Our shop (and I called it a shop) overlooked a vacuum repair joint and a lens fitters. Sure, it was sort of a regret of mine. If it had been my choice… I always liked houses — the personal aspects of looking in and seeing people nuking frozen lasagna. With the commercial zone being the case, I’d taken it upon myself to garner a certain artificial endearment from the surroundings.
“There it is,” I’d say, as a little trademark comment to Lux, my assistant, “the harbingers of commerce greet us once again. You can tell a lot about a people by its businesses.”
I said this as I was opening the blinds one day. I knew I was boring the hell out of him, but that’s the way I liked it. It kept things static, ensured that the days would be predictable. We’d marry a few couples, Kay would come in and take some photos between taking calls, Lux and I would go grab a meatball grinder and a Dr. Pepper, or maybe Chinese takeout on some days, and somehow, the clock always rolled on down to five, and we once again drifted alone into our own minds for the waning of the day.
I’d majored in English in college, pretty much knowing the whole time that I’d be inheriting my Dad’s business and so not even needing to take the practical classes. But all along, that itch had been manifesting in me — regarding the dearth of self-expression rampant in the technology-driven, TV-sodden American culture we lived in, and one day I just thought, Hey, all the couples should write poems when they get married. The poems will be about playful things — about the things they like, about their love for each other (all heterosexual conjunctions heretofore), about their impressions of the future — excitements, fears, objectives. If the couples wanted, they could retain the poems for their own exclusive viewing, but they were strongly encouraged to pen SOMETHING.
Partly, I was curious. I MYSELF wasn’t married, being somewhat prone to things like shaking bouts and alcoholism, but like I said, I was a reader, a veritable voyeur. You would just see it in people’s eyes sometimes, it’s that thing we can’t explain — that realization we get that nothing could possibly outweigh that great ubiquitous present moment in which we find ourselves, a moment which is invariably such a confluence of past and future — of impossibility and reality. The decision to get married is a big one, usually a pipe dream on the lad’s part come temporarily true, and then, sometimes, permanently true, or etched in quasi-permanence, as it were. What is the impetus, then, where is the grounding? Is it all just carnal, I mean are we just like computer chips which lunge at that biological “opposite”? What is love, truly?
Logically, if we could define what love is at this concentrated level, at the arena in which people are so willing to give up their freedom to spend their lives rapt (or just wrapped) in union — on a terminal leash. I had to have it… I had to have love. In every situation, I walked on eggshells, and the sun only sped faster, the waves only crashed more gushingly in, sending my life hurling through space and racing forever toward its end. I felt the hardness of our eyeglasses, of our social security numbers, and how such things could lend themselves to general motifs that life is nothing but a struggle, and we’re nothing but animals fighting with each other, but then, Why language, why opposable thumbs?
“Whadyu think?” I asked to Lux one day. “I’m gonna have every couple, from now on, write a poem. The poem will encapsulate their ideals — an acute representation of their strongest emotions and fantasies.”
“Huh-huh-huh,” he laughed. He liked when I was psychotic, that’s why we made good business partners. I made sure to be psychotic as often as I could. “I like it. Have you run it by Kay?”
“No, I haven’t,” I said. “That’s how I know it’s a good idea.”
“Huh-huh-huh-huh! I think you might be on to something!”
“Good. Now I need a cigarette.”
I walked outside, lit up, and started thinking of my mother. She was dead now. Not much to say about that, I guess. I just got to thinking of this one quote I heard one time, I think it was Bukowski, he said that he’d hear one time, that All whom God intends to kill, he first makes angry. That had been it. My mom had been angry at my dad. I didn’t want to know why. I walked back in to the shop, and wondered what the hell I was doing.