The 39 Steps: A Sestina for Leaving the Apartment
Be quick, in case the cats try to sneak. Take out motorcycle boots.
It’s all under control if there’s no cat hiding behind the doors.
Put on boots, coat, but don’t even dream of leaving—stay vigilant,
slide open closet again, a cat might’ve slipped in. When did you take
your jacket off the hanger? You’ve mastered the dark art of shutting down
but can’t prove, for sure, you didn’t see a cat when you checked.
Close the closet doors (again). You can’t know until you’ve checked
the entire kitchen. Down the hall, but quietly—these clomping boots
make an awful racket downstairs. Is the coffee maker shut off,
unplugged? Toaster? Can’t let it all burn. Pull the back door.
Do you know you know it’s locked? Yank the knob again. Don’t take
your eyes off when you pull it. (Your loop de loop of vigilance—
the door can be pulled again, but keep tugging and your vigilance
will strip knob and deadbolt.) Is the stove off? Here’s a surefire check:
lay palm on the surface. You’re spiraling, and late for work, but it takes
just one lapse to lose everything. Assign a number to each burner—boot
away the shame. Give each burner a letter, too. Keep the panic dormant,
say “IS OFF,” after uttering each number and letter, to shut down
internal chatter long enough to examine the faucet, confirm you shut
this off, too. Running a hand underneath satisfies, for now, your vigilance.
Next: bathroom. (Maybe you’ll never leave.) Slide open the shower door.
Wave hand back and forth under shower head—prove you checked
thoroughly—then hold breath, listen for toilet running, your tight boots
squeezing your toes (if only they choked your doubts). Inspect faucet, take
a look at toilet bowl to confirm water’s stopped. You know to take
your hand and hold it underneath the faucet—prove the bathroom’s shut
down—before walking back to kitchen, your black leather motorcycle boots
too hip for someone scared of his own sink, wilting under his own vigilance.
It's off. Look again. Look once more, to know for sure. Still off. Still you check,
waving hand below another faucet. Wrench yourself away, toward front door,
pat front and back pockets for keys and wallet. Stop at bathroom door.
Look at sink. Off. Walk away—no, look again. Seriously, you can’t take
time to locate the cats, to know neither ran in the closet when you checked
the first times. Hurry up, please, it’s (finally) time for the front door, to shut
down the chaos and step out of the apartment. Close and lock it. Be vigilant,
pull knob in case it re-locked itself. Pull again. Nudge it with your boot.
Better tug door again, in case you were distracted when you clicked it shut.
Go ahead, take another pull. Damage the damn latch with vigilance.
Walk away without checking, each stair caving beneath your boots.
The Urge to Toss
Empty except for the couch
in the TV room where
my nephew used to sleep,
my father’s house after he’s dead.
Brother and sister shut off
the refrigerator last weekend,
I’m alone with the doors wide open.
Nothing to feed his house’s
body anymore. The living room
a square plane of carpet.
The easy chair he slept in
because he choked on the bed,
City Mission claimed it this morning.
He lived here 52 years,
his things fit inside this one room.
Bags of trash: eight years
of bill receipts I shredded,
three different blenders my mother used
and a hand-mixer from 1956,
my father’s collection of suspenders.
I’m leaving their wedding album
for my sister, on the kitchen counter
where he kept his medicines.
I’ll save the framed collage,
my nephew’s baby, toothless
smile wide as his face.
Walls to spackle, wallpaper I can’t peel.
An unopened box of paper clips
on a storage shelf next to his hammer.
On the couch, I tear open a letter
from the Veterans Administration—
maybe another insurance policy
in a pile of mail. The urge
to toss the writ of child support
from my nephew’s girlfriend’s lawyer
because for the life of me
I can’t find a forwarding address.
Episode 774: December 31, 2020
from Book 4, The Complete Dark Shadows (of My Childhood)
“I thought it unusual, to say the least, to find an empty coffin here,” Tim Shaw says to Dirk Wilkins, who, newly painted with undead eye shadow after suffering a Barnabas vampire bite, descends the abandoned farmhouse steps to claim the empty casket as his own before the sun rises, an episode I’m watching with Liz on New Year’s Eve 2020, leaving behind the year COVID-19 tried to slaughter as much of the planet as possible—1,826,340 dead worldwide, including 336,811 in the United States, a country with four percent of the world’s population but twenty percent of all coronavirus cases—and drive the rest of us mad with isolation; Dirk bares his fangs at Shaw (he’ll bite Shaw’s neck off-camera, sparing sensitive homophobes in 1969 the unwholesome vision of a man biting another man’s neck and sucking and swallowing his blood) as they stand over Dirk’s empty coffin, the sight of which triggers a memory of the cold November evening in 2001 when I first saw my mother lying in her open casket, her head resting on a white pillow nestled into the coffin’s ghastly, white plush interior lining, her mouth and cheeks pulled back in placid self-reflection by the undertaker; as a child, I constantly scanned her features for signs of imminent bipolar mood swings—stunning that for once, and only in death, I could see no turbulence in her face, now as bland as an empty prairie, as if she were merely taking a nap in the burial clothing my father had chosen the week before: an emerald dress buttoned to the neck, its antique white silk brocade collar swirling like something from an illuminated manuscript, her hands wrapped in glass rosary beads and folded atop her chest, the whole scene feeling ancient, as if we were about to begin a funeral procession down the shaggy dirt roads of what she called “the old country,” her mother’s village, Montenero di Bisaccia, a tiny hilltop town in Italy’s Abruzzi province; that night, as I kneeled in front of her casket and studied the surprising stillness of her face, gazing at her folded hands and rosary beads amid the quiet, reverent formality of the emerald dress, I sensed, finally, death’s mercy, the end of torment: her flash-cut, whiplash mood swings that terrified me as a child and the unrelenting anxiety that made it difficult for her to complete sentences without losing her breath—gone now, snuffed out like the last oxblood candles in a Dark Shadows basement antechamber.
Episode 790: August 29, 2021
from Book 4, The Complete Dark Shadows (of My Childhood)
Twenty years old and pregnant with her second child, Linda Kasabian decides not to attend a love-in at Topanga Beach in Malibu on July 4, 1969, the same day Reverend Trask tries to force his new bride, Judith Collins, to sit in the Great House rocking chair already occupied by the ghost of his previous wife, Minerva, who leans forward, her spectral body uncomfortably angular on the stiff rocker, a piece of furniture as rigid and unyielding as the Old House’s dimpled, roulette-wheel-shaped, sky-blue, velour chair with an inflexible spindle protruding from its center that I’ve now learned, after posting a query on the “Dark Shadows (1966-1971) Official Facebook Fan Page,” is called a “circular settee” (thanks to fan page members Morris Fowler and Elaine Fisher for identifying it; James LaMendola for adding that his theater director in college called it a “hate seat” because “anyone who sat on it didn’t face other sitters”; and Kevin Komonyi for spotting a circular settee in Episode 17, Season 2, of Mission Impossible); instead of going to Malibu for the love-in, Kasabian travels with Catherine Share to Spahn’s Movie Ranch, a former Hollywood set where film and television westerns were shot, now a ramshackle Wild West campground home for the Manson Family (four-and-a-half miles from where David T. grew up, Spahn Ranch is nestled just behind Stoney Point Park, a popular hiking destination where, as he told me during a late-afternoon, Lake Shore Drive traffic jam a month after I watched Episode 790, he used to climb Stoney Point’s rocks and sandy boulders—real ones, not the Styrofoam variations that dot the ersatz grounds of Collinwood—a little boy playing on the outskirts of what would become an infamous murder commune’s home), whereupon Kasabian meets Charles Manson, who was spending the Independence Day holiday retrofitting the Family’s dune buggy brigade with stolen auto parts for their daily treks to Death Valley in search of a bottomless pit with twelve magical fruit trees (one for each month of the year), a lake whose waters bestowed everlasting life, and a magical city that would hide them during the coming race war, after which, Manson assured the commune, they would rule a post-apocalyptic world as hippie-KKK royalty: “He could see right through me,” Kasabian later would say of her first sexual encounter with Manson, which occurred the following day, July 5, in a nearby cave (witnessed by Share and fellow Family members Ruth Ann Moorehouse and Nancy Pitman) during a summer of homicidal doomsday prepping described by Manson’s second-in-command Tex Watson, in his memoir Will You Die for Me? as a period in which the commune “got more and more paranoid about the blacks that kept appearing” and in turn “spent [their] nights patrolling the ranch, sleeping in shifts, with guns and firebombs ready,” culminating the second weekend in August, when Manson ordered Kasabian (who later would turn state’s evidence against the Family) to drive Watson, Susan Atkins, and Patricia Krenwinkel in the group’s yellow-and-white 1959 Ford to 10050 Cielo Drive, in the Benedict Canyon neighborhood of Los Angeles—Manson demanded Kasabian get behind the wheel, Watson writes, “simply because she was about the only Family member with a valid driver’s license”—where Watson, Atkins, and Krenwinkel would torture and murder Sharon Tate, Jay Sebring, Abigail Folger, Wojciech Frykowski, and Steven Parent.
Episode 793: October 11, 2021
from Book 4, The Complete Dark Shadows (of My Childhood)
Collinwood in the year 1897,
stock photo of the Great House
backlit against powder-blue
twilight; the witch Angelique,
straight and stiff in a blood-red-
and-pink gown with gold lamé
flared sleeves and collar, red
velvet cape edged with white fur
(matching her white fur shoulder
wrap) lies to Aristede about why
she’s roaming the waterfront—
“I just arrived here tonight
with a puppet troupe”—then
ties a candy-apple-red, silk sash
around the neck of a wooden
voodoo doll, choking Aristede
unconscious; Beth Chavez returns
after a 22-episode absence, the Collins
family servant clad in a plainspoken,
forest-green servant’s gown topped by
an earth-brown shoulder wrap
(an unassuming, forgettable dress,
though secretly I hope she keeps
wearing it, like the form-fitting,
admiral-blue gown with black
vertical stripes she donned for 11
consecutive episodes), while
Edward, in a light-gray, double-
breasted suit—blond handlebar
mustache askew, its left wing tilted
slightly upward—leans against
the dour, walnut-stained Great
House drawing room mantel
as Beth departs to search for
Quentin, whom she finds slumped
in the Old House’s cream-colored
seashell chair—he invites her
to join him, but the only available
seat is the dimpled, roulette-wheel-
shaped, sky-blue circular settee,
its rigid center spindle making it
impossible to sit comfortably on;
before the credits roll, Angelique
returns in a burgundy taffeta gown
and a white-lace-trimmed, purple
bib that clashes with the green
of her Manson-girl eyes, wet with
crocodile tears, as she turns to Edward
(lit by the amber glow of the Great
House drawing room’s crystal-ball
lamp) and fabricates a tale of Barnabas
hypnotizing her into becoming his
vampire bride: “I felt his teeth sink
into my neck”—uncomfortably tight
close-up, her pink lip gloss greasy
in the stage light glare—“and I fainted.”