Petrouchka's Fatiguing Dream

November 18, 2023

2:17 AM

Subject: Fatiguing Dream

Sis,

I had the dream again last night.

The Charlatan’s hot and bitter breath was moist on my fuzzy face; his hands were firm on my sawdust shoulders, holding me in place. The Moor, scimitar in hand, led the Ballerina away. I tried to protest; pathetic, high-pitched sounds emerging from my levering felt mouth. My oversize head was hanging to my chest; my arms and legs were waving under a force beyond my own. The gathered people laughed. Dad stood off to the side, watching.

I needed to piss, but I couldn’t move.

Dad’s been moldering so long, his greatest existential fears realized in the way we’ve all moved on.

I woke to the familiar feeling of drowning in shallow water. I know that my life is in this state because of all my terrible choices. But did you know that every one of those bad choices was fundamentally about trying to fill in the void before it consumes me entirely?

Is this situation particular to my fucked-up circumstances? Could it be a Gen X thing? One of my kids told me it’s Gen Xer dudes like me who are gonna put Trump back in the White House. Jesus.

Anyhow – I was drowning in shallow water, consumed by fear, etc, etc. And it occurred to me that the thing which would horrify Dad the most was the way he’d become a cipher in our text thread, a hoary meme drawn out of one’s reticule for the facile summoning of mournfulness or absurd irreverence. Three black, broken hearts; a stupid packman face with its tongue hanging out. I closed my laptop so as not to think about my hemorrhaging P&L and went to the bathroom to try to piss.

I stood above the toilet, making space for my dysfunctional plumbing to begin pumping my emissions into this quiet, splashing bowl, the contours of which I could just make out in the refracted light of my cell phone screen. A little tilt can help the system work itself out. I leaned against the wall, my cellphone casting cold blue light into the dark bowl.

I have no business being in business, Sis, because business is not a business that rewards idleness. ‘If you have time to lean, you have time to clean.’ So said that bitch waiter, all those years ago. And yet here I leaned, even as the business skidded into irrelevancy, pondering last night’s fatiguing dream, imagining away what I knew to be true about all the ways I had failed our father in his final repose, considering what I was gonna do to fill the sucking pit of fear and impotent rage in my chest. This behavior was readily apparent in the P&L.

I closed my eyes, meditating upon the urgent sensation which had waked me, awaiting the relief which had always yet come, but which every day felt less certain as my pumps and pipes were inexorably degraded.

‘Alexa, play Sergei Rachmaninoff radio on Pandora.’

Leaning into the darkness of the bathroom, the small sting at the tip of my penis indicating that the urine was finally beginning to rise. Andre Previn raising the ghosts of 19th century imperialism. The bells tolled as though he were summoning the Tsar, as though he were calling the Kaiser back to the long-forgotten fields of glory, and I was deeply moved. Tears, which had puddled up inside my sinkhole began to well, and as the music swelled within the tempered confines of the first movement, I nursed the warm wetness, hoping to draw forth some actual emissions from my mangled-up plumbing. I felt the strings, which it is so facile to describe as soaring (a description which nonetheless feels apt to me) growing in my aching chest as Ashkenazy’s arpeggios climbed underneath. And then there is that point, a couple minutes into the first movement, when the strings recede and suddenly Ashkenazy is again in the fore, for only the briefest moment, as though he were commanding the entire orchestra to turn to a new theme. Finally, as though a water gate, too long closed and subtly corroded, were at last forced open, the urine flowed in a strong, if intermittent stream. I smiled to myself in the dark.

The toaster popped, the caramel sweet scent bringing Dad’s swarthy features to mind. There I stood once again, a little boy trembling before him, too meek even to ask for a piece of toast, instead merely alluding to it in such a way that could not but piss him off.

‘That smells good,’ I said, the longing irrepressibly near the surface. He pushed himself forcefully away from the kitchen table where he sat, slamming his roughhewn hands on the tabletop with such force that I took a step away, trying to make myself small behind the kitchen chair where my hands rested, pressing myself against the wall and looking down at my padded feet. I felt him brush past, and I stole a short look at his fearsome red face. But he did not acknowledge me.

The scent of good, buttered toast lingered in kitchen. To this day, this interaction remains among my greatest regrets. Yet I was hungry. I was fearful. It felt as though a hole had been ripped open in my chest and down to my belly - a hole full of nothing but fear and bitter recrimination. I took a piece of toast, and I ate, standing behind the kitchen chair, my body pressed against the cool wall.

After Dad died, his old notebooks and computers and boxes of writing ended up in my care, and for a few months I took a lot of time to dig through his shit. And there was a lot of shit. Correspondence I didn’t recognize at first. Letters from and to people I didn’t know, that somehow had ended up among his things. There were boxes of correspondence, thousands of pages. I entertained ideas about preserving them, archiving them, whatever. But eventually they all ended up piled in my little garage, and in the entropic nature of things they became gradually degraded, like my plumbing, like the P&L, etc. It is a situation that caused me some agita, but which I also just lacked the wherewithal to do anything about.

Maybe it was Ashkenazi that did it, I can’t say for sure. But in one of those nimbus flashes that occasionally arise within a dying man, causing him one morning to discover long forgotten reservoirs of strength or perseverance, I decided to head back out to the garage. I pulled out my car and left it idling in the parking lot. I swept out some of the dirt. I began once again to sift through his old shit. A letter fell out of a filthy notebook - one he had written and apparently never sent. I leaned against the hood of my car and opened the letter in the gathering dawn.

I made a copy and attached it here.

Parsley

*****

March 15, 1980

Joe,

In truth your letter sat, unopened, for several days before I found the perfect time to read it. I had just fixed a fresh cup of coffee, caramel rich with table cream, sweet with a scoop of granulated sugar. The caramelized richness of buttered toast standing in rich olfactory space beside it. An unfiltered camel burned between my right index and middle finger, my thumb pressing against my temple, a second cigarette smoking in the ashtray beside my coffee. Rachmaninoff or some such thing played on the radio, a dog lay curled at my feet, a spiral notebook and a ballpoint pen stood at ready should I need to jot down notes. It was, in other words, a perfect morning.

I dislike cowardice in a boy - I dislike the boy who follows fashion and can’t think for himself - I dislike the boy who doesn’t know his own mind, who is constantly seeking approval, who therefore hides and lies and obfuscates even when he might just as well be honest - because he is more interested in pleasing than in being. It saddens me that Parsley seems to manifest all these qualities. And so it was that just as I completed your letter, and was about to start on the excerpt bearing your impressions of the service, that he wandered in.

I don’t really understand what I have done wrong in raising this boy. He lacks the simple ability to just say what he wants. Why couldn’t he simply take a piece of toast, or better yet why couldn’t he simply make his own? Why must he instead pad softly into the room, half hiding behind a kitchen chair, looking longingly at my toast and then say, in the most transparently dishonest manner imaginable, ‘that smells good’?

And perhaps it isn’t fair of me to feel such irritation with this little bugger, but in all honesty, I can’t get my head around how this little boy could be my son? Ha!

In any event, I had to clear my head if I was going to give your letter the attention it deserved, so I stormed out of that room. I had your letter and my coffee, and I settled down here in the living room. Happily, the little shit didn’t follow me in here!

Your letter, and most especially your description of the service, got me thinking about my dad, and ultimately about myself, and I began to understand why men write for posterity. I have reread the rabbi’s eulogy many times, and I don’t recognize my mother in that story, except possibly for Abbie Stern’s remembrance. And in truth, I never really knew my father, and so the man that I have known as my father these past 25 years is, for the most part, the fiction Bernie created, although now and then Ma would share something - maybe a roll of her eyes, or a quiet aside, too low for Bernie or Al to hear, which caused me to wonder if there wasn’t more to know about the man, and about their relationship

The funny thing is that the service was meant so clearly as agitprop, and the approach was so ham-fisted, that I realized even before you wrote to me that Bernie had been feeding me a load of bullshit. If this love story was as powerful as they said, how could it now be so friable as to crumble in the face of a life that had gone on 25 years past my father’s death? Why was it necessary to utterly excise these last years from Ma’s life? Why couldn’t her husband be allowed to participate in the service, or have even a lonely mention in her eulogy? It felt to me as though not only Ma’s true life and yours, but also my own and even my father’s had been erased by the service.

At this point I have no idea what is true, or not, in our family history, but I felt moved by your letter to write down what is true for me, so that at least there will be that little shard of truth which future archeologist of man’s spiritual and psychological development might reference, should they be interested. He died when I was only five, so I never really got to know him. My clearest memory of my dad is sneaking into his room when he was trying to sleep one morning, and waking him, maybe because I wanted to ask him something. And he screamed at me. He told me to ‘get the fuck out of here’ and he threw a pillow at me, and his face was red and sweat beaded on his forehead and he looked terrifying. Ma came rushing in and she scooped me up and closed the door behind me. I was too stunned even to cry. And after that Bernie, who must have been around 18, got more involved in my life.

Bernie didn’t want me to grow up hating our dad. He filled in a lot of the missing pieces for me. It was Bernie who helped me to understand how hard working my dad was, and how smart, even brilliant. Bernie explained the ways that the deck was always stacked against him, and how Leon took advantage of Ma after dad died and essentially stole his patent for the coin-operated washing machine.

Bernie explained how Ma was just so overwhelmed at the time, and how she relied on you for advice and how you weren't a bad guy, just out of your depth, and how in the end Leon took you both for a ride. I think that’s why Bernie became an attorney - he wanted to make sure no future Leon ever took advantage of someone he loved.

Bernie taught me to revere the memory of our father, and I always have. I have tried to direct my steps, more than anything, after him, a man who was noble, and loyal and hard-working and brilliant. A man who always put the needs of his family ahead of his own. They say good guys always finish last - and maybe my dad’s story proves that out - but Bernie taught me (whether he meant to or not) that the most important thing is to be a good guy. And that’s always how I have lived my life.

I regret, almost more than anything, busting into my father’s room that morning when I was five and disturbing his peace. He was dead within a month, and it became the only direct memory I know him by - ‘get the fuck out of here!’ I think of this moment, and I am filled with a paralyzing, sickening fear, sickening in the sense that I want to vomit, which I carry around like a hollow place in my stomach which I cannot fill with food, or with alcohol or with drugs. It just lurches and wretches along with me wherever I go. This literal pit of fear causes me to deplore myself. How is it possible that I could be so weak, so wracked by fear and by loathing? I am disgusted with myself.

November 18, 2023

5:13 AM

Subject: Re: Fatiguing Dream

Parsley,

Whoa! That’s heavy. I don’t think he really meant it (the shit about you). He never mailed it. You should think of it as a journal entry. I’ve written some pretty horrible stuff about my kids in my diary. I’d better burn them before I die!

Dad and I never really talked about his dad. I know he died young and that he invented a coin-operated washing machine.

It’s sort of wild that Dad and Joe were still communicating after Lucy died. I never knew that. Auntie told me once that the boys blamed him for not doing more to protect Lucy after their dad died. She told me they showed him the door as soon as Lucy died.

Anyhow – you need to get that urinary issue looked at. Have you called a doctor?

Love you Parsley!

November 18, 2023

5:45 AM

Subject: Re: Fatiguing Dream

Sis,

You’re right. It probably doesn’t mean anything. The envelope was sealed, and it just ended sorta abruptly. He left it unsigned. But on the other hand it also confirms, like, everything I ever feared about how he felt about me. If I’m being honest, I always felt like I was failing him. I always felt intimidated by him. It always seemed to me that he loved you more than he loved me. So even though I know you’re right, it’s still sorta hard to shake. And then the second half of the letter is all about his dad. Like it seems like he felt the same way about his dad. So maybe he was such a dick to me all my life because he felt like his dad was a dick to him?

Anyhow, whatever the meaning of it, I went back out to the garage after work. It was cold. Dad lay barely a mile away, his grave marked only by some lifeless plastic flowers. I thought about driving over to visit him, but I’ve been out of the habit for a while. There’s nothing, really, to commune with there.

I considered whether I should share this letter with our siblings, whether it might be preferable to the tired superficial memes his life has become, or the heroic stories they probably signify. But I wondered who would be served by sharing this letter around? Even a living dog is better than a dead lion.

The stories we dogs tell regarding the lives of our departed lions - they are for us, after all, not them.

We dogs. I don’t know about you, Sis, but I just feel so lost. Like a dog who’s lost his master in an explosion, snuffling around the ruins of a blasted-up foundation for some old, familiar scent. Why am I so afraid of everything? Why can’t I find motivation to see anything through? Why am I such a bad person, an inconstant slave to my basest expediencies? Given the revelation of that first letter, I thought maybe I could find the answers in all his old shit.

But as you know I never really had much motivation for anything. I’m a loser baby, so why don’t you kill me?

I put the letter back in its envelope, and I returned the envelope to its notebook, which I returned to its fraying cardboard box, slowly decaying in accreted dirt and cold and muck kicked up by my car entering and exiting - in heat, in wet, in snow, in chill, mostly in filth.

I closed the garage door behind me, and I came inside. I went to the bathroom to try to take a piss.

Missing you, Sis.