Coming down, Patsy and I walk to my house. It’s late, my parents are in bed. We build a fire in the fireplace and watch, the last of the drug still enchanting everything, the lick and dazzle of flames liquid, arching into air like the individual blades of grass in the park. It’s very romantic, the fire, the darkened room, and Patsy would like to ball; that’s how she puts it: “Come on, man, let’s ball.” I like the feeling of kissing her, rubbing up against each other, the pour of awareness the aftereffect of the drug makes, this timelessness, I could almost…

Almost. I pull back, I say, “My parents are in their room, I don’t know….” I say, “Must be the dope, I’m pretty fried.” And shesays, “Yeah, I’m pretty fried too,” and pulls her pants back up where she’d loosened them.

11

Sorrowful Mother

My mother taught me to love the things that would save me, and then, when I was sixteen, she taught me that I wasn’t worth saving. I learned the first lesson best—since beauty engaged my deepest interest, and since I was most willing to be instructed by delight—but I would be lying if I said that the second lesson didn’t shape me.

When I was a boy, in the years of our art lessons, she allowed me to paint a still life with her oils on a piece of Masonite, a green pottery bowl full of feathery orange chrysanthemums I invented stroke by swirly stroke. She bent over my shoulder, saying something like, Look how that blue you’ve added makes the bowl curve toward you, look how it makes the green deepen and come alive. There we are together, permanent in my memory as pigment suspended in oil, the unmistakable tenderness of her gesture, her shoulder barely touching mine, as we both turn our attention toward something we can love.

Is the nature of the instruction we receive from our parents always contradictory, despite their best intentions? My mother seemed to hold out the world with one hand and sought to diminish me with the other, as if to say, Here, love, is a paradise you do not merit.

The book I buy at Star Drug is a paperback called That Special Summer. I like to go there after school for a Coke and french fries, delaying the return home, and peruse the rack of books in the front of the store. This one sings to me; doesn’t that man on the cover, darkly blond, with green eyes of a striking immediacy, seem to be looking right at me? His gaze guarantees that the $1.95 paperbacks cast onto the waters of American drugstores will find their way surely (like Baby Moses in the bulrushes) to the places where they are desired.