O. J. for President in 2008

In the wake of the recent “hunting accident,” in which Vice President Dick Cheney shot a fellow member of his hunting party, one can no longer discount the overwhelming evidence that sits in front of our eyes. The privileged class enjoys not only a favorable glance from law enforcement circles, but also is allowed to get away with not just stealing and lying, but now it looks like murder, or at least damn close.

Already, the PhD’s of spin doctoring have Vice President Cheney everywhere on media outlets looking chagrinned and remorseful, stating, “That was the worst day of my life,” and “I take full responsibility for shooting my close friend.” That’s all well and good, but were the same shooting accident to take place on a street corner in Black America, and the two players in the scenario African-American, nobody reading this would express the least bit of surprise were the “accidental shooter” to get 20 to life.

Still, we should not be surprised by the legal invulnerability of the “W” presidential cabinet. Michael Brown, the head of FEMA lied on his resume with zeal enough to provoke literary agents of fiction to pant after the rights to his next whopper of a tale. New Orleans was twenty feet under water, but FEMA did not offer help for three days, while men, women, and children of color drowned and suffered abandonment from their government and assault from a desperate mob in front of national news cameras. The White House’s original story was they didn’t know the nature of the problem, but in recent days it comes to light, not only did they know, but they were aware that New Orleans would suffer extensive flooding from Hurricane Katrina before Katrina hit the “Big (No-Longer-So) Easy.” Apparently, the White House needed to get all its ducks in a row first. Thus, it comes as mere rust on the edge of the razor held to the neck of the poor New Orleans’ citizenry that Haliburton, within weeks of the chaos, signed a contract with the Federal Government in excess of 400 million dollars to rebuild the flooded areas. Yes, that Haliburton. The one with Cheney and Bush, Sr. as longtime board members.

Let’s not forget that President Bush sent thousands of our sons and daughters to stand in harms way in Iraq, while the wild goose chase for weapons of mass destruction first floundered and then fizzled into the fabrication it was all along. Young men and women in the American Armed Forces lose limbs, suffer mental and physical calamity, and die on a daily basis, while an entire region of the world learns to despise the United States’ bullying tactics. Oddly enough, Haliburton “wins” the contract to rebuild Iraq even before our government has finished tearing it down. You couldn’t make this stuff up.

Unfortunately, the fun for the Bush White House simply cannot last. With the two term limits, “W” might actually have to find employment without the boon of a sterling legacy. The rest of the Republican Party squints and runs for cover as the spotlight shines on many with names connected to a seemingly endless list of scandal. Who can they run too? The answer seems obvious. Name one man who can, like Bush and Cheney, commit mayhem and get away with it? O. J.

He’s rested. He’s likes to golf. He’s got nothing else to do. And as President, O. J. will have the power of the presidency behind his efforts to find his ex-wife’s killer. The Office of President will obviously have to take a break from feeding the likes of Haliburton as it has done during the Bush-Cheney regime, but at least it will have a more noble course to follow for the next four years

Once

If I had met you once,
A moment only,
And you decided
To never again
Cast lashes up
And spread your lips
Across your teeth,
White and giving,
And by doing what
Is most your nature,
Smile, generous
Heart, and give
Me exposed light
You own and
I borrow,
I would have basked
For years in warmth
And asked for nothing more.
Providence was kind,
And left me
With my imagination
Unnecessary, short
Of possibility.
How do you stay
Beyond sensation and memory and logical manipulation of light and air and matter and spirit and psyche?
How do you make
A sad man’s life nor longer constructed with the same building blocks of ridicule terror, and deadness of soul?
No answers.

-- Miles Shapiro

The Wood Bench

The wooden bench swing dangles
From metal chains wrapped
Around a branch high up--
High above the balcony
Where I watch the abstracted shadow
Sliced grey into the pale light, rosied strange
By new sun.
The undulating pattern writhes in the wind.
I drink my coffee and recall the twins
And her child in play.

Cigarette smoke cobras around and into my palm.
The remembered children, who now sleep
Peacefully only yards away, stretched
Waterproof bodies over the snow,
Arced arms and legs re-creating my already perception of them.
A smile leaves behind pained past;
And the smoke fills my once hollow chest
With a warmth, new and welcome
Like hers in our bed, but without the aroma
Of her sauced loins, her welcoming wetness.

It is foreign, this contentment;
One requiring a readjustment of a pessimistic
Default setting honed smooth by angry batterings
Eroding hope into an eviscerated carcass.
But I am no longer that. I work and play and parent and love
Like any man might had he not
Felt and seen and heard what is known.
Is it sweeter because I have?
Does the clean man's “happy” not count the same?
Here's the start. I no longer count.
Measurements are for growth charts pencil marked
Inside door frames and along lengths of counter tops.
There is no score nor was there ever.

When I learned to count as my children have
The necessity to remember every number was crucial.
But score is a verb, meant for meat, not children.
Absolution is self-reflexive. Grammar is felt.
Each sentence is a recrimination, until you teach.
Then the swing has four rungs against the back
And leaves no scarring in the snow.

Stolen

She, on knees scraping pavement and curb,
And he, jerking with sorrowful convulsion
Took my dog. Rather, I gave her away,
But felt pressed I no longer deserved her.
The lines carved jagged beside mouth corners
Sliced off the inside of her cheeks
And threw pain out like confetti.
I stood aloof like the sober one with litter on lapel.

He, though, flat out stole her, twice.
Once by accident as the dog ditched children
And dug nails into macadam with fury and speed
To plunge a life beneath the tire of a municipal snow plow.
Second, when the plowman wept on my shoulder.
He showed my family his dog
Which hangs from keychain without attendant wife.
I could claim near nothing, a supporting role;
A Little John to the minstrel mourners.
My absurd bulldog was gone, theirs.

Undrunk with grief, I rested his head upon my shoulder
Like the good man I am supposed to be.
That’s not who I am. Or not who I think myself to be.
I think of myself as a man who has a dog
And then loses the dog and then cannot bare the pain.
I am not, no more.
I am old, half-a-life down, and fail to avoid
Thoughts of a before dog, a better behaved dog
Whose passing caused greater wrench.
A future dog, different, maybe like the first,
Or perhaps many, clumped together residing in
A culture of dog, and resisting Man.

The Want of Language

I prefer to paint,
Because those snippets of thought
Hang thick smears of color
Instead of tidy, typed
Words without texture.
The paint covers all the white
Noise provoking impulses
Like this.

At certain moments,
Even old wounds
And remembered take downs
By ex-wives and parents
Shroud themselves in silence
Beneath viscous hues
Which merge into
Serene landscapes missing
From moments like now.

And yet here I am
Amongst the critics
Taking on an ancestry invincible.
Men of letters wield weighted measures
As my lightness of thought
Flies into the air,
Untethered, foolhardy.
At pinnacle and then descent
I long to land softly
In the wet and forgiving
Squish of vermillion
And ochre.

The Movies

Hers is redemption.
Her ex’s, persistence against the odds.
My ex’s, cloaked in shame.
During Broadcast News she refused
To see William Hurt’s designed stupidity.
The flashback in the delivery truck,
Father consoling scholastic ineptitude
Did not register above the din
Of Hurt’s humorless, perfectly constructed face.
She lost me that night. I sat in funk
Knowing I did not trust her to let Truth
Strip bare desire and ask forgiveness
For insisting on sightlessness,
And I no longer wanted her too.
I resigned myself to an endless
Scraping away of organ flesh
Until the ventricles flapped paper-thin
Before collapsing beneath the pressure
Of ribs and diaphragm.
I was determined to last-- noble, saintly.
I found reprieve in the ex’s fury.
Stubborn still, but I ceded
To the threat of legal removal

And mine is unknown to me.
With no pattern in Apocalypse, Metal Jacket,
A Night at the Opera, Shawshank,
Young Frankenstein, and Cuckoo’s Nest.
I see myself without human optical accuracy.
I am not there. I am eyes alone. A single eye.
I watch and like what I like. Autofocused.
I only recognize myself in reflection.
A quote from Avedon revealing his portraits
Are about him more than the subject.
Exposes my mechanical whirring, and endless footage.
Narcissisus saw himself in the pool, and did something
Too unlikely for sense. He fell in love. How?
Were I to see my reflection with such clarity,
I would squint in pain. I do not remember a time
Without self-loathing. The ex’s hatred of me
Aimed itself at my lens’ blindness.
My love now laughs at it, warm, inclusive,
And makes no apology for my sadness.

Dear Mr. Stevens

One must have been cold a very long time
with every crystalized juniper in place
each needle threatening one's soul
were the landscape of marriage to change,

and then to have it change, disappear from the familiar
into the wrenching away from the known abstraction,
the tender bone alone, exposed to sorrow never
visited, and then transformed once more,

into the heat of love again, a second cup of richest soup,
to know the abstraction itself was the nothing,
a ruse
lined with psychic mail of modernity's seriousness;

to strip bare again, face this new partner,
naked, sexual, bloodied with her own failed construct,
and then to shed belief for opportunity
to see the rosy pink sun
re-emerge from the distant jagged line

unscathed,
full, glorious
like an as yet hour
spent warm amidst the scent of aroused loins
aching for the forgiveness of a new day
only one’s arms and chest
and fingertips
and tongue
and breath
can bring back to life.

My Terrorist

Behind my eyes,
Where thrum registers fear
Resides an older brother,
Wooden Indian sentinel,
The conscience bearer
And my torturer.

I hold him responsible,
Because he is now,
And could have been then,
But chose allegiance
With East Coast therapist
Boon, My mother.

Treaties so dear
Cost years of sullen jaws
Tightened into doctor visits
And tickets to
Woody Allen movies.

Business goes well
For him, who thinks already
About early retirement and coaching
Little boys like us,
Needing more help than
What was on tap.

I bought a refrigerator from Sears. I did it on-line, being the modern sort who hasn’t the time to waste to wander around Sears. Instead my girlfriend and I actually measured
the dimensions of the refrigerator we wanted, selected the modern stainless steel look, and voila, got a refrigerator delivered to the house at a rather hefty price. This, seemingly, is all good.

We move forward 11 months, and suddenly the temperature gage reads 57 degrees. Fine for fall weather, bad for milk and eggs. As we have a sufficient amount of time left on our warranty, which was the standard kind, not the extra 249 dollar kind, we called whoever it is we called, and they arrived and supposedly fixed the fridge. Not so fast. Two weeks later, the fridge interior is a balmy 64. We put this refrigerator full of groceries on the deck because it is winter. At least we did so for the food we could salvage. The other half of the food went into the garbage again. This is a rather expensive endeavor as we have eight living in our house as we have three kids of mine and two of my girlfriend, and my girlfriend sister living here. We call again. The repairman returns and informs us we need a new computer panel. This makes sense to us, as we have the combined mechanical acumen of a palm tree—that’s not completely true. My girlfriend has been known to utilize a power tool to hang a shelf or curtain rods, but refrigerator computer boards are definitely beyond her ken. I, on the other hand, have injured myself in the few attempts at power tool usage, and now steer clear of most things that require electricity and move rapidly.

The repairman orders the computer part and asks us to call him once the part arrives in the mail. The part arrives after a few days. We call. We make an appointment for him to replace the part. Three days later he replaces the part. This series of non-events takes a week and a half. In the meantime, the freezer portion of the fridge has also died, and we have to throw out easily over a hundred dollars worth of meat and cook the rest, despite the fact we won’t have refrigeration for another 24 hours or so. This is because a refrigerator that cools oddly needs time to warm up. We eat too well that night, despite cholesterol issues.

But as of that next day the refrigerator works—for three weeks. Then it dies. We call, again. They come back, again. This time the mechanic tells us we need a new refrigerator altogether. The old one, which is less than a year old, is bad. “But,” Mr. Mechanical says with sunlight shooting out of his head, “you are covered by warranty.”

We are given various slips of paper which require translation for human interpretation, but we dutifully dial the numbers we are told to dial and speak to the people we are switched over to. Eventually, we are instructed to go to the Sears at the White Plains galleria-- the place, we steadfastly avoided in the first place. There we are to tell the salesman to give us a new refrigerator. We are told, however, that there is a possibility that the store will not recognized our claim for a new fridge, as we bought the appliance on-line and not from the store itself, thus, the store might or might not not honor our rebate.

Now, I wish to inject an element of reality, and the truth is, Jill, my girlfriend, has been putting up with the above nonsense, and I’ve been scooting off to work and wiping my brow in relief.

Until now.

Now, I am told by Jill to go to the Sears in the White Plains galleria and get the new refrigerator which has been selected by her and someone on the other end of an 800 phone number as due replacement for our downed appliance. I am told to do so or there will be a question of firearms and rage, and I nod my head and head off to White Plains.

Parking is only mildly painful. The galleria, more so. I dislike malls. Crowds aren’t wonderful either, but I wend my way through the food court, passing fast food smells wafting through the vast octagonal high school lunch cafeteria disguised as a modern consumer nirvana. Sears is on the far side, and I make it into their doors only after avoiding the persistent women who insist for the entire length of that hallway that I need a massage in one of their modern massage chairs. After I make it through that gauntlet and step inside Sears, I immediately ask for kitchen appliances. A smiling woman sends me to the third floor. On the third floor, where there is no item larger than a shoe, someone from the janitorial staff tells me I’m on the wrong floor. I retreat to the second floor, where there is someone with a name badge. He directs me to the first floor. Eventually, I wind up about eleven steps away from the smiling woman who sent me upstairs in the first place. Had I looked around upon entering the store I probably could have spotted my destination without difficulty.

My salesman’s name is Ahbar. It says so on his white, plastic name badge. He continually asks my phone number, and I give him all the numbers that come to mind. It is not until I miraculously remember Jill’s cell phone number that his computer recognizes my consumer existence. Unfortunately, the computer does not recognize my now-deceased refrigerator model number. He clicks repeatedly on his store computer but the CBLR string of letters of our dead refrigerator doesn’t appear anywhere on his computer screen, and he thus has no way of knowing the value of our old refrigerator which needs replacing. He calls an 800 number. He experiences a taste of what we have experience, and after 38 minutes of being switched from one disembodied voice to another, he asks me to talk to the voice. I do. I am instructed to speak to a manager, but the managers are unavailable, as they are all in an organizational meeting in a room I cannot nor am I allowed to see. Ahbar is not sure I can get a new refrigerator, because I didn’t buy the refrigerator from this Sears store in the White Plains galleria. I explain it was an on-line purchase and the on-line disembodied voice name Keith K. told me to come here. Ahbar leaves to find a manager.

Another sad-faced man, who waits for Ahbar to be done with me, stands next to the Kitchen Aid appliance he was planning on buying. He has an exasperated look on his face. I walk over to him and tell him what I have gone through. Ahbar returns with a small, bespectacled man with “Juan” on his name badge. Juan runs a plastic card with a magnetic stripe through a slot attached to the store computer. Ahbar asks me again what refrigerator I want. I tell him that my girlfriend and the voice at on-line purchasing have selected an Amana. He tells me I originally had a GE. I need to wait while he speaks to the manager again.

Juan reappears. Without speaking again, he runs his striped card through the slot again. He leaves. Ahbar clicks on the Amana refrigerator. He stares at the screen for about six minutes. He looks frustrated. He calls a phone number and talks in a hushed voice. He hangs up. He clicks the computer some more. I have been in the Sears store in the White Plains galleria for 1 hour and 45 minutes. The Kitchen Aid appliance consumer who has waited for, what seems to him, forever, leaves. He gestures to Ahbar that he will be in touch, but I am certain he’ll never shop at Sears again. I rejoice in my part in that decision.

Finally, I am told, that although the Amana is almost the same value as the dead GE, I need to pay an extra $100 to get the same icemaker the GE once possessed. I have a gift card valued at $225. (Relevant aside: I have this $225 gift card because when we bought the original GE refrigerator, Sears delivered the wrong color. The second time, the door opened the wrong way. Finally we received a stainless steel one which opened the correct way, but it had a noticeable dent in the front. We called a bunch of 800 numbers and they sent us these shiny blue cards.) Ahbar slides the blue card through the slot. I am to receive an icemaker. I am told I can leave. The refrigerator will arrive in 13 days. “13 day?” I ask, incredulous. “I have eight people to feed, and you want me to wait thirteen days?”

Ahbar gives me an 800 number to call with my complaint. I get to my car in the parking lot. My cell phone rings. It is Jill. She wants to know what happened. I tell her. “13 days?” she yells. “Let me talk to the head manager.” I tell her I don’t know the name of the head manager. She gives me instructions to find out the names and numbers of just about every Sears employee who has ever held a managerial post. I tell her I will find out who the store manager is. She is not quite satisfied, but I explain I am feeling a tad blurred by the experience, but I will gather as many numbers as is possible.

I call directory assistance and get the number of the store. That number yields a number for the head of the store, but when I call that number, I am thwarted. All the managers are still in an organizational meeting, and the head manager will call me once he gets out. I leave my phone number, the number of people who eat food from a refrigerator at my house, the number of times I have had a repairman come to fix the refrigerator, the number of days it will be before I am to enjoy the use of another refrigerator, the number of times I have called various 800 and non-800 numbers to get some form of assistance from Sears, and the number of minutes (broken up into hours and minutes) I spent in his store trying to get a refrigerator that works into my kitchen at home. I hang up.

I get home, and Jill is not happy. She begins calling Sears’ National Customer Relations number. She talks to a man who seems competent and sympathetic. He dials the store, but after 40 minutes, he cannot get any more answer than we did as to why we must wait 13 days. He left his number for the store manager to call. He explains all this to Jill when he calls her back, but he informs her, he is being promoted the following day, and the person who is taking his place can be reach at—and he gives Jill an 800 number. He also gives Jill a Sears case number: #1282067.

Jill calls the 800 number. She is asked her telephone number, but this time they decide they want the house number and not the cell number. She gives it to them. They tell her to call these numbers. She runs out of patience, calls me on my cell phone, explains her new tendency toward violence and mayhem, explains why, and tells me to call various 800 numbers. I do. One number gets me to a man who is very nice, but he is in the repair department, not the delivery department. He apologizes and gives me the distributor’s number. I call the distributor. He is not in, but I leave a message. An unknown number of days pass as the above takes place. When it comes to Sears, I can no longer keep track of time. It is now Tuesday. The refrigerator is to come on Sunday. Jill and I wait. The food remains on the deck. The weather has been rather warm this winter. We eat out a lot. We are still waiting for our refrigerator from Sears. While waiting, we talk about this experience in terms of numbers. The number of days we have wasted waiting for repairmen, the number of hours spent on the phone, the number of refrigerators-full of groceries we have thrown away from spoilage, the number of times we’ve called one another to talk about the Sears situation.

We are both angry. Jill is disappointed. She says she once trusted the name “Sears.” I don’t remember ever holding any company name in such high regard. I suspect conspiracy. I remember reading about a major automobile manufacturer doing an actuarial study of the cost of putting in airbags versus the cost of paying off lawsuits filed by relatives of those who died in car accidents whose deaths would have been prevented by airbags. I imagine Sears has a similar; less nefarious study filed away somewhere. They have calculated the relative value of not replacing various non-functional appliances versus the cost of lost customers plus telephone operators’ wages, and the ledger states they can make more money giving people the run-around. They know we are a passive lot. We don’t have the time to fight these silly little fights. That’s why we buy their products on-line in the first place.