My Friend Can’t Seem to Let Go
1.
My friend Deke
drives his Corolla
through the ice and snow
of a barren Michigan winterscape
and worries if the tread on his tires is thick enough
to hold him to the slick pavement
or if it’s been worn too thin by his
daily rural commute
He wonders if he’ll end up
dead in a ditch
in the service of
academia
specifically an obscure, mediocre liberal arts college
whose architecture pursued the style of
late Greek Revival Automobile Manufacturing Plant
and in whose faculty lounge hovers
a pall of dejection, defeat and decay
Deke also regrets that Global Warming will not progress fast enough
to cover the low hills with palm trees
and the fields with sugar cane
during his lifetime—
his prediction is that the transition
won’t complete itself
for at least another century
As he drives
he simultaneously visualizes the Age
when mile-thick ice crushed the land
and the future in which waving stalks of sugar
smell so fragrant, so sweet
and erase everyone’s childhood traumas
and fill their nerve endings
with pleasure
The Michiganders will turn ultra-violet dark
dark as Sri Lankans
their hearts thawed, to their own amazement
their prejudice and hate dripping away
They will leave the taverns where they’d been hiding
stand in sunshine
and strip off their flannel shirts
blue jeans soiled with mud
boots caked with cow shit
From now on they will go barefoot
and will open their hearts
to Jesus
They will strive to be
like Jesus
A woman
plays the fool after she stops a coconut’s
fall by catching it in midair
Am I an Olympian, or what, she asks her young son
who is crawling in the dirt
collecting multi-colored tropical insects
who never bite or sting
and, with their antennae and hind legs
sing calypso and reggae tunes
He puts them in a tray to
form a choir
He is careful as a Jain
not to hurt them
When Deke is in a Grand Rapids nursing home
the staff will ridicule him as the old prof
who thinks he is living in Hawaii
2.
Deke is on his way from the frozen lake
next to which he lives
to Frozen Lake College, at which he teaches
and he wonders:
Why do I continue to do this?
Why am I a captive of decisions I made decades ago
when I was closer to being a Boy Scout
with all its frustrations
than to the age I am now?
A couple of students see Deke enter the college’s circular drive
and say, not with great fondness: Here comes Lumpy
because his car is covered with dings
from when he visited me in Denver
and one of our infamous hailstorms caught him unaware
He ducked his head and ran
onto a stranger’s porch
while his car cowered naked in the street
Let’s Go Places, Toyota’s slogan
never meant: Into a fierce hailstorm
Meanwhile, after receiving only two hard blows
that sounded like a furious pitcher
was launching fast balls against the side of my truck
I fortuitously pulled under an overpass
Later, Deke, seeing my largely unscathed vehicle said:
You bastard
I boasted:
I have New York parking karma
and Denver weather mojo
When Deke looked skeptical, I continued:
I’ve never been electrocuted hiking in the mountains
which proves it
Deke considered my existence
my hikes onto fourteen-thousand-foot peaks
with my childhood’s purple
lucky rabbit’s foot
in the pocket of my nylon REI pants,
and how I move from place to place
allegedly collecting species of luck
3.
In Michigan the skies are dark grey
six months out of twelve
Sunshine is hostage
with no ransom offered
It weighs Deke down
keeps him also a captive
(He and the sun are held in the same vault
but they are blindfolded
cannot see each other
cannot feel each other
Deke is cold all the time)
History is a grimy snowbank
shoved into existence by the rusty blade of a plow
at the edge of the Wal-Mart parking lot
where the morbidly obese
go to die
and Deke wonders: Why?
I don’t remember
what crime I committed
to subject me to such a long sentence
The students also call him Lumpy
because Deke is sort of fat
though not as fat as true Michiganders
for whom Obesity is
e pluribus unum
Deke is a professor of Medieval Studies
His head is full of
the Fall of the Western Roman Empire
which set everything in motion
counter-urbanization
Invasions, mass migrations
though he himself is stagnant
His head also reverberates with his wife’s voice
nagging him
to do something about the dented car
The hail was big as golf balls
He can’t bring himself to respond
4.
Deke worships the events
that occurred before he was born
for example:
the Crusades to wrest the Holy Land from the Muslims
by soldiers mounted, gleaming, and shitfaced on ale
sworn to defend an ancient mythology
the same ancient mythology we defend today
against the same enemies
though now we have better dentistry
One of his graduate specialties was Scholasticism,
the movement that joined faith to reason,
and the forming of the Universities--
he shared the impulse
perhaps a compulsion
to pass on knowledge
a “noble” calling
Do you know that the Black Plague took down sixty percent of Europe’s population?
Dante mapped their Hell
Wasn’t it amazing how Marco Polo’s men carried so little baggage with them
and drank milk from the horses they rode into battle against the Chinese?
Isn’t it all so interesting?
Deke is Deke because his parents named him Deacon
They, especially his father, wanted him to be a religious man
a leader of the Church
but Deke didn’t have the feeling for it
nor the ambition to meet God
He had little ambition whatsoever
That he received a PhD remained a constant source of wonder for him
So how could he just drop
the transmission of a knowledge collection
that he tried to make colorful
but which
for his students
never quite came alive?
The idea that they could understand the world they lived in
by understanding how it got that way
never gained traction
They were the children of farmers and merchants
5.
How could he just walk away?
Who and what would he be if he wasn’t displaying his Wisdom
to the ignorant
like a missionary
working to bring Jesus to the savages
of darkest Africa?
Could he drop the mantle and succumb
to being just an
Ordinary Man?
Who would admire the vast volume
of learning he had consumed
but which sometimes threatened to come up
like acid reflux?
6.
He was like a rabbi
squeezing the Torah to his chest
as the world tried to wrest it away
and burn it
Torah was God Himself
The rabbi would never let go
Deke held the hope that one day
--quite miraculously--
his students would
“get it”
and atmospheric conditions would cause the large pockmarks
on his hood
to simply pop up
and disappear
as if his car had never endured that hailstorm
The anti-Vaxxers and their children would all die of Measles
the public school system would be lavishly funded
stupidity and ignorance would vanish from America
and Republicans would lie down with lambs
7.
He sometimes thought of retiring to Mexico
but was afraid of the diseases
that were rife down there
and the fact that seventy journalists had been murdered
in just a few years’ time
and that none of the murderers had been
captured and brought to justice
Deke felt that a historian was a kind of journalist
which made him vulnerable
to bandits, revolutionaries and
other desperados
8.
His commitment to the past
anchored him
How could he mindlessly fly into the future?
9.
His students—what did they want?
Not wisdom
not even knowledge
All they wanted was
for someone to treat them kindly
and to keep treating them kindly
as their lives dribbled into the interminable future
as they lost their youthful beauty
and aged into ugliness
Unfortunately, like all of us, they believed that they must
keep jumping through hoops
to collect enough win signifiers
(like college degrees)
to prove that they
were good enough
to qualify for kindness
that they were loveable
(Deke doesn’t treat them kindly
when he writes his snide, red comments
on their awful papers)
10.
Those were dark ages
that Deke had chained himself to
and a dark state—Michigan—
in which to teach it
Joan of Arc was convicted of witchcraft and heresy
and burned at the stake at age nineteen
the age of a large proportion of Deke’s students
so many of them, boys and girls, still virgins
Deke looked at them
marking his roll book
and casually wondered which ones were experienced
which of them had
floated in the Purple Haze
and which of them were still locked
in fear and isolation
The Pope had fled to France
but where could Deke flee to?
He only had a hint:
somewhere warmer
and brighter
somewhere like Hawaii
Work by Mitchell Krockmalnik Grabois appears in magazines worldwide, including RASPUTIN. Nominated for numerous prizes, he was awarded the 2017 Booranga Centre (Australia) Fiction Prize. His novel, Two-Headed Dog, based on his work as a psychologist in a state hospital, is available for Kindle and as a print edition. His poetry collection, THE ARREST OF MR. KISSY FACE, published in March 2019 by Pski’s Porch Publications, is available here. Visit his website to read more of his poetry and flash fiction.
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