Authors: Hugh Fox
Reunion (21 page)
The whole time he had been growing up, wandering through fields of Monet's flowers, down Pissarro's bustling, vibrating fin de siècle Parisian streets, walking through the mine fields of Pollock and the abstractions of Klein, having lunch with Petra in the Member's Lounge at the Art Institute, those milagroso box seat Saturday nights with her at Orchestra Hall wandering through the cathedrals of Bruckner's
Ninth Symphony
, down into depression with Bartok, into Bohemia's meadows and fields with Dvorak ⦠he had always known, hadn't he, that this was the moment of miracles, maximum aperture, vision, satori, the
center of shamanistic enlightenment when all the portals of his soul were open and the visions all poured continuously in nonstop.
It had come once, had nothing to do with his grammar school classmates. They were in their world and he was in his.
And now he wanted it to come back again. He wanted so desperately to come back to Chicago for his dying time. Which was the way he really saw it now. Wanted to be an old man, cane, crutches, whatever it took, crippled and broken physically OK, but with the portals of his soul still wide open on this, his City of God.
Close enough to call up his cousins and, OK, call up his old friends, grammar school, high school, college ⦠a whole life here ⦠and then exile ⦠what madness to have ever left The Plateau and descended into the Valley of the Angel of Exile â¦
An old lady and a dog walking by, nice unblemished legs, fur coat, wearing incongruously bouncy white jogging shoes, frizzed up blonde hair, sun-glasses too, the dog a fuzzy Pomeranianish duplication of the woman's hairdo. So much so that the dog looked like a second head walking along the street, oh so delicate and aristocratic.
“There's your old girlfriend now!” whispered Malinche.
And they both laughed, the old lady smiled at them and walked on.
He didn't want to leave, wanted to take a key out of his pocket and walk up the steps of one of the old brownstones and walk in and there his entire past would be, all his wives, no ex-anything, just all in a big expanded NOW, and all his kids, and his mother not how she'd been but another version of her, all
simpatica and giving, intense and loving and accepting, his father immense and bounteous like an oversized capon, his grandmother speaking Czech and teaching him the whole time so that he'd have the key into The Slavic World â¦
This really was his Rome, his Carthage, Troy, Alexandria, Baalbek, Babylon, Harappá. This was where his ghosts dwelt, all possible pasts and futures.
“We're home!” he wanted to yell at the bricks and the trees and the sidewalks, “I'm back, the sailor home from the sea, the nerd back from the library ⦠”
Back to stay
,
Never to stray
,
Turn into dust
,
Still not blow away â¦
Looked down at his watch. 3:30.
“We'd better get out to the airport, you never know ⦠”
A yellow cab passing by. Hailed it down, they scrambled in.
“Midway!” looking at the driver's face in the rear view mirror, skin the color of kiwi fruit, nose rounded, dark little gerbil eyes, decidedly brachycephalic, brachycerous â¦
“Baluchistan ⦠Baluchi??” he chanced, Malinche's hand on his sleeve trying to restrain him, but too late, it was already out. A sudden swerve almost to the curve, then back out into the center of the street again almost into oncoming traffic.
“Who has told you such a thing? Who has sent you?”
“God!” said Buzz quietly, “I have been sent by God. Relax, you have nothing to fear. I will explain.”
MLK.
MELEK
MOLOK.
Messenger. Angel. The Hebrew was so benevolent and benign, the Phoenician Molok so horrible and monstrous, but essentially they were twins, two fingers on the same hand.
Hugh Fox was born in Chicago in 1932 and is one of the founders (along with Ralph Ellison, Anais Nin, Joyce Carol Oates, and Buckminster Fuller) of the Puschcart Prize for literature. He is a poet, novelist, archaeologist, and has published over 100 works, including
Depths and Dragons, Home of the Gods
, and
Approaching /Acerando
(poems written in Portuguese in Brazil, translated into English when Fox returned to the United States).
Hugh Fox has spent his entire working life teaching American Literature and writing at Loyola University in Los Angeles, the Instituto Pedagogico in Caracas, the University of Sonora in Mexico, the University of Santa Catarina in Brazil, and Michigan State University.
He was the founder and Board of Directors member of COSMEP, the International Organization of Independent Publishers, from 1968 until its death in 1996. Hugh was editor of
Ghost Dance: The International Quarterly of Experimental Poetry
from 1968-1995 and Latin American editor of
Western World Review
&
North American Review
during the 1960s. He was former contributing reviewer for
Smith/Pulpsmith
and
Choice
. Hugh Fox is listed in
Who's Who: The Two Thousand Most Important Writers in the Last Millennium, Dictionary of Middlewestern Writers
, and
The International Who's Who
.
1
Pronounced Gee (as in Gee Whiz) âOn.