When Armageddon Comes

I

She the powerful principle of shorthand and he the work ethic, the taste of pipes directly blessed poured
onto my head and inside, people appointed to speak on my behalf to renounce on my behalf
the right thing to appoint god-parents and never speak to them again had I already been to the moon or yet seen it born into the space canal the valley of the dolls false eyelashes there war was everywhere there was glitter on every occasion and the taste of pipes and the taste of teeth.

Nursed on canned vegetation and creamed wheat coffee from the age two in medicine cups or teaspoons
the clock in the kitchen wore out as everything broke down and used wind wings and dashboards used bench seats to bathe babies in kitchen sinks or sleep them in drawers pull them out and put them back in one at a time feeding them porridges and pot roasts renouncing for them grubs choosing for them roasts
instead of orchid choosing ruffle instead of pleat and center part instead of side, pork instead of lamb
turkey instead of goose. Greatness is a just assumption that lasts but an hour.

Horsey doggie chaplain good girl good boy bad, don’t bite don’t pick don’t suck then naps and shorthand books blue books yellow box spring loaded shotgun drinks of moth coffee can string apron
bar smell inside a cupboard Vienna sausages potted meat chipped beef the only can of oysters ball whack
dog chase bloody leg badger centipede sparrow ditch water tunnel big B little a big Z little o no piano tiny
teacup hospital jam plaid flannel old West sheet to vomit to cradle to hurry and park left with wind wings
open and wonder if no they will the lab the kitten the table leg peaches not apples, shorthand books are blue shorthand is blue thing box yellow dog black centipede bite soft overcooked squash limp green beans.

She the powerful principle of ashtray big veins big toes tall, he the work ethic and aftershave cold blooded
armies and bandages one brother too many an extra one they spoke about in whispers. Vietnam loaded the camping car, Vietnam spooked the fish, Vietnam tore up the Bible, Vietnam wasted our money, Vietnam changed the channels, Vietnam poured hands in the collection plate, Vietnam slept on the couch with the work ethic and Hitler Japs, Vietnam pushed pills in everyone’s throat, Vietnam named everyone Bob’s son, Vietnam killed all the deer and Vietnam remembered the name of Alaska.

Big letter K backwards e page turn over record scratchy skip scratch skip stuck on pokey dog fence rabbit farmer scared off pitchfork ant boat drinking wild hose water the taste of pipes throat lozenge lunch box milk money rabbit’s foot fish hook gone downtown up the hill across the street Big Chief fat pencil line up sing the country is fantastic holy ghost five and dime long face bill deposit mine blast monsters under there last time stand the corner paint licker stomach hurter stinky panty bad girl good girl curl in the middle of her forehead when she was she really really was and when she wasn’t she was horrid.

Raise your hand ask nicely go chalkboard go sing go auditorium for the measles nurse hat
red cross holy cross your heart and hope to die better lunch next time! they did Tupperware milk carton two teams substitute round the bases made of box tops and trash can lids fence posts parked car or take the stairs by twos faster stopper long way down to Phnom Pen newsman Bob’s son sent a letter married
a girl who had her hair done before bed each night transistor voice early morning Apollo eggs Apollo bacon Apollo salt white Apollo toast and butter make Apollo love not war make poppies in egg cartons on front porch steps dogs uphill bark in the background where whistle and doorslam nails it to the air pocket, dog talk and horsefly.

Loop loop pull, loop loop pull, once again, loop loop pull it works it really works now curtsy loop loop pull it works again! So proud of you, we all are. It’s summertime now. Summertime stretches forever in all directions with tennies on and burnt backs. Can’t get out of bed the pillows smell real good but its dust day, its birthday, its parade day, its all day. Dimes get pockets, dimes for ten penny candies, dimes on doorsteps two bottles for a dime, dime cokes, dime songs, dime calls, dime stops, dime store, dime time is what it is, it’s dime time and for one dime three jukes the same one three times but only to watch the record loader inside the most fantastic thing ever seen plays Billie don’t be a hero don’t be a fool with your life, Billie come back and make me your wife this is what people feel like singing about Yankie Doodle went to town with macaroni is his tri-cornered baseball hat and hit home runs for the home team with the home team disadvantage in home town Vietnam, there were no children there, just guys running all day long out of TV screens yelling or hurling themselves on top of each other and out of Huntley Brinkley‘s mouth and that was so, so comforting to know they‘d be there at the same time to talk to us about it even if dad forgot to and swore at it all night long between Bloody Marys and passing out.

It get’s better, strides. The family got hepatitis, tuberculosis, cirrhosis, trench mouth, wasp stung, broken boned, stitched up, fought with, drunk with, gully washed, frankincensed in hospital waiting rooms oxygen masks and new babies in labor kept baking under hot lights of the east wing, as they unloaded us from car trunks and back seats and etherized our wonderful way of walking in without a care in the world, without a new purse or single new thing, at least from my point of view. We were nobodies but somebodies and everybodies got the same thing but we didn’t know about it until later.

Aunt Peg threw me in her Chevy Nova and no one mentioned a thing about it next year. Cable was on the horizon but up there cartoons on weekdays were status quo. They were already keeping the young ones inside instead of outside with the doors locked until dinner. The roads all looked the same up there and there were parks. There were import stores. People didn’t know you and didn’t care about the haircut or the barbershop anymore. The city seemed to sleep outside of itself, outside of something that was going on and shouldn’t be disturbed while we waited inside of houses that had master plans for parents to come and pick us up and take us home. The bathtub there was very nice, built in with none of those dark places in which a portable commode ought to be kept for the next guy in line. Two bathrooms instead, two whole bathrooms and only a few people to make use of two showers, two sinks, two toilets, two bars of soap, two hand towels and no rags, no one there kept rags around to make sure the old man next door didn’t see you naked in the water, rags laid over the nipples and Y. The taste of pipes wasn’t the taste of pipes there, it was the taste of better water yet to come and on the way home we stopped in Tombstone and had to pee in someone‘s sink but I can‘t remember why or if I just did it to prevent something else from going wrong. This is the type of memory one ought to abhor but instead it comes up once in a while and feels right on time, somehow useful or fascinating as all get out. Some other kids were involved and they were blonde and maybe something was wrong at their house and every house after that had complexities of plumbing, medicine cabinets ,newspapers and Playboy magazines in between.

I saw those around. Naked pictures of girls who obviously got sun tanned a lot. I couldn’t tan but would try out on the sidewalk in a homemade two piece. Grandma sewed all my clothes out of old dresses my mom no longer wore but they still had some life left in them and drawers got full of ripped-out zippers, pockets for patches, snaps were even hoarded along with plastic bags, jars, lids because there was still a war going on, still pin up girls stood straddled a wide indifference to nudity because wars demand that type of thing, make it necessary. We just looked at the left overs, hid them in our pants if we got lucky and found some that someone else had thrown out in a hurry. There were whole months full of Saturdays and other months where people labeled panties for each day of the week, now that’s a bit odd don’t you think? Miss July, Miss September, Miss February, Miss Christmas, Miss and her twin Miss and the Miss of the Year Miss, each with a short autobiography likes surf likes boots likes dogs likes short bald gray.

This was our church, we were told what to do as we walked in, genuflect, holy water, say this and do that.
Sing if you know the words and shake hands with everyone you can reach. I liked that so much that sometimes when mother was tired I’d practice Catholicism on my own, walk right in and do the things as if they meant what it is they meant which is to say, I’m still not sure if they did. Altar boys would follow and at the end the cross would be carried out and the priest would wait to shake your hand too. People struggled in that affair, tried real hard to make him notice them and say something kind or familiar, just to feel his hand on their hand. The church gave out pamphlets explaining which sins would get you in real trouble like having sex alone or murder which were in the same basic category as limbo babies were to impure browsing. All those limbo babies waiting to go somewhere and mother prayed to get out of purgatory as soon as possible even though it seemed neither here nor there by definition. It was an article of faith she was used to and that‘s all that really is, something you get used to and have faith in, don‘t have to understand it and in fact you really don‘t deserve to know that much about it anyway, it‘s God..

Saturdays started running out and each one got shorter, school days got longer, division longer, history got longer everyone the same way every year, project Indian village, project popsicle stick, project chicken bone, project photosynthesis, project Thanksgiving, project letter writing, project typing, project wood shop, car shop, project baby pig, project diorama, project Halloween, project Christmas play, project cassette headphone reader series, project bean seeds, project frog stomach, project fitness test, project putting out a body fire, project paper fold, project zoo trip, project clock, project show and tell, project menstruation, project home ec, project eye screen but not once did we ever have a project about Vietnam but Vietnamese kids showed up anyway and needed a place to live in America after they saw how good we had it here, we must have for them to want it so bad they gave up and came over to our side.

In fifth grade, if the teacher got tired of talking, ran out of things to say, he’d put on a movie from 2 until closing time. It was real nice like that when he’d just stop talking for a moment and let us all relax a bit. I never fell asleep but some kids did if it was black and white which is to say, most of the time I liked to pay attention to everything even if no one else bothered. The projector would wind up and stop a few times, the teacher would go over and take off the reel and put it back on, flick it and tell someone to go turn off the lights again. By the third or fourth time it would go and there’d be astronauts, insects or factories on the fold up screen that usually stood just beside the flag until it was raised in front of the class so white and undisturbed one minute and the next, alive with busy places, calm voices and a countdown before each one, four three two one blastoff and you are in a group that wasn’t that different from a church where people concentrate together on the same thing for a while right before they go home and try to do something else that is inevitably more necessary to the standard of living they are accustomed to because the movie said so but in not so many words or so succinctly. This is what everyone else is doing, they do it on time and soon it will be your turn to do these things if you play your cards right.

That wasn’t the problem though. There were too many kids by then and most of them lived too far from Horace Mann junior high which looked a bit like an orphanage and a bit like a capitol building on a hilltop. So they opened up a big school down and more central to every part of town and rumors spread about the kids ruining their lives down there, getting drunk at lunchtime and getting into all sorts of trouble. Mom made up her mind and enrolled me in a private school, St. Pats which is to say, it was a real cheap private school and you had to wear a uniform. It cost $12.50 a month to go there which is a hell of a lot to pay to torture your own child. The first day was knee socks and there too early, meaner kids than I was used to and a church schedule of once a week plus catechism. After that though it was special hot lunch on Wednesday made by Mexican women with charitable souls, First Fridays and mass confessions in a proto-type of the drive through window banks that were just around the corner once we figured out where to put them since the alleys weren’t designed as much for efficiency as they were for just getting there and parking real close in order to do so. European style some say.

I fell in love in sixth grade with my first teacher, he was blond and married with some kids. He looked a bit like John Denver and the Beatles. I knew he loved me too or sort of. It was a great year if not for making friends, then for watching him at the front of the class trying not to piss off the Catholic in us or violate any of the commandments. I’ve little doubt he only got the job because there weren’t many nuns left and one of them even turned up a lesbian in the bowling alley. Watching Mr. Ashby can only be equated with going to your first Denny’s for breakfast. It only happens once and then it becomes par for the course. It almost made it possible to rotate through the seventh grade teacher’s boiling hot lessons of the hellfire, the damnation and cruel punishments of her type of faith-based core curriculum for second and fifth period. Mr. Ashby made it all right and Sister Helen in eighth grade home-room bat clean-up, expunged the grime out of both points of view by being kind, looking right and taking special care of special kids like me by sitting us up-front so we could pass out the papers. So you appoint her to renounce for you the second time, to witness for your commitment to the cause of religion even if you don’t really understand why. Not even sure if the devil might show up and stop her in her tracks because it seems if the devil is all that powerful, he’d know when his side is in danger and shoves her type out of the way using some of his dirty tricks and lightning fast cloven foot fox trots, like Cassius Clay beats up a Sugar Ray without no ska or bloodspill, just an eternity‘s worth of temptation in an internment camp. I was the last one to sign up though, seems everyone wanted her to renounce for them but she made an exception.

Delete McCarthy, delete King, delete Watergate, delete Nixon, and enter, Puff the Magic Dragon who lives by the sea and frolics. It was raining. The pills were in a storm drain. Narcs if you only knew who they were. Dragnet gave way to FBI gave way to McMillan and Wife, created from a rib. From Huntley Brinkley to sneaky magic neighbors in the Air Force and Serpico. Dark times, hot pants. Me and you and a dog named Boo so it seems there was internal migration and refugee status for all, travelin‘ and livin‘ off the land made for you and me. Hippy dippy and dad don’t mix, no dads mixed but some of them traded wives like eskimoes. Last Tango in Paris or a Turkish jail with Michener and a notebook called O‘Toole. Foreshadow backstreet limo Arab getting out with his model. This is history my way, machine gun kelly maxi-maxi mini skirt, barefoot, polka-dot, halter-top. Hoop skirt burqa bop, bikini burqa stop, smiling bad burqa, face off burqa face. Gaucho pants, go-go boots, bell-bottoms, hip huggers, windbreakers, high heels, flats. High street London Milan New York Madrid Beirut water burqa, dress burqa, work out burqa. No bra, eighteen hour bra, training bra. Shift, pancho, tunic, rain gear. Bronco burqa, Beelzebub burqa, banjo burqa. Lederhosen, kimono, streaking napalm go-go girl. Have a burqa and a smile, a glut of beards to go. G-Men, GI Joe Men, G-String Men. We all get dressed to go.

We wanted our sexy bodies to be sexier by using our clothes. All the guys thought so and stood in line to watch us walk in our tight pants and tube tops. Where you going sweet thing fat thing ugly thing my thing his thing? You wanna dance baby girl? First handshake first love note first kiss first date first dance firsts all around everything was the first time you drove a car bought a drug got an F stayed out too late got drunk knew a combination ditched a class, the first time you got loved or thought you did by a chain smoking older man twice divorced and getting ready to bugger you with a training video and a smack of butter but Cat Stevens held out hope anyway, it’s a wild wild world and I’ll always remember you like a child girl thinkin’ about the good times to come dreaming about the peace train, take this country and shove it in. Shove it all in, morning has just broken and it‘s Russia, it is China, it is Hanoi,
it is an unusual Six Day War and we know so because the title said this in no uncertain terms.

In retrospect there is a page for circus, peach and house fire. A page for each lake we went to. A page for police sirens. A page for the rotary telephone. A page for Stevie Hope. A page for two p.m. to a quarter to three. A page for postage stamps. A page for C&H sugar and gas prices. A page for social studies. A page for cigarettes. A page for power outages. A page for motor lodge. A page for W. T. Grant‘s department store. A page for cheerleader outfits. A page for June bugs. A page for the fragrance of votives. A page for California. A page for barefeet versus new shoes. A page for broken windows. A page for oxygen and one for medicine. A page for Volkswagon. A page for venison. A page for Cleopatra, Ben Hur and John Wayne. For some reason there are two pages of Patty Hearst and only one for the St. Francis Hotel. Page after page of Rod Serling and Burl Ives summoning the ancestors in the voice of Leonard Nimoy. A page for the calculator.

II

College starts with Crimson and Clover, over and over and somehow like we wish you a merry Christmas. There’s 101 and 102. Everyone is so old now and chasing us around the classroom for a pinch. Nice guys creepy guys and foreign guys but no more movies. They try to dance and pull out their wallets like old men do. Then you run into the best friend, he’s always better, knows how to make you laugh, understands the crying, won‘t beat you up or cheat on you so you let him try. Oops, married how did that happen, totally unprepared or rather, unimproved from the last one. No trousseau in no coach waiting no day frock. Fast talking Arab says life’s a gamble lets throw some dice whaddya say? I’m in, sounds nice but the car won’t start and there’s rent to pay for our baby is on her way. She came through the protesters walking on two feet and ten feet behind her father. Redux back play. We met and married each other of our own free wills which, I didn’t know I had one and if I had, I’d have done it anyway because folly is impossible and we could always borrow money from my mother. Not raised as such but figured out that some people spend their luck too late.

It was Iran then as it is now. Hostage drama and reality TV was just a bomb’s throw away. Didn’t make much sense, no more than Vietnam did or the Falklands did or the Sandanistas did or Angola did or the raid at Entebbe did, America was brainstorming and barnstorming for the big bang. The old joke, Arab guy walks into a CW bar and the bouncer says, “You I-rain-ian?” so he goes back home to find out and there’s a big sigh of relief. There was the skinny one who played pin-ball incessantly, a pipe smoker, a Libyan spy (they all were), a Druze and a captain in the Bahrainian army who went through money like a house on fire. He tried to dance and talk like an American which is very annoying. Mom was getting sick now and dad died the year after he tied my husband’s cravat. He was smiling as if he knew something we didn’t, he seemed genuinely happy about it and mom baked a Betty Crocker and put brown frosting with pink letters all over it, something she was prone to do. That’s when the warnings took on a far more serious cover you up lasso you with his concubine’s hair quality in both tone and pitch.

We ate at Pizza Hut a lot. Not sure what they all had about a Pizza Hut but they did like the flatness of pizza, the hot way it went into the mouth and most importantly, it was the only fast food in town. Everything was Lionel Ritchie and scoop neck. We rented an apartment with one bedroom and I threw his shorts out the window where they hung on the telephone wire all winter long until we found a jimmied lottery ticket as we were making calls on credit card numbers the Arab‘s passed around. This wasn’t going to be easy and by the time I gave him a bloody nose with my pocket-book his brother was already on the Greyhound down below getting out of town, it was too much for him and as I grabbed his leg to beg him to stay, the driver looked truly perplexed. Lover’s quarrel it seemed to him but not at all what he thought, just a matter of Nasser, Lisa Halaby and for some reason, Trotsky. Our early conversations about it were coke equals imperialism, you don’t want to know and this is my brother, another son of my mother. Not much to go on but I kept trying. I stopped everyone I met and asked them about numerology., noticed no one took the church seriously anymore and that doves qul qul qul but roll their r’s and trill their q’s. I wrote the glue song, dove’s midrash began taking shape and Bosque pears.

Soon we were done with the hometown community college and went up to live by a swimming pool in Phoenix. I went to work at Sambos after lying to my employer about my experience. You don’t want to do that when it comes to waitressing. My feet hurt all the time, bars should never close and maple syrup is not good with tobasco. It’s even worse with a cigarette in it and you’re pregnant. But the milk’s good and you get it for free. The manager was named Shaheen and the same people I sat with at the student union were the same ones I came to work with. One of them was a refugee from the Ayatollah. We had great conversations and they told me sperm made babies so I signed up for that one because I‘d paid attention in church and biology. They told me that some lies had been told and naturally I ditto’d that assumption because I’d figured out where the sound came from when the priests were blessing the crackers, my brother was ringing a bell behind the altar. It appeared to be a case of Wizard of Oz, logic and nice looking boys with flat stomachs who had no reason to lie because I was already taken and lacked a formal education so the truth would be just as good as a lie. It is a lot like intuition.