Sad Stuffed Animals

Stuck for time being in the Miami Maimonides General Hospital waiting room, pondering when Nurse Maryann would return from her lunch break so he could start his biweekly blood transfusion, Herman Bear had nothing to pass the time other than to peruse his own thoughts.  While the young folks nearby stared and tapped into their handheld phone-device-things, glimmering with glee at each electronic pig toppled by kamikaze angry birds, Herman, with no such device, tapped deeper into the recesses of memory. And, as the digital wall clock silently ticked away the minutes, the borrowed ballpoint pens scribbled all-too-depressing health histories, Herman, staring all these things, could see, stashed away in previously inaccessible consciousness – the way the red moon shone brightly from the back window of a bus ride through the Ukranian wheat plains, the bright eyes of Emmanuelle, a French student, in proper beret and striped blouse, studying Marxist theory in Baku in the summer of 1950, and then, in the glint of the glaring florescent lights above, Herman squinted and could see the sparkling surface of Lake Baikal, where he worked as a lifeguard in the everlong summer of 1946.  With the Great Patriotic war just over, Herman, himself a bright-eyed sixteen year old, spared the ravages of military service by his young age, was the fastest swimmer in Irkutsk, where his parents had settled after being freed from camp in Siberia, after the war had ended.  At the lake, Herman guarded over cautious swimmers, taking their first tentative postwar dips into holiday leisure, wondering alike if the sunlight above would persist, this time, or whether the dark clouds of war would shadow his country, yet again.  In particular, Herman recalled, the threat of nuclear annihilation by the capitalist armies of the United States loomed heavily in the papers of Pravda, and as such, in the minds of the more war-weary adults.  But the children, aware as they were only of sunshine, fresh air and water, had all the time in the world to run and play in the slowly lapping surf of the deepest lake in the world, and Herman, perched above it all in his lifeguard’s chair, watchful and yet thoughtful, had time to let his mind wander.  In those long and lonesome hours in the lifeguard’s chair, Herman would make up songs whose lyrics, once improvised, were lost forever, and in the passing moments, recite Shakespearean sonnets and soliloquys, in his ever improving English, recitations performed with confidence, but, as Herman would remember in his later years, with a naïve innocence of the madness and power of love.  And so, standing up from his chair, with an arm to the sky, he would yell, in those moments when the beach was completely empty, Berowne’s monologue from Love’s Labors Lost, which he had been practicing to audition for the lead in that summer’s play at the theatre, and which only half-understood:

“And I, forsooth, in love!

I, that have been love’s whip;

A very beadle to a humorous sigh;

A critic, nay, a night-watch constable;

A domineering pedant o’er the boy;

Than whom no mortal so magnificent!

Herman paused here a moment, when he thought he heard the sound of someone coming, and continued, progressively louder:

This whimpled, whining, purblind, wayward boy;

This senior-junior, giant-dwarf, Dan Cupid;

Regent of love-rhymes, lord of folded arms,

The anointed sovereign of sighs and groans,

Liege of all loiterers and malcontents,

Dread prince of plackets, king of codpieces,

Sole imperator and great general

Of trotting ‘paritors:—O my little heart:—

When suddenly, from below his high chair, came the sound of applause.  There, clapping and shouting up to him, “Bravo!” with a laugh and sly smile, was a girl, maybe fifteen herself, in a long white tunic, with shiny blue eyes and braided black hair in pigtails.  Stunned, he stammered a, “uh.. ah.. thanks,” and climbed down to say hello. 

“You’re quite the actor,” she said.

“I was.. rehearsing,” Herman stammered.

“You sounded so serious,” She replied.  “What does that all mean, anyway?”

“It’s Shakespeare.  I’m auditioning later this week for the summer play.  I’m Herman,” Herman said, adding, “What’s your name?”

“I’m Anna.  I came to Lake Baikal with my dad, who’s a driver for some Party Secretary in the Leningrad Oblast, and who, feeling ill, needed some fresh air and sunshine.  I was just up at the great hall, where these boring Party bigwigs were praising the new five-year plan, or whatever. I was bored so I snuck out to see the beach, and, well, found you.”  And here, Anna smiled in a way that would cause Herman’s heart to wince, all those years later, in that hospital waiting room in Florida.

“What was that?” Asked Nurse Maryann.  [The eight-hour transfusion had begun]  “Your heartrate just soared.  Do you feel any pain?”

“No,” Herman replied.  “No, I’m fine.  I’m fine.”

“You sure?”

“Yes.”

“You sure?”

“Yes. I said yes,” Herman said, somewhat annoyed.

“Okay,” Maryann replied, “but I’ll keep monitoring you during the process, in case anything goes wrong.”

“Yeah, ok,” Herman mumbled.

“Do you want the TV on?” Maryann asked.  “I could put on that Fox News you love so well.”

“No,” Herman said, “leave it off, for now.”

“Okay Mr. Bear, whatever you say.”  And with that, Maryann continued the transfusion, and directed her attention back to In Style magazine.

Herman, staring out at the vast expanse of the Florida horizon, sighed for a moment, and continued his reluctant daydream.

He recalled, Anna looked radiant in the sunlight.  They chatted by the lifeguard’s chair for a while, about books he was reading, books which she had just read, and hated.  When two small kids ran to play in the beach, Herman wished they would go away, so he could continue to talk to Anna.  And, as if on cue, thunder clapped, it began to rain, the kids ran back to their cabin, Herman put up the “Beach Closed” sign, grabbed Anna’s hand, and the two of them ran off for the shelter of the boathouse nearby.  In the musky room, amidst the hulls of stacked sculls and sailboats, Herman would later recall, rays of sun found their way through cracks in the wooden roof, past illuminated specs of dancing dust, lighting the water on Anna’s cheeks, and causing her blue eyes to glow. 

“So, what do you do, back in Leningrad?” Herman asked.

“Well, I’m in school now,” Anna replied.  “I go to the Leningrad Naval Academy.  I’m learning how to be a boatcaptain.”

“Really?” Herman said, with genuine admiration.  “Well, we are surrounded by boats, and I’ve always wanted to learn how to sail, do you think you could teach me?”

Anna paused at the suggestion.  “How would we get the boat out of dock? It’s locked in by chain.”

“It is,” Herman said, “But I know where the key is.”

“Well then,” Anna said with a smile.  “Well, ok.  I, your professor, must teach you how to sail then.  It is duty to a fellow Comrade!”

And with that, while the rain poured down from the summer Siberian sky, Herman and Anna, singing in jest “The Internationale,” stole a sailboat and ventured out into the distance of Lake Baikal.  Soaked by the rain, Anna showed Herman how to tie the right knots, and set the sail, which they raised with a coordinated heave.  As the white sail caught the wind, the boat tilted, and Herman almost fell over, but caught himself, and shared a laugh with Anna, who had taken the rudder, and steered out into the lake.  Soon, the rain had stopped, and the sun began to dry their clothes.  In the ensuing stillness, Herman could hear his heart beating, as Anna took his hand, and placed it near hers, on the rudder, saying, “Now- steer easy, like this.”  Nervous, Herman placed his hand on Anna’s instead, and they moved the boat together, alone in the middle of the lake, on a bright summer day.

The rest of the summer would pass in long, languid days like that first one, catching shade together in the boathouse, sneaking into and out of each other’s cabin, quietly so as not to wake their siblings, and out into the fields behind the communal farms, where they could picnic with fresh grapes and wine stolen from inattentive vintners, and drunk in the daylight, nap together, hidden from the world by the tall grasses, seen only by the passing, circling birds above. 

There was one day out in the field, Herman remembered, that was like all the others, except, he could tell, ever so slightly, the chill of an approaching September air passed over their bare arms.  “Do you want some more wine?” Herman asked, as he reached for the bottle, and his hand knocked over his glass, spilling the red wine onto her white blanket.  “Ah, sorry!” Herman said, trying to mop up the wine with a napkin.  “Sorry.” 

“Herman,” Anna said, looking away.

“What is it dear?” Herman asked.

“Do you love me?”  she said, still looking away.

“I do. I do love you,” Herman replied, without pausing.

And here, Anna paused, and said, “I love you too,” and paused again.  Herman’s wide smile slowly receded when another cool wind graced his cheek, and Anna said,

“I’m leaving tonight to return to Leningrad.” 

“Leningrad?  I thought you were going to come with me back to Baku.  We.. we could get married,” Herman stammered.

“Herman..” Anna sighed.

“They have a Naval Academy in Baku. We talked about this. I could work for the oil company.  My dad knows someone in the Party,” Herman said, desperately.  “And – if we try, there’s even a chance,” and here Herman’s voice dropped to a fast-paced whisper, “If I can make enough money, we can make contact with some people I know back in Baku, who can smuggle us across the checkpoints from East to West Berlin.  Once we’re in the American sector, we can get sponsorship to come to America from my uncle in Brooklyn.  It’s expensive, but, it can be done! But we’d have to hurry, because sooner or later they’re going to put up a wall in Berlin and … ”

“Herman,” Anna said again, forcefully.

“I love you, Anna, so much.”  Herman said.

“I have to go back to school.  I can’t go with you to Baku.” Anna said.

“I will wait for you.” Herman cried.

“Four years,” Anna said.  “If we don’t meet again in four years, then, you are free to marry someone else.  If you love me, you won’t wait any more than that.”

“I love you,” said Herman.

And with that, Anna stood up, and ran off into the tall grass, and disappeared. 

Back in Baku, Herman slowly put bribery money away so he and Anna could make it to West Berlin.  He wrote her, and she wrote back.  He wrote her again, and she didn’t.  He wrote again, and again, and again there was silence.  One year had passed without word from Anna, and then a second, and a third.  After four years, Herman had a fling with a French girl studying abroad in Baku for the summer, and when she left to go back to Paris, he accompanied her on the train ride as her imitation husband, all the way to the Russian border, where, under darkness of night, Herman hitched a ride through Poland, slept in a farmhouse to avoid the border patrol in Berlin, where he met up with his preordained contact, handed over all of his cash, and hid in the false bed of an American army truck, that brought him to the American sector.  By the time he made it to Brooklyn to live with his Americanized uncle, five years had passed since that summer by Lake Baikal, and Herman, working as a taxicab driver on the lonely nightshift, had all the time in the world to ponder the vagaries of his fate.  One night, Herman picked up in his cab a girl who wanted to go to Orchard Beach.  Along the way, they talked about he used to be a lifeguard.  She said her name was Stacey, and was a seamstress in the Garment district, but needed some sunlight, and so called in sick.  When Herman got to Orchard beach, Stacey confessed she didn’t have the fare to pay him.  Herman parked the car, and said, it didn’t matter, he’d like to go to the beach with her.  She agreed, and they continued a conversation they held, that lasted through their marriage, and only ended when the ravages of Alzheimer’s tore apart Stacey’s memories, leaving only a friendly, loving but scared shell behind. 

And Herman, still staring out the window in Miami Maimonides, sighed privately, as his blood was replaced, and thought of the photograph whose meaning he never fully explained to his children, of Anna on a sailboat smiling in the sun, her hair wet with recent rain, laughing, holding onto the rudder, ever so confidently, on the surface of Lake Baikal, the deepest lake in the world.

While Emily thought of grand vacations, and sunny days by the “plage” in Pas de Calais, watching the kids build at-risk sandcastles, and yell up the dunes, begging for their parents to “come and see,” Richard kept an eye on the sidewalk out for passing families with expensive strollers and ironic tastes that might be broadminded enough to adopt them both as a couple.  They had been through so much together, Richard thought, from the rainy lost-and-found discard pile outside the Port Authority, to the back room Asian rub-and-tug, hugged in turns by the twins, Didi and Mako, who would with tea cups and makeup make a makeshift dinner where mom and dad didn’t fight over incomprehensible adult things, and the meal’s dishes made it “into the sink this time,” instead of broken in shards, on the kitchen floor.  Throughout everything, Richard and Emily had each other.  Despite their own well-built brick walls that caged their kinder emotions like stepchildren hidden in false rooms behind closet doors, “for their own good,” despite knowing that in a world as harsh as this was, as mean as this was, and as foolish an mistake love was, despite everything, the fell for each other, and found themselves, to the chagrin of their better judgment, finally needing each other.  Richard, always the romantic, had approached Emily as she sat crying one white night on the discard pile, inquiring meekly, as was his propensity, if she was “all right.”  Emily, through tears camouflaged by the rain, hugged Richard immediately, intensely, and told him how her boyfriend of two months had kicked her out when she demanded he stop using cocaine, and with no where else to go, she walked into the Lost-and-Found office at the Port Authority, where she stayed for four weeks in a small room with other dolled-up discards, waiting for someone to claim her, until her time there was up, and she was tossed out, into the discard pile.    Richard, with his natural suspicion overcome by romantic rapture, hugged her slightly at first, and then let go and embraced Emily with a natural intensity.  He didn’t tell her then, and in fact never told her, that on those long white summer nights he would go for walks alone, just get away from the nagging of his boho Greenwich village-based artist aunt, on whose couch he slept for lack of a home to return to, and walk down to the lost-and-found discard pile at the Port Authority, just in the off case he finally met “her,” the girl of his diaried narratives, the girl for whom, he presumed at night, all his vague struggles were in pursuit.  And whom, on especially broke winter nights, staring at the priced just out-of-reach lattes on overhead Starbucks’ menuboards, he secretly doubted existed at all. 

But there she was! Hugging him!  And he, hugging her! (In the rain, of all places!) When a cop’s flashlight shined on them both, demanding to know “what is going on here!,” they ran from the discard pile, holding hands, chased by the cops, ran five blocks and ducked into an abandoned Yiddish theater on 8th Avenue, as the cops continued on past.  There, stunned by the secret silence, beneath the cobwebbed chandelier, they kissed for the first time, but only for a moment, as Emily took off for the creaky stage, and pausing only to straighten out her hand-me-down white dress, sang a aria from a Yiddish musical she had remembered her grandmother, once a stage actress, herself, but by then, old and creaky too, used to sing to her beneath the 6th floor skylights, on rainy nights just like this, in their Allen street tenement:

Ofen pripitchik,
brent a feirel
In der shteb is heiss

And here, her voice carried into the rafters, where junkie rats opened a doped-up eye and strained to listen.

Un der rebbe lerent kleine kindelach
der alef-bays

Richard, for the first time in a decade, cried.  Emily wished she knew what the words meant, and gasped suddenly when a gunshot rang off in the distance.  While the nonplussed junkie rats nodded back off, Emily ran to Richard, grabbed his hand, and they both ran to hide in the orchestra pit beneath the stage, warmed only by Richard’s heavy coat, and their painless love.

And now, it had been a year on the streets.  Richard and Emily had made promises they knew their finances would never keep.  Some were made to each other, and some to neighborhood toughs that prey on the endless stream of dreamers that live in New York City.  Now, as a way of “protection” offered by a well-meaning City worker, they found themselves on the selling block again, put up for adoption, here in the sidewalk flea, amidst the bric-a-brac and discarded quasi-junk left for scavenge by the nightlife lonely, offered to the public, together, but perhaps, if no one noticed that they were married (and they certainly couldn’t tell anyone of their wedding beneath the cathedral of the Williamsburg Bridge, with the pigeon bridesmaids and rat groomsmen), offered alone.  Richard knew all of this, and so kept a wary eye on passers-by, hopeful for a way off the streets himself, but dreading separation.  Looking at Emily, he wondered if she understood the same.  Of course, she did.  But, she decided not to let it bother her, and continued to dream of black-faced seagulls cawing at the beach snacks thrown to them by little Augustine, who was so much more daring than his sister Sara, with whom he shared blue eyes and summer dawn hair, that she watched, blowing in the wind, from behind the children, who would never turn around, as they were only ghost-faced dreams.

Kicked out of her house just this morning, Lucy had nowhere to go. “Perhaps,” she thought, “I can hide up here, and no one will see me, tho, I really really want someone to see me.”. And as people walked by, she stared ahead, and thought, “no one can see me.”

Staring, staring into the Phoenix bar on 13th Street

(On 9th St) Prisoners of Fashion

Elliot Bear’s view from the gutter (rise of the supermoon)

Elliot No. 2 (Later that day)

Elliot in Black and White

Punishment was harsh for anyone who dared challenge the supremacy of the Empire.

The Flea in the Grass 3

I’ll wait.  I’ll wait here.  They won’t find me here.  I’ll lie here, just a little longer, then, I’ll run.  I’ll go into the woods.  I can live there for a while.  I can live off the land. I know how to live off the land.  I’ll wait.  They won’t find me here.  They can’t.  I hope they can’t.  Won’t.