Chrome Diaries, Part III

Kramer versus Kramer

By Elba Kramer

Get a job

Green melancholy.

Feral joy.

It was the first of these my partner cited when she left me, referring to my dark funk of resistance to capitalism’s tender caresses, futile as the “city without cars” sign mounted askew above my Bob single-wheel bike trailer.

She wouldn’t have left me if I’d stayed a professor.

As the American-environmentalist-holed-up-in-Toronto Jane Jacobs said, universities have become places of credentialing rather than educating (me: perhaps they’d always been that?). For my part, all I had to do was cash in my chips—didn’t I have some particularly lustrous ones?—and I too could have been credentialed in the professoriat, have been a well-paid Marxist. Would that have been so terrible?  Boy with car meets girl, keeps girl and car.

“But you don’t have a car,” she’d said when I brought this up.

“Well, it’s a…”  And I stopped myself right there.  You can’t tell literature professors about metaphor.  And she’s got her own little jokes now, so I’d better watch out.

So back to the question. Why do I insist on squandering my talents on graffiti instead of using them for the books my handlers in the system so clearly felt were my inheritance?

Green melancholy.

Feral joy.

On this planet, three people think I’m a prophet of the real. It’s not enough. It won’t quell the heart pains that came on two years ago when my friend’s wife left him. They came and went, but are back again for my own via dolorosa, a little scratch from a paring knife, left of the solar plexus.

I run.

At first I ran to avoid the subway fare. Now I run because I can. When I run, no heart pains. 

I run fast in the deep and lonely parts of the urban ravines, courting the easy death of a broken heart, the simplicity of a fuse blown too far from a payphone.  Didn’t Jim Fixx, the running guru, die that way? It’s not despair. I’d just rather face it straight. I’m an animal father, sniffing my boys all night as they sleep. If they’re to lose me, better this than by stealth. Yet my intuition tells me I will live to hoary age. I run hard. I roust the psychotics out from the underpasses in the wind of my flight, and they cry out their bits of the urban anthem of loss and ruined sex. The minute renderings of their resentments are as detailed as the prose of novelists and the scrabble of a pigeon’s pin feathers against the morning air. At this speed, they have but three or four words to explain themselves, so it’d better be good.

She left me. 

What else is there to say? How will I tell my mother, eighty-five if she’s a day, deer in the hunter’s sights? How could she know that the pink of the trigger finger is even now blanching to beige, the doom of these ill tidings is upon her. “It’ll kill my mother,” I’d said. Two sticks were floating out above the sidewalk. How many milliseconds before had they been a single baluster from the front porch—our front porch—how many milliseconds before that had I had no idea that she could ever ever leave me in a million years, no idea that in my grief I would kick at the perfect dental row of carved wood in the banister? “Best shoot her myself, if it comes to that,” I’d said when the sticks had settled, years later it seemed, onto the little apron of December grass past the sidewalk. In my mind’s eye, the two sticks are floating still.

On the phone, I talk to my parents in Tennessee, careful first to eat slices of the fruitcake eased from the Collin Street Bakery tin they’d sent for Christmas. Save the green and red bits for Sebastian. They inquire anxiously about the courses I teach to grad students on nature and on cities, trying to make the classes into the stable life as a professor I surely must deserve. The fact is that these courses are the remainder from the long division of my career, and the students I attract tend to be those inassimilable intelligences who are often abandoning their own Ph.D.’s.

Of her I fib, “She’s just out for a bit.”  Anything I say to my parents is a joy to them, but I feel like I’ve got a corpse in the hall closet, and a spell of unbinding and decay thickening at the root end of my tongue, and my tears drip into the shell of the receiver and sizzle as I laugh down the long lines into the deep South to reassure them. My father, the old logger and oil man, is a vigorous giant still, skiing his winters out in the high-altitude working-class trashy resorts of the southern Appalachians. How long can I go without telling them?

“I’ll cut off my baby finger,” I’d said to my love. It was a kind of swearing in the old sense of oath-taking, a way of borrowing spiritually from the future to intensify and concentrate language even as it dissipates and fritters. A desperate act, in other words. That I’d meant it didn’t help my case. This wasn’t a refutation of green melancholy but an instance of it, the restless liminal man’s pacing out on the borderlands where anything could happen. And except for the fact that anything just had happened, she wasn’t having any part of it. I’ve always tried to tell her that she’s not bourgeois. That she only appears that way next to my shaggy prowlings in the sleek contours of the Centre for Comparative Literature, say, or my panhandlings for quarters to park my friends’ Volvo.

Tonight at midnight I’m out running, having earlier surrendered my boys to the exigencies of the new protocols for sharing quality time between the adults.  Before, we didn’t have quality time. Just time. As I head south along Spadina the syringe of the CN Tower vaccinates a nervous cloud, a bit of cross-cultural scud fleeing north from America across the pewter oval of the great lake.  Perhaps that very cloud coalesced as mist above some stumps in Mato Grosso province in Brazil, and will precipitate as ice crystals on disheartened polar bears. Inuit hunters will use their ninety-ninth word for snow to cry foul.

I was always America to my lover. She loved me, then she left me. Love: when does immigration become emigration? 

Little Liam, he of the tough and vascular head: he has, purely by coincidence, a scar on his right cheek to commemorate the week she announced she’d leave.  The scar is settling in, modifying. Right now it looks like four vertical lines crossed once, like a prisoner’s wall-scratched record of time served. “I’m one of the tallest kids in my class,” he said the other day. “Well. Not the tallest. Actually the second shortest. But I can hold a basketball.” When we’d told him what was happening, he said over and over, “You’d better not, you’d better not.” Six years old, saying over and over, “You’d better not.”  His last untrammeled minutes just before that, searing me: his pinkie finger had been scanning the lines of a book too old for him by half while at the other end of his hand his thumb was being sucked, his head being dragged along by this process like the jaunty little ball hovering over lines of text at karaoke parties or the gatherings of self-consciously modern Baptist hymnsters. 

In a world like this, cognition’s always in for a bumpy ride.

I have more degrees than you do, dear reader, so how come fifty and paupery are riding me so hard?

Running: west down Bloor, and cobras of fresh snow wriggle between the black tights of the anorexic girls. When they stand beneath the streetlamps, the space from leg to leg is a baluster cut like those drawings which could be either a slender vase or two faces kissing, depending on whether you see the dark or the light. It’s optically elusive, and they say men see those things one way and women another.

At Honest Ed’s I pick up speed, musing about how the most surprising things in our children turn out to be the most predictable. I’ve held Sebastian’s foot almost every day of his life, but I can never prepare for his astonishing transformation into a megapod. Conversely there’s no way to know ahead of time when Liam will spill milk, yet whenever it happens I say, “I knew it.” You’d better not, I think towards him, but it never does any good.

Sometimes a distant headlight twinkles a corona in the discreet place where the jeans of women widen to the pelvic structure. In the parkette, two Dobermans pincering each other, flexible as monkeys, entwined like plastic, light dusting of confectionary snow on their flanks.

“Why is one of the railings missing?” Sebastian had asked. “Go ask your father,” I said. “Oh, I am your father.” One of our old jokes, never far from the Spanish word from her side of the family, when they’d combine my boyish energy and my immaturity into a single word of praise and gentle rebuke: “infantil.”

There’s always been an axis of affective solidarity between preteens and newly aging parents, between the preens and the forties, the young and the restless.  Elfin Sebastian and the beautiful girl his age next door both have emerging central incisors. The children are temporarily long in the tooth, and it gives them an aura of worldly wisdom at odds with the innocent collagen puff of their lips.  We’re all on the cusp of more knowledge than we can handle.   

Running, I loop around to the nameless street where my love lives now and I don’t look as I zip past the lighted window, but I imagine the pelts of my wee bairns, their scruffy scalps, their exhalations as they lie dreaming. Sorrow and love flow mingling down from my pierced heart.

I chose voluntary poverty, and a little involuntary squeaked in, too. Having put my hand to the plow, shall I turn back? A double-minded man is unstable in all his ways, the Bible says. Turning back: that would be Kramer versus Kramer.

Lowbagging on a ruined and glorious planet is never far from sadness but always hopes for transcendance. The urge to spend a little less, drive a little less, hurt a little less, work a little less for The Man and paddle more, where shall we put such tiny earnest treasures amidst the flinty vertiginous surfaces of Babylon?  How to pass them on to our lovely boys?

I press on across the great bridge dividing the city east and west. It used to be second only to the Golden Gate for suicide, but they’ve strung it up like an Aeolian harp, and there’s no way to jump now. The wires sing in the wind as I head east. One day the wall of the expressway down there read BUSH IS A TERRORIST, and the next day men in orange had whitewashed it, leaving only the center part, which said LISA. But the following day it was SUPERCALIFRAGILISTICEXPIALIDOCIOUS, and that word has presided over our months in the new country. I feel at once agile and superfragilistic.

Across the bridge Bloor becomes the Danforth—quaint Canadian use of the article there—and I surge forward to beat some cars coming down Broadview.  I’ve found my stride now. I’ll want to run all night, and what will stop me?  Men without jobs, underemployed and undertoothed, cluster at the corner as I come into my neighborhood, calling for money, and my heart holds steady and I laugh.  “Tomorrow,” I call to them, “that’s my plan.”

Kramer Coffee flits by. “Behold,” I say, “I am Elba Kramer, lord of all I survey.” In the morning the Danforth buddhas will be there, men who look like me, gentle toughs with pink-flanged noses and twice-told tales.

I know about jobs, who holds the leash, who gets ground under. And on the other hand, not having one can kill you surely as a knife in the dark. Maybe they’ll get me in the end, maybe I’ll set my own terms. “What we don’t know is pretty much everything,” I say to my boys sometimes. 

For now, the city is a circle whose center is my boys and whose circumference is everywhere, and I range widely. At the Danforth and Carlaw, the cars are speedy but I am speedier still, and I lean in to the intersection with a feral joy. If I’m lucky, I’ll make it.

                                          —elba kramer, east Toronto/Jan 07