2

Do you seek diamonds? I pick them by the cluster (and now a hint for the hunter: praise them in song and they will spotlight their brother). A winter’s night beside the street that glows and wonders at the summer? That’s me above the sewer’s grate, napping like a cat, cherry-picking dreams from the frothy sky and chawing custard.

Sure I enjoy the finer things. Like a filcher, like a pink sink pitched in the pantry behind the liquor shelf, guzzling the refuse of a cocktail party. I haven’t seen my conscience since Chase suspended it in Southern California from the apex of a tent above slaloms of molly.

They glisten and they fret and they vibrate: memories. I’d spare myself a few, but who should take them? Here’s a few, real gems, hemoglobin of the main vein.

3

My father, Bradley Shaw, Bony Satyr, once sang to me and my brother between guzzles of Labatt Blue from the lip of our mud-pit pool a ballad about what I now believe to be measures of dealing with the inevitable onslaught of depression.

“Grab goggles when the shit storm hits,or grab a case of brew and call its quits.”

After a few more stanzas of liquid-garble he imploded into the pool and required CPR from the raven-haired lady next door with the breasts like PFDs. They waxed his chest while she heaved saliva and life into his skunky lungs. Since then I’ve often thought on his diamond rhyme and even though I’m not sure exactly of what it means, I do know as a matter of fact that I left my swimming goggles at a wine shop in East Hampton last Thanksgiving and haven’t seen them since.

Did I mention B.S. fought in the Vietnam War? The blood he spilled, that of the Vietcong and villagers alike, never bothered him. It was the terror he encountered upon his return home that made sobriety anathema. The country was changing, and war stories simply weren’t so glorious anymore.

I wish I had more to say about my mother, but she disappeared right around half-baked memories of mine began to form. My father told me it was because I bit her nipple too hard while feeding. This is not true as I had been years beyond that when she vanished. The dog vanished with her—a badly scarred black Labrador named Moses. I remember him fondly. “Moses Nose Roasts” I had called him when he burnt his nose badly after my father kicked him into the bonfire. The image still speaks: my mother shrieking inside the bolted closet underneath the stairs, the raven-haired neighbor lady peeking at us ocean-eyed between the pickets of the fence (my brother slurping Truth from her chest), Moses nervously following me as I circumscribed on all fours the moon-drowning fire, my possessed father lurching from the back porch with a crack of the screen door and laser-guiding a kick into Moses’s ribcage. Yelps and the hiss of fire.

I hate to invoke dreams in point of explanation, however I fear that due to a drastic dearth of concrete memory I must resort to the power of somnolent impression. The dream of my biological mother (and I promise to spare you henceforth the lewdness of dream investigation…insert sarcastic emoji here): she washing me in a giant porcelain tub while I play with a zebra-striped yacht, the crests of warm stirring water, her laugh and the flicks of her blond hair about the dim sky of the bathroom, my cherubic belly, her swollen breasts protruding from the clouds of a silken nighty. The doorbell rings and at once comes the slaughtering chant of my father: answer the door. answer the door. She leaves to answer the door. The water spigot shoots red.

The raven-haired lady next door replaced her. She took to feeding and dressing me, making sure I got to school when the sunlight revealed the corn fields and grain elevators, a tractor roadside rusting ensconced in a cloud of gnats in the summeror a squall of snow in winter. During the decade she cared for me she treated me no differently than her own son Jaspers and even hid us together in the cellar while father thundered above—half brothers shoulder to shoulder cowering in silence amidst the millipedes and spider larvae, rotting foundations and lawn mower parts—and took to defending us more regularly as her courage grew with our years and strength. She never spoke much out of what seemed like a mouth permanently agape with shock.

One memory in particular visits me often on late summer SoHo nights while I gaze across the skyline from the balcony after Amanda

has gone to bed. It must be the heat. I must have been about 6. Jaspers sat next to me on the couch. We were whole brothers already despite the discrepancy in blood. My father slept passed out in the armchair before the television, beer cans rung around him on the maggoty carpet like he buoyed the centerpiece of a sacrifice. My stepmother had taken a rare trip out of town. The news had come on and Jaspers giggled. His giggle ignited my giggle. My mother’s face was plastered across the screen.

We celebrated like imbeciles—giggling (we were only 6 for Christ’s sake). A man’s voice (the anchorman presumably) spoke while the image remained. Our noise stirred our father. We continued giggling with the impression that Bradley would want to see his Eve. He awoke with a curse, trembling. The lights bothered his eyes.

“Shut them off!” he commanded.Jaspers knew and poked the lamp. The room went dark with the

exception of the light of my mother’s face.“Dad…” I said in one of the last occasions I used the word. I

pointed at the screen.He heard before he saw. Something took a hold of him. The story

had ended and new images riddled the newsfeed.“What did they say?! What did they say?!” he screamed.“Body!” shouted Jaspers joyously. “Body!” I joined him in his

excitement and together we recited “Body!”Bradley vomited over the edge of his chair. He staggered to his feet and drifted out the front door to his car. Jaspers took the remote and changed the channel to cartoons.