The Book Bag

I still have my 4th grade book bag. Alone, at five in the morning, I picked the rusted lock with a paper clip, and discovered the 10-year-old Joe Weil’s first literary efforts, all crumpled up, in my terrible hand writing, but the meters of the poems were perfect. I remembered using that bag as a make shift sleigh, sliding across the parking lot at the acme super market. The entire route to school, and the voices of my friends turned to smoke in the winter’s air, returned to me. The weirdest things survive. I lost my parents and some of those friends also died: Eric, who introduced me to vampire comics and Henry Miller novels, his brother Greg who netted the biggest trout I ever caught, Huey who threw a good fast ball, and liked jamming with me on the piano. I found a poem in which I’d written about a guy who shoots into the wrong basket and scores two points for the opposing team. Back then, basketball was a minor god in my life. I wasn’t good, but I played it like football–I played street ball, tripped, shoved, bulled my way through. In 1968, there were basketball courts in the convent parking lot. If you were good, you played on the courts where the hoops had nets. If you were really good, the nuns left the lights on, and, except for bingo nights, you played full court on the netted baskets under the lights. I would play after school, in my uniform, before the bigger kids showed up and chased us off. A little later, after my mom ragged on me for tearing holes in all my uniforms, I’d run home, change, and come back to hang and play with friends. When the Magic fountain re-opened in Spring, you’d get a frosted drink if you had the money. If not, you’d go to the acme and carry some shopping bags for old ladies to make the change.

I’d play until nearly six, then race Eric on our bikes to get home in time for supper. The angelus bells would be ringing from all the churches. Old men kept homing pigeons, and they’d fly over the steeples of St. Mary’s, and St. Vladmir’s Ukrainian Catholic Church in perfect formation.

Sometimes, we’d cut across the tracks, and pop wheelies in front of oncoming trains. Sometimes, we’d go and steal a couple orange crates or wood from the back of acme to use for forts.

I thought about Eric, how his father would take us to the pro wrestling matches at the old armory, and how the Amazing Mulah, the woman’s world champ, threw a leg kick at us once when we crowded her outside her dressing room. I thought about how he died of a heroin overdose, and the friends he was with rolled him for his cash, and dumped his body off at the emergency room entrance. I thought about my mother’s face being eaten away with cancer, how she taught me to cook for the family before she died. I thought of standing in that kitchen, 18, her bald head hooded, her dimming voice instructing me to put the chicken in the bag with the bread crumbs and shake. I shook the bag so hard that it broke, and the chicken, bread crumbs, and seasoning all spilled to the floor. She laughed, and felt my bicep and said: “I can’t believe how strong you are Joseph.” It was the last time I heard my mother laugh.

Memory is painful because so much I loved was lost or damaged beyond repair, yet to only move forward like some idiot juggernaut is worse; it might spare me  pain, but at the cost of a sky full of pigeons, and my mother’s laughter. I write to raise the dead, and when I stop writing, they go back to their graves, but this book bag that I kept for no good reason all these years is like the mouth of hades. I can descend into its dark, pull out its scribbled text, and, for a few moments, recover the 10 year old with delusions of literary grandeur. No one had died yet, except for a couple of gold fish. My terrible “epic” called “Big Time Game” contains the lines:

It was a good prayer, even if it wasn’t answered. My wife is still asleep. Eric, and Huey, and my mother and father are asleep. It is snowing as usual here in Binghamton–and maybe it is snowing in St. Gertrude’s cemetery back in Jersey where my parents, and my uncles, and aunts, and the whole of my childhood is buried. Now I understand why Gabriel forgave his wife in that story, and everyone else, and why the snow fell on both the living and the dead. Now I feel what it is to be born into loss. Now I know what it is to have my love and my futility raise me above the glory of angels.