THE HOLLYWOOD RAGE PAGE

Somewhere deep below the the grey mottled  multi-layered portrait of me whose surface has  hardened like a criminal you will find  a canvas of ghosts the lost souls of my life buried beneath six feet of paint who are suddenly as clear and luminous as the stars observed from the deck of  an oars up caravel slicing through the wake of an ancient night Their resurrection  began with my own, summoned by age which drew me like a gentleman caller to the fields of pentimento where the earliest sketches and baby step  brush strokes of those who I have  misjudged disappointed and most of all  miss  thrive like purple-poppy-mallow waiting to be repaired.

Summer Day one  1956 Setting: a Garden apartment building in Queens surrounded by a pasture of concrete. Goldfish do their pond laps like old men at the Y. A block away trains load and deposit silent movie men with hats while  Fritz, the German shepherd on the corner yelps his marching orders like a commandant I’m four wearing beach flappy shorts bare-chested and  blonde cautiously balancing on an invisible high-wire a tiny Wallenda in socks as the Platters sing “Only You” on the Dumont    television set The parakeets Pepi and Gigi flutter and twirl like they’re on American Bandstand Sunlight sneaks in like a cheating husband striking the framed painted portraits of my  sister and I like a Hollywood Klieg light My mom marches in for the ceremonial changing of the  living room upholstery guard smelling like instant Maxwell a top note of aldehydes and bergamot and a just vanquished Viceroy with a lipstick tattoo which has taken a Johnny Weissmuller swan dive into the pool of a Bone Chin

It was only a few days ago when we carried them home in our arms and arranged them like teachers placing children in size order and carried them to their place of honor, on the notched pine bed of a coffee table where we stared at them every morning and every night like hypnotized parents  and did everything we could to keep them happy and alive. And yet while we were otherwise engaged watching The Crown or playing Sudoku there was  a sudden decline a Garbo collapse   as cells surrendered  and in a matter of hours the bouquet perished amidst a tangle of final baby breath Which is why artists memorialize our fallen flowers, photographers capture them and writers eulogize their glory to remind us that every visit is as brief as a sigh, that to welcome the temporary  limpidity of beauty and the transmission of color is to be loved unconditionally, and that there are lessons to be excavated  in the covenants of fidelity which will speak to us like the moment that the snow stops, long after

It’s always there Sadness Waiting  in the psalm of morning in the bustle of the afternoon in the heavy heart of evening like the soldiers  in the trenches of Somme eavesdropping on no man’s land gripping their rifles  like nursery blankets silently reciting the Lord’s Prayer.  It lives beneath the speckled earth  in the rumble of dreams  in the prelude of rain in the epitaph of goodbye in the epilogue of regret And it’s engraved in the faces  of the long forgotten who live in the exile of pictures behind the longhand of fragile boxes that was written in the calligraphy of my mom who knew  as a tortured child that she had to warn me of what lay ahead.