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This development boasts hundreds of blocks, but your Block in particular is ripe. The hormones pop like gum bubbles or cherry bombs, & you take your first steps away from dad and mom. You smoke your first cigarette. You drive your first car. You get your first girl to go her first far. You drink your first bottle of Night Train, you try your first puff of mary jane. You sneak into your first bar. You heavy-pet, you suck your first cock, you fuck, & then you make love for the very first time & forget the rest. You become obsess'd.
You say: O, he's a real gone cat! Or: she's primo, she's a fox. The summers & winters tumble over each other, you trade rings & promises & jackets. Then it's over. Then you fall apart. Then someone talks you into the backseat of their Chevy & into a fresh start.
The decade explodes like a grenade. You're blinded at first, groping to the door of a new society. The children of the Block scatter, like dandelion seeds sailin' on starbursts of fuzz.
Connor's in San Francisco, uncertain but alive, in tie-dye, sky high. Angela's in Chicago, she's in go-go boots, she's in hot pants, she's in love, she's in trouble, she's in Boston, she's in Florida, O baby she's in love again, she's in motion. Tommy's haul'd home by the pigs, their lights painting indelible blue & red stripes on the Shepard's house. He was pick'd up in some dirty Paradise of a highway rest stop, his face chafed by another man's beard. Bridget visits for Christmas with a black eye, & refuses to say why. She hangs tinsel on the tree, staring at the back door where the ghosts of her friends congregate to ask if she can play in the snow. If they came, & they ask'd, she would go. Nino gets a degree from Rutgers. Maria gets a diamond from the furrier in town. Cyrus makes a touchdown.
The mothers and fathers drink & Dream of Jeannie, eat Beef Wellington & leave the light on. You kids, you roam, but you
Draft cards burning for heat. Acid in the blood. Strung out souls watch two girls move together, stuck with honey and sweat.
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can always come home. After shots are fir'd in Dallas, JFK visits the Irish wives, a royal incubus, fucks them perfectly, orders room service champagne, & mumbles about Cuba in his troubled sleep. A rose blooms on MLK's head.
An ivory comb in a Black Panther afro. A sapphire stickpin in Mrs. Moretti's church hat. Angel dust & hand guns! Falsies & flowerkids! Nehru jackets & clove sticks! Beatlemania tears wet everyone's dreams. The jokers are wild. Beware your own child.
A covey of bodies squatting in Canadian woods, threadbare silk scarves tied in branches. Draft cards burning for heat. Acid in the blood. Strung out souls watch two girls move together, stuck with honey and sweat.
O holy soldiers. You boys come home in dress blues and wheelchairs. You come home with Medals of Honor & venereal diseases & amphetamines. Riley comes home, clear-eyed, with a story about jumping naked from a chopper hundreds of feet in the sky & flying like a bird to a rice paddy where he lands & folds his wings. No one believes him & no one disbelieves him. Aidan comes home the father of a prostitute's newborn, the mother's exotic face inked upon his arm. Or you do not come home.
On Easter, you visit. You sit in service where violet light stains faces. You do not pray. At supper, you tell stories about jazz clubs & protests & communal cucumber farms in Oregon. When ask'd about your part in all this, you do not say. You drink a lot of wine. You might as well sleep in that childhood bed one more time. What is your body now? Can it remember riding a tricycle one April, the perfume of lilacs in the air? Does it know your mother bath'd you in the kitchen sink, her hands careful as god's as she wash'd suds from your small shoulders? Does it recall cream of wheat, or canned peaches, or anything remotely sweet?
In the morning, you leave. You kiss your old man's head goodbye as he once kissed yours. You take the railroad to Manhattan. You fly to Marrakech. You board a boat to Spain. You go underground. You go to the other side. You transcend. The Future is now & the Past comes to an end.
Your mother spoons leftover Ambrosia salad out of Tupperware for your father. Her hands shake. She just heard the Caputos' house sold. A black family is moving onto the Block. How bold! The center can't hold. Men are walking on the moon, & kids are grinding in the clubs, & there's drugs & more drugs & drugs, & free love. Bellbottoms & bottlecaps! Stovepipe pants & derby hats! Cat eyes! Government lies! Kiss the sky & let it rain! It's hard to tell it's hard to tell when all your love's in vain.
Man, she could hate herself for the things she did.
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Bang, August 25, 1972
Jacinthe's name means hyacinth in Greek, the stalk of flowers that grows in the shade. She explains it to people at work, because they think it's a strange name. Jacinthe works on Fifty-Seventh Street & Madison as a secretary for an advertising company. She doesn't mind the work, really, the filing & typing & taking dictation. No one bothers her; the executives swarm the desk of Linda Goreton, the strawberry-blonde in accounting, and Linda seems to like it, wearing those satin blouses that show in their sheen the architecture of her bra.
Jacinthe's days are predictable, & this is probably her salvation now. She just really needed to slow down. O boy, what a time she had! Squatting in a wrecked school bus in California with beautiful losers, stealing artichokes from fields, eating drugs, waking up with other naked bodies, sore & confused. Man, she could hate herself for the things she did. Swiping a purse from a stranger sitting in front of her at a movie theater when she had no cash. Fucking her best friend's old man, Stanley, in the garage of some party. Peyote & fivesomes. Shopliftin' & hallucinatin'.
And she got punish'd, it seemed, she did. Raped by two guys she met when a normal night of drinking & dancing to records got out of hand. She lay in the bathtub the whole next day, bleeding from the ass, dreaming of being someone else, somewhere else, reborn, regain'd.
She went to two weeks of university, but doesn't think she'll ever go back. Her baby brother Cyrus died in a jungle, in unexceptional circumstances. Just death. Just an ordinary day of war. She can't believe he's gone. She won't for many years. She's waiting for him to come home, chocolate eyes warm'd by tropical wisdom, his black, wavy hair still part'd on the side.
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