mother scowls and chases you out of the room, so you know, you know, without anyone saying anything, that you have said something you can never say again, and your borther and you look at each other in waning innocence.

"Mom, boys have weiners (not tails, you know that now) and girls have buns (where did you hear about that?) and boys can put their weiners in the girls' buns" and you know that what makes so much 5 year old sense is wrong and you run out of the room and forget about it, but feel shame for the first time, shame, a word you do not know, you feel it.

Then you are 5 and a half or maybe 6 by now, it is very hot and you walk out the front door all by yourself, your brother is sick, he is very sick and cannot walk out the front door at all, but you can and it is the first act of betrayal of your life. Your mother gets very angry at you after you have a long walk, past the cemetery, past the purple Jewel truck in the last driveway before there aren't any more driveways and you have no landmark to turn around at, so you just do, you just turn and walk back the way you came, your mother angry and dark in the driveway, "Now I have to call the police back and tell them the naughty girl is home."

There were drives in the big car, there were drives past pass with care and do not pass and that's how the girl lerned to read, and her brother couldn't read, but she read the sings to him, pass with care, do not pass. They passed the time to the hospital, where the brother got new blood.

New blood for old, for young blood, bad blood, long drives, the father driving, the mother riding, the brother, the best friend, sitting beside you, laughing, tripping, going for new blood.

Sometimes the girl has to stay with the grandmother, the great-grandmother, who is very old and not nice, not at all, not one bit, though the girl can't say why. Then the mother and father and brother go alone in the car passing with care and not passing for more than a day and a night.

And so one night the mother comes for the girl and the brother does not. There is no brother. There is a mother and a father and no brother. The girl has a toy with suction cups on its feet and she is walking it up the window. Up and up, and does not look at the mother. The mother has left the brother and the mother is no longer the mother. She is the other. Only the other. The mother would never leave the brother. She is not the mother, this other. The girl has only her suction cup toy and the empty window; only climbing up and up. The mother, the other, the not-mother stands alone.

Garret Players and the Church

It is 1966 and my best friend is a gay guy named Sammy. (no we don't say gay; we don't say or even think anything.) Sammy and I go to the Garret players in a garret in a nearby town. They rehearse sultry Tennessee Williams plays in the sweltering New England heat. We drag chairs and rugs across the dusty floor. We watch. Afterwards we always stop at Howdy Beefburger. Sometimes our friend Lacy is with us; we call her "Two Two and One" because she always orders two burgers, two fries, one coke, large.

Sammy has the car. It is his father's. One day many many years later, Sammy will return to this small town from San Francisco, with his lover, because the house is his and his father dead. His father is fun to be around, not like the other fathers. He jokes with us kids and is like a big kid himself, running Cy's produce stand out on the road in front of the house. Across the street is the Merrimack River and I watch it float by with visions of Thoreau.

Because I have no Thespian ability, I always return to the church, for the pageantry, the weird primitive ritualistic quality. The St. George Primitive Methodist Church. Who are these primitive Methodists, I wonder. Our pastor is a blind guitar playing fire and brimstone preacher of the old school. His wife is plain as a board. I am here for the drama. It is why I stand up on youth day and proclaim Jesus as my personal saviour along with all the other kids

What a crazy notion, that some long dead guy can save you! But we get talked into being crazy and thinking it is normal. At least it does not interfere in our messy gropings on the back stoop, mine and Bobby's. If I can't get out of this town soon I will go all the way nuts, I am sure, and it has nothing to do with Jesus.

About the Church

What to say about the Church? The stained glass window, the sanctuary, the inside versus the outside. The safeness.



Well, in the beginning I didn't think about church. My parents never went except for the occasional wedding and funeral. My mother was downright hostile. Church was for dummies, was the message I got.



So church and I never met. The occasional sunrise service on Easter Sunday. Why? I don't know, my Mom liked the sunrise part, maybe? It had a magical quality, but the early morning always does.



So it came as a surprise that I decided to go to church with a neighbor girl. I wanted to go because the other kids went. It was the thing to do on Sunday morning. I was eleven. There would be boys. So off I went with Susan Burnham and her family to the Second (or Third or Fourth?) Methodist Church, on the theory that my father had been a Methodist as a child, so that seemed like the right church to attend. That and Susan Burnham's parents didn't mind stopping off for me on the way.



I don't remember anything about church in the early years. Time went by. I didn't meet any boys in church. The one boy I did meet was Clarence Hagar; he had red hair. he went to another church and he was in fifth grade when I was in sixth. we met in the playground at school in the mornings by the swing set.



It was his brother who intrigued me, Wayne the "hood," the bad boy. I should have been a church regular, maybe even s Salvation Army soldier, cuz it was my mission to save the bad boys, and keep them for myself.



So I went to after school Bible Study with Clarence Hagar in hopes his brother would be there. He never was. And what I learned about the Bible you can fit in the spaces between the words on this page.



The church would get me yet.