Banjo Eyes

The top of her head revealing concealed headlights, the top of her head putting on blinkers and signaling.

“Are you receiving me?” she asks.

I blink back blindly.  I am a twenty-first century man and to Blake I would have been poetry.

“Chilblains at four, you said. Dropsy at sixteen,” she notes on her bad-pad. “I must know more. I must know everything.”

“Shall I speak?” I am asking.

She smiles a Grandma Moses smile. The cat throws up in retreat and she closes the headlights.

“Related. Excited. Extended. Remorse.”  She hurls syndromes at me. My own explanation can’t be as personal and certainly won’t be as apt. It just won’t do. What can I say?

“Do your best, sonny,” she says, pen poised.

Brushstroke Saga of Longtime Woes: psychic scarring, burlesque humiliations, paranoiac tumors, bridges in my moods, ill-fitting dental equipment, a hump, a gash, a knot, a frieze, a stone, a gag.  The lights flash. I am Krakatoa.  I end in tears.

“Now what’s this about bridges in your foods?  Are you taking medication?”

“But doctor!”

“Call me Marie.”

“Maybe I’ve been too sensitive?”

“Let us go outside,” she suggests, with no bow to my humility. “Let us finish the conversation in various locales around the city, cinema style.  Maybe then interest will pick up.”

“New ideas do flourish in unfamiliar surroundings,” I suggest hopefully.

“Likewise anomie,” she says.

*

“Have you been to Brazil?” I ask, airborne and chatty.

She peers at me tragically over her shoulder, her hair in the great Gatsby disarray.  I feel fear in my spine.

“Darling,” she moans. “I am Brazil.”

*

The Brooklyn Fox. 1949. Ankle straps and Caesar Romero. Fanback chairs and overstuffed suits. Mad madcap madness.  Though disarmed and dismayed by the relentless pileup of the decades, I remain accountable, and in her particular page, that is not nothing.

“If you take to the bush, then beat around it,” she says, “you haven’t a chance. Your life is a document. Also, green is a bad color for you, and don’t leave the grounds on Thursday. Learn aggression. Memorize a good joke; that’s very important.  Everyone is already laughing at you. Don’t you understand?”

“Haven’t I wept enough?” I ask. My face is scored with salt ruins, a sacrificial altar with pores to sop the blood.

“Tears are cheap. I bring people to tears all day long.”

“Nightmares!”

“You sleep? Amazing grace.”

“Men in long black coats without faces with long black coats climbing the stairs to my bed.  What means this?  Or is it just a generalized fear?  Maybe some sort of collective unconscious drive towards self-annihilation?”

“Have you been to Cuba?”

“But doctor!”

“I took a cruise there once. What’s-her-name was on the boat. The one with the heart-shaped face.  I’ll never forget that. A little pointed chin, round cheeks, and she wore her hair in two big curls on her forehead to accentuate the heart. The movies used to know what they were doing.”

“What’d you go, in the spring?”

“And little bow lips. Adorable.”

“I’d like to leave now, doctor.”

“Incentive is down. The American dollar doesn’t produce that old familiar yen.”

“That’s what I mean.  How am I to live?”

“But I’ve already told you.”

“But doctor!”

“But Marie.”

“But Marie!”

*

So this guy

    This guy

    A man walks into a doctor’s

                                          a psychiatrist’s office with

a huge bird

an ostrich

a penguin

a pelican on his head

      sitting on top of his head.

               perched on top of his head.  What seems to be

wrong

the matter

the problem, the doctor

                      the psychiatrist asks.

                                                demands. How do I get this

joker

jerk

guy out from under me the pelican says.

                                       The pelican asks 

how do I get this guy out from under me?

  under my feet?

“You’re learning,” she says, puffed up with pride.

“I play the banjo, too,” I reply.

Barry Jay Kaplan‘s recent stories have been published in Descant, New Haven Review, Kerouac’s Dog, Bryant Literary Review, Upstreet, Talking River, Perigee, Amarillo Bay, Storyglossia, Brink, Apple Valley Review, Drum, This and others. His stories, “His Wife” and “India,” are Pushcart Prize nominees. “His Wife” is also one of five stories selected for Best of the Net Anthology. “A Man of the World” was nominated for the Million Writers Award. Barry has an MFA from the University of Iowa Writers Workshop where he had an assistantship to Kurt Vonnegut Jr. He is also the author of the novels Black Orchid and Biscayne, both selections of The Literary Guild.

A Song for Barry Jay Kaplan