Douglas Collura
Excerpts from
Things I Can Fit My Whole Head Into
Starting Each Day Is Like Treating a New Disease
They Return with Food
Sell Yourself First
Dating Diary
The King of Hollywood on Guard Duty, 1943
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Starting Each Day Is Like Treating a New Disease
Rise and shine, meatball.
Raise your lazy ass up.
Someday you'll be dead, but it's not today, so shake it.
Now make the bed.
Tuck in the ends, Tinkerbelle, that's right.
Now stumble into the bathroom.
Rub the electric razor along your face.
Go ahead, miss most the hair—why should today be any different?
Dip yourself in and out of the shower.
You want to smell like spring, don't you?
Now, throw on some clothes.
No, not the ones you wore yesterday, this isn't college.
Slip on your shoes.
One on each foot, Einstein, that's right.
Now open the door.
What do you mean you can't?
You have to.
It's for the money, remember:
rent, food, nursing-home insurance—
there'll be no one taking care of you at the crummy end.
That's the spirit, turn the knob, step out.
Shut the door behind you.
There.
Now you can smell it.
It's the world, maestro.
The whole packed ball burning up.
Go ahead. Breathe deeply.
You might as well.
For you
are in it.
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They Return with Food
I stare into the shadows of my apartment
as they fill out and become my dead relatives.
My grandmother—I'd never seen her outside her kitchen—
bears a pot of her meatballs and bracciole.
My aunt, joking that she sleeps with the fishes,
offers up a tray of her stuffed sardines.
Whom else in any world will I ever know
with the patience to stuff a sardine?
"What brings you guys back from the dead?" I ask
"We can't stand to see you unhappy," my aunt says,
"Here are the dishes that made you smile as a child."
"I'm not unhappy, only contemplating." "You live
without anyone to cook for you. You are miserable!"
Gazing at the food, I remember my taste buds so young,
every dish had me drooling into paradise.
At breakfast we'd plan dinner, after dinner
heat up leftovers for our midnight snack.
My dead relatives mill about my apartment,
stick up their noses at the décor.
My aunt's unhappy my kitchen table only sits six.
My grandmother's at my refrigerator. "It's so empty in here,
a person could starve to death by looking in."
"I don't cook, I eat out!" They let loose a collective gasp.
"No wonder you're sitting alone in the dark," my aunt says,
"We were family minded, we spent our best hours together.
We taught each other how to savor the world."
We didn't eat to taste, didn't even eat to live.
We were one huge mouth chewing everything up.
I had to climb out to become myself.
"I don't eat that way anymore," I say.
My dead relatives freeze with their offerings,
shake their heads, turn their backs, begin to go.
My aunt says over her shoulder, her cheeks
sagging with regret, "Oh my boy,
you have forgotten how to love us."
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Sell Yourself First
It was my first job. A food distributorship in Jersey. I wasn't exactly an innocent kid, but green and hungry to know things. I reported to the V.P. of Sales, Jimmy Mazzantonio, who everyone called Maz. Fat, round-faced, with black-gray curls close to his head and a cigar he used as a pointer. Everything he did was loud. He ate prodigious meals of steak and pasta drowning in cheese, and almond cookies with cappuccino. He drank Johnny Walker scotch that he stored by the case at the wet bar in his office. One of the bookkeepers, Shirley, would disappear inside for long periods of time and come out not so much disheveled as obviously put back together.
He'd hired me not only to sell but to receive a body of knowledge about selling and deploy it successfully, as if he were passing on a valuable tradition. As he taught me these things, he'd stare me in the eye, and I knew he could see I wanted to learn.
"Don't sell the product first, kid. That means the product has to be good and too often the product stinks like last week's sturgeon. Sell yourself first. Sell yourself funny and sincere, but not so sincere that they think you're soft. Sell yourself knowledgeable and full of details. Sell yourself with neat paperwork and a good looking suit. Then, whatever the product is, even olive loaf so mottled with lumps of fat and soggy pimentos that one glance at it, your eyes suck back into your head, it'll sell. It'll sell, because you sell."
He knew what made people tick, and how they could be useful. I sucked in every word he said.
"There are three types of people in this world, kid: first type—the incompetent and the insane. They're one type because they create one thing—disaster. Fortunately, you can see them coming. Who can't spot a nut case or a knucklehead? They are useless and time consuming. Flee them. Then there are the weasels, they're harder to spot. They're either ignoring you or plotting against you. If you're in their path, you can be at war and not know it. Fortunately, weasels live on the surfaces of their eyes, because whatever existed deeper down inside, they killed long ago to become efficient weasels. So always look into the eyes of the people you're dealing with. If you see a weasel there, remember you're actually in battle, and the only thing they even half respect is someone who fights back. The third group of people is everyone else. They're well-meaning and pleasant and you can ignore them."
I loved that year. The company grew richer, I received praise, I learned to watch people and learned to be someone people liked to purchase, or purchase from, depending on how you looked at it. Things moved ahead and I moved ahead with them.
But nothing remains constant in business. That rule Maz didn't tell me. That rule he showed me.
Management called him upstairs for a long talk about certain expenditures and how he drove the nicest car in the lot. And then later that day, Shirley left his office looking stunned and red in the face and walked out of the building and the next day her desk was cleaned off. Maz went home under the weather, and he took a number of days off, which was unheard of. How empty the place seemed without its loud center.
When he came back, he didn't say hello. Toward the end of the day, he called me into his office. His large mobile face was less mobile.
Usually he watched my eyes, but that day, he studied something in the room above me or behind me.
"Are we waiting for someone else, Maz?" I asked when he didn't say anything.
"No. We're all we need." He rolled his cigar back and forth between his fingers. "What do you want out of life, kid? Women, cars? Didn't you ever want to mean something—everything—to somebody? You know what it's like to lose that? It makes everything else small. I sleep next to a block of ice. She wasn't like that in the beginning. I suppose I did that to her. My daughter's off at college studying something; my son, I don't know where he is—wherever junkies go. I suppose I did everything to everybody."
I wanted to say, "I've learned a lot from you," but I couldn't make the words come out.
I glanced at his eyes that looked too raw to be left unguarded, and it embarrassed me. He studied his hands, and when his eyes came back up, they found mine, but now they looked harder.
"You don't have any idea what I called you in here for, do you kid?"
"To catch up on the sales?"
"No. I'm cutting you loose. I'm letting you go."
For a moment, I thought I hadn't heard that. But his face was as still as a stone.
"Letting me go? What for? I did everything you told me?"
"You did it too well. We don't need anyone else like me here right now. Here's a check for two weeks." He held the check out, but I couldn't reach for it. He dropped it in front of me. "You're out."
I stood up slowly with the check in my hand. He rose and walked to the wet bar, and with his back toward me, poured himself a scotch.
I could barely move. My legs were numb. "Maz, what am I supposed to do now?"
He spoke without turning around. "You know what to do. You know exactly what to do. Go out and sell yourself to somebody."
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Dating Diary
Friday, June 1st: Have you ever gone to bed with a brilliant, sensitive,
well-read woman who threatened to castrate you with a harpoon and press
your nuts between a couple of volumes of Herman Melville? Well, you're
not alone. Last night, I went to bed with Professor Wanda Krumcasian,
Ph.D. in American Lit. This widely-published Moby Dick scholar grappled
off my clothes as if she were scrubbing gull shit off a poop deck. And
when she said to me, "Ride me, you great white whale," I felt like the
most famous piece of blubber that has ever flopped across the seven seas.
Thursday, August 29th: Have you ever gone out with someone who
sent you birthday cards that began, "Ashes to ashes, dust to dust," and
went downhill from there? Hey, I know how you feel. Yesterday, I had a
date with Hortense Lambutsi, the owner of Lambutsi Cemetery Plots. We
went to the beach and walked along the water. She ran her fingers through
my hair and told me it would keep growing long after I'd kicked the bucket.
Then she did something extraordinary, something no woman's ever done for
me before: she buried me in the sand and left.
Monday, September 20th: Have you ever had dinner with a woman who
looked like the love child of Pablo Picasso and Gertrude Stein? A sort
of Picassenstein's Monster? Well, last night, I had dinner with the esteemed
art critic, Lilly Fernesh. I just kept staring at her face; she has one
of those large, sexy overbites that allows her to rest her entire chin
in the roof of her mouth. Some people have more talent than they know
what to do with. A very subtle, discerning eye, that Lilly. She says that
from the right, my profile resembles that of the great actor John Barrymore,
and from the left, it resembles the horse's head in "The Godfather." Boy,
it's nice to be compared to movie stars.
Wednesday, November 15th: Have you ever had the sneaking suspicion
that you were being mounted by a giant cockroach that had the genitals
of a stud horse and the head of George W. Bush? Well, we're all getting
a taste of that action, aren't we? And that's what drove me out of the
house the other night looking for a quick pick up. I went to this dance
club and hooked up with an anarchist gal named Freida, a tattooed cutie.
She was pierced in so many spots that if you'd stuck a hose up her ass
and put her on your front lawn, you could have used her as a sprinkler.
I used to be a landscaper, so that look always turns me on. After hours
of drinking, she whispered into my ear, "The government disgusts me, but
you don't." I saw my opportunity and said, "Let's see how you feel after
you see me naked, baby."
Tuesday, April 3rd: Have you ever been so sick of relationships
that even imagining someone while you masturbate feels like too much of
a commitment? Hey, you don't have to tell me about it. I'm in the midst
of a dry spell that only a nomad in the Gobi Desert would understand.
I try to think back on the more pleasurable, innocent days of childhood,
when I'd run up and down the block with Jo-Jo, Chickpea and Anthony. We
were an imaginative bunch of kids. Every Sunday after church, we'd go
into the alley, strip down, one of us would put on a black hood and we'd
play, "Let's have fun with the horny nun." Well, some forms of spiritual
purity you can never get back.
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The King of Hollywood on Guard Duty, 1943
The King of Hollywood marched back forth, back forth,
the perimeter of Camp Everett his to protect.
Marched in darkness. Numbness grew up his legs.
Women tossed phone numbers over the fence.
Please Don't Bother Private First Class Clark Gable, the sign said.
MGM had begged him not to enlist,
but a darkness had crashed around him in Hollywood;
now he marched, the oldest private on the base.
To fly into enemy fire, he longed for that. To blend in
with young recruits who couldn't stop staring at the King.
To please the little Sergeant who smeared a thumb
across the brass he polished. "How does it feel to be a King?"
the Sergeant would ask, "must be grand!"
Marching inside him was the fifteen-year-old dropout he'd once been
who thought himself good enough to be a 30-buck-a-week mechanic maybe.
His long, broad frame older women helped up the ladder.
Teeth all yanked out by a king maker who said,
"You want to be king, kid? You need a white, straight smile."
His sex appeal was in his stride as he marched,
his wide, solid face, how sleekly he fit in his own body.
Hated that tee-shirt comedy—won an Oscar.
Hated that Southern costume drama. Felt silly,
bought a ranch, wanted to work it, wanted to work it with his wife.
Marching, marching, but the King had joined the military to fly.
As his wife had been flying, Queen of Screwball Comedy,
selling more war bonds than any other star, rushing back
to keep an eye on him, she knew how women wanted him,
tempted him. Strands of her blond hair were found at the crash site
on Table Rock. The perimeter of Camp Everett needed protecting,
the King was marching, taking time between quarts of scotch
to enter into darkness as she had. Sick of recruits gawking,
he'd take out his teeth and yell, "Look, look at the mighty, toothless
King."
But kings are always treated differently. He knew that.
There was a woman on the base the men had dubbed
Mavis the female wrestler. Glasses thick, skin rough, teeth her own,
who could figure out what he saw in her? She didn't expect much,
grateful for what she got, tasting the boozed-up, cigarette-blasted breath
of a man upon whom something large had collapsed.
Private First Class King of Hollywood Gable marches the perimeter.
Marches in darkness until he is numbness itself.
Dawn, his relief shows up. He goes to an unlikely woman.
Even his numbness can feel those beefy arms wrap around his chest.
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