2011 Issue - Santa Fe Community College

Then Again
by Jack Cooper
I had so little, a small place above garages where the landlord stored
dismembered Jags, an iron bed, heavy as a car frame, that folded down
from the closet and an office desk with an oak chair held together by
wooden pegs. These were hand to mouth days that tested the limits of
solidarity and deadbolt nights that left the world abandoned to gunshots
and disembodied screams.
Then again, I had an IBM Selectric with a 12-point Palatino font
whose round serif letters sang to me as I typed each word of the book I
had promised Jesse Joseph Tougau I would write about him after he
passed.
He'd been a cerebral vagabond in the days “When men were men
and women were washing machines,” and fed my longing with impassioned
tales of imperfect heroes like the time he stayed awake 135 hours
laying pipe from a gusher in Borger, Texas, alongside his bunkmate, a
hermaphrodite who hid his fully formed breasts with an inner tube under
his shirt.
And later he infected an eye in the Tehachapis mining silver and
bummed his way to Vegas where he made a bundle counting cards but
got crippled with arthritis and took a train to Hot Springs, Arkansas,
where attendants with white towels wiped brown muck off his skin for
three weeks before he hitched a ride to L.A. and took bets on horses
from the back of a dry cleaners until he went completely blind and lost
his legs for good and had to move in with his brother where I met him
through a friend and made him that promise.
A new life later, when you moved into my place and we got a regular
bed and bought our first computer, I'd long since given up the book and
felt bad about it. Then you told me I could ask old Jesse in that other
world for forgiveness, which I'd forgotten I could do even if it might be
in my own head and even if it felt silly because how would I know if he
forgave me.
Then again, how do we know anything
Santa Fe Literary Review 27