What a Long, Strange Trip
Answering a letter-writer to her column,
a woman having a hard time in pandemic lockdown,
“Amy,” ends with, “What a long, strange trip…”
to refer to all of us dealing with the coronavirus:
the second time Amy’s mentioned the Grateful Dead
in her advice column, so we wonder: a Deadhead?
Worse ways to spend one’s time than listening
to the band’s music, quoting lyrics, especially the one
that’s become an anthem, a prayer, of sorts,
“We will get by, we will survive,”
and hope it’s true, with a little help from our friends,
to paraphrase Ringo in another old song.
In the meantime, we wait for Amy to refer
to “Uncle John’s Band” someday, playing
“down by the riverside,” when we can all gather again,
and not worry about anything, too much.
- Robert Cooperman
Before His Title Bout, Moshe Breslau Is
Visited by His Brother
It ain’t my night? I thought
that’s why you got rid of Big Al,
him telling me to take a dive,
so he could clean up on a rematch.
Who gave the order? You
or one of your “business associates?”
These ain’t guys you never want to cross?
You afraid of them? What you got me for!
No one yet that can go toe to toe with me.
And if it comes to knives and guns,
I got no qualms. So I’m only one guy;
you got hard guys who take orders from you.
Use ’em, what you pay them for!
No more talk about me going down,
I got this far by giving an honest effort.
People bet their life savings on me,
and don’t you dare call them suckers.
You’re the sucker, thinking to make
a dishonest buck on someone
else’s sweat and pain, and that someone
being your own damn brother!
Don’t tell me how much these guys
stand to lose. And don’t fuckin’ tell me
how much you stand to lose.
And definitely don’t tell me how badly
they’ll make us pay if we cross them.
You can depend on me to protect you,
like when we were kids.
But damnit it, Danny, betting against
your own brother? You should be
fuckin’ ashamed!
© Christine Karapetian: Social Study 38[2]
Posing for an Art Class at a Prison
When I was otherwise out of work,
I’d take off my clothes and strike poses
for art students, letting my mind wander
to favorite songs or poems or autumn walks,
or wintry Manhattan Beach, waves hitting
the rocks hard as gauntleted fists.
This job: a community college rented space
in a prison on the empty, forested border
between Queens and Nassau County,
the studio in a building for the criminally insane.
I won’t lie and say I walked as blithefully
into that hell as I would’ve through the doors
of the old Fillmore East when the Dead
or the Airplane were playing. Still, no howls,
no cells exploding with homicidal madmen
flinging themselves about the bars
as if evil Jungle Jim’s: just hospital-antiseptic
green walls, a guard at the barbed-wired entrance
checking my driver’s license and name
on the visitors’ list, to allow me inside.
What I remember? Changing behind a screen,
then twenty-second poses, so the students
could limber up their wrists, then a series
of one, two, five-minute poses, then finishing
with one that lasted an hour, with breaks
to rest aching limbs holding still for too long.
When the session ended, I collected my check,
and all but skipped the mile or so to the bus stop,
sun Eden-bright, autumn leaves dancing,
a fox disappearing into the quiet woods.
Scam Artist
A guy’s got to get by.
Who better to support me
than the kids from high school
who made my life hell because
Ma took in male boarders
and Dad took a powder faster
than I can snort a line of soda?
So I got the emails of everyone
I knew back then, wrote to say
I’d married, but she wasn’t
what an honest man would expect:
took out a couple of policies
on my life, then hired a guy,
who blasted me, left me blind,
then kidnapped our daughter.
Now I’m fighting for her custody,
since how could I leave
sweet Amy in her depraved hands?
Worked like a snake charm,
until these two sisters hired me
a lawyer; I split the state faster
than if the mob were on my trail.
Taking Up a Musical Instrument
People less musical than bloodhounds
have, in later life, found a talent
for playing a musical instrument.
Inexplicable, but it happens,
which gives me hope that maybe
I’ll wake tomorrow or next week,
and play the guitar like Jerry Garcia,
or the bagpipes like a pipe major,
a loch shimmering below me
with the scales and fins of a million
flashing salmon, my drones
calling them to their spawning grounds.
But I’m enthusiastically tone deaf
when I sing with musician friends,
who kid, “Do you know ‘So Low’”
or ‘Far, Far Away’?”
A friend once suggested
I take up the hammered dulcimer,
no need for finger dexterity,
her small, padded hammers flying
faster than pickpockets,
the notes she coaxed:
a miniature, archaically lovely piano
Bach might have studied
for a few moments,
then played like a virtuoso;
something I look at and see
only a magic I’ll never master.
Moshe Breslau, Managed by His Younger Brother Daniel in the Fight Game: the Lower East Side, 1916
Danny’s taken over managing my fights,
with Big Al probably at the bottom
of the Narrows, wearing cement dress shoes.
When he tried to get me to throw a bout,
and after I refused and hit him,
Danny cleaned up the mess.
As kids, it was me who’d protect him from bullies
picking on a weakling smarter than them, pushing,
punching him, ’til I’d guard him to and from cheder,
breaking some teeth, when things got rough.
But now, with his saykhel, he looks out for me:
I never see the big picture, like he does:
his mind clicking faster than the hooves
of the winner at the featured race at Belmont,
like when he used to run numbers for Big Al,
keeping all the info in his head,
a ledger neater than any I can write.
Tonight, I fight the champ.
I can take him, easy: two steps slower
than in his heyday, his fists weighted down,
and not with the piles of quarters that send
your opponent into woozy-canary-land
when you connect, his jaw suddenly
more fragile than Seder wine glasses.
Here’s Danny now, not looking too happy.
Shit, I hope Ma and Pa are okay, and Esther
ain’t tossed a conniption fit on account of her role
in the play Danny got her into, ain’t big enough.
My Dentist’s Monthly Newsletter
In the latest, an article about how laughing gas
was discovered in 1844 by Horace Wells,
a Connecticut dentist, as he walked past
a street show that employed what we once
called “Hippie crack” at Grateful Dead shows.
The strolling players magically levitated passersby
into barking, tearful, helpless hilarity;
when Doctor Wells realized the mist quelled pain,
he tried it on his patients with excellent success.
The little imp in me wants to ask my dentist
why he’s never run an article about Doc Holliday,
who infected even more victims with tuberculosis
while he yanked their teeth and filled their cavities
than he killed with his six shooters at the OK Corral
and in the random, .45 violence he was drawn to
like the rotgut booze he couldn’t get enough of.
But no need to rile a man who uses sharp
instruments in my mouth, and he already knows
about the not-so-good doctor, since we’ve traded
stories about him: my delaying tactic before
Dr. Unser’s horse tranquilizer-size needles can pinch
and numb me up for the torments he later performs,
“DDS,” after all, in the old Brooklyn joke,
meaning, “Dey Died Screamin’.”
The Electric Menorah
Every Chanukah we lit the menorah,
waited for all the candles to burn down
to that whiff of smoke that reminded us
of the ascending soul: not so much
for love of the dancing flickers, but fearing
if we turned our backs for an instant,
the flames would burn down the whole house.
So a few years ago, I bought a used electric one,
pleasantly surprised at how cheap it was,
until we switched it on, and discovered
one candle—not the shamus—the one
we light the others with—was a dud.
Too late to heed my mother’s advice
that what’s cheap is dear, we shrugged
and said impromptu prayers for the health
and happiness of everyone we knew,
for world peace, and happily ignored
the menorah until we went to bed.
Still, it nags at me, that imperfection,
but even more that it’s all so easy now:
a flick of the switch and there’s light,
as opposed to my childhood ritual
of lighting the shamus, then the others,
night after night until all nine glowed and swayed,
as if around a campfire where everyone sang,
“Kumbayah,” like the world depended on it,
which it still does, only more so than ever.