The Memory of Running (10 page)

Frank Malzone was a very good third baseman. He held the spot in the fifties for our Red
Sox. I was little when he quitor, as my pop liked to say, when they run him outbut I have
fond memories of Pop imitating him in games. Malzone had a big face, and it more or less
hung out. Hed take his fielding stance, feet spread, knees bent, forearms balanced on his
knees, and his big face actually did just hang out. My pop loved him. Malzones up! hed
yell. Big face. Big bat. When I was seven, we got a puppy, a mutt with a huge face. We
called him Malzone.

Malzonethe doghad the body of a German shepherd, but he had an auburn color and soft, long
hair that tended to knot up when it rained or got hot or snowy. He liked to be near Pop,
but really he liked us all. He loved it when you would talk to him like a baby and then
rub his belly. When Malzone was three, he got irritated. Thats the word Mom used. He went
dog crazy. He would whine and cry at the door for hours, day and night, until somebody let
him out. Then hed leave for days. Id get frantic. Who knew what could happen to a nice,
happy dog out there alone on the streets of East Providence? I remembered this today. I
hadnt thought of it for a long, long time. How I came home one Saturday and Malzone was
gone.

Wheres Malzone? I asked Pop in the kitchen.

Malzones at the dog hospital. Hes fine. Hes having a little operation.

My dog? Operated on? Malzones in the hospital? Bethany walked into the kitchen. I could
tell shed been crying. Just a little operation, Pop said; then he walked out of the room.

I looked scared. I wanted to hold him. I wanted to comfort him, Bethany said.

But what do they do to dogs?

Bethany looked at me a long minute. They cut off his balls, she said.

They cut off his balls? The screen door opened, and Norma squealed in. It was all his
yakking and whining, Bethany said. Yakking? They cut off his balls for yakking? Dont cry,
Smithy! yelled Norma. I stepped away, then turned back to my sister. You cant do that

because he gets all excited and yaks. People yak. They wouldnt do it to people, would they?

I had started to cry, and Bethany hugged me. Norma tried to hug us both.

Pop wouldnt let me go with him, Hook. But I tried. I wouldnt have been afraid.

I hate that Im ten! I screamed. I hate that youre ten, too, Bethany said quietly. Im six!
Norma screamed proudly. Just like that, I cried. Poor Malzone. My poor dog. Pop said they
had to do it because he was going crazy over girl

dogs and he was a runner. I looked at my sister like she was nutty. Of course hes a
runner. Malzones a dog. Dogs run. Pop said they have to snip to stop the running. Snip,
snip! screamed Norma. But Malzones happy when he runs. My sister put her hands on her
hips. You are so stupid. You just

dont listen. You have Jell-O for brains. When they brought you home from the hospital, we
all thought you were retarded.

Did not! I convinced Mom and Pop to keep you. Id keep you! Norma screamed. They were gonna
keep me.

Maybe. Bethany shrugged.

I sat at the table, and my sister sat across from me. Norma grabbed a chair and pushed it
next to me and sat. We were quiet for a minute or two. My pop was having a cigarette in
the parlor, and we could smell it.

Do you think Malzone will be all right? I asked. I think hell be the same old Malzone. But
he wont run. Hell run. He wont run away.

I like it when Malzone runs, I said.

Thats because youre a dog, too, Bethany said seriously. Youre a runner, too, Hook. Dont
stop, okay? Dont stop or youll be a fat-ass.

I ignored her. I like it when Malzone runs.

I love it when you run! Norma screamed, trying to grab me. I kept pushing her hands away.

The animal doctor said that for a while Malzone will think something about it. Hell have a
memory of running or something, and after a while hell forget about the girl dogs and be
fat and happy.

He say happy? Wanna play with puppets, Smithy? Norma screamed. I got up and started to
walk out of the room. Get away, Norma,

little jerk. We all picked up Malzone the next day. Mom boiled some

chicken legs with rice, which was his absolute favorite food. We had some codfish. We were
all togethereven Norma screamed over for dessertand before I had to go to bed, Bethany
sang her choir solo from the Seven Last Words. It was purely wonderful, and she rubbed
Malzones belly as she sang.

Route 1 merges over a bridge just outside New Haven, then heads off on its own again. The
walk space is not exactly a sidewalk on this 195 overpass, so I couldnt drive it with the
cars shooting by. I walked, pushing my Raleigh next to me. It was late afternoon, and I
was pretty tired. See, I made one of those traveling miscalculations that people make when
they lose a certain sense of time. I should have stopped earlier, at one of the shore
exits, where I might have been able to have a swim and a good sleep, but now Id have to
wait until I got outside the city of New Haven, and I was getting tired.

After I had crossed the New Haven Harbor, I lifted my bike off the main road, onto a
grassy slope, and walked it down to the service road. About a hundred yards ahead of me
was the New Haven train station. I pushed through the high, ornate doors and walked in.
Train stations are amazing. Uncle Count is a train-station buff. Not a train buff, but a
station man. Its his theory that when the big stations were built in Boston, Providence,
and New York, people must have thought trains would always be the end-all and be-all of
travel. Now they seem like museums with newspaper stands, but they are still amazing, with
paintings on the ceilings and statues cut into the high walls.

I sat on a long wooden bench that looked exactly like the pews in our church and ate the
last of Father Bennys fruit. Then I bought a tuna sandwich at the snack counter and ate
that, too. It was 5:40. I didnt think it was anywhere near 5:00. On the opposite wall, the
huge information board flipped with each arrival and departure. The next train to New York
was at 8:20, and when I bought my ticket, I was instantly sorry I hadnt asked Norma to
send some money. The ticket was pretty expensive, and it left me with seventy cents. But
my stomach was full of fruit and tuna, and that wasnt too bad a way to wait for my train.

We came into the big Penn Station at 11:00 on the nose. It would have been earlier, but
there was some track work going on around Stamford.

I sat on another long, pewlike bench in the New York station and slept until a policeman
slammed his nightstick next to me.

I awoke with a start, and my fat heart raced a minute. I watched the young officer walk
away, every now and then slapping his night- stick onto the oak benches. The enormous
waiting area was filled with exhausted men and women in different stages of sleep. The
ones that obviously could get the best rest were the people whod figured out how to sleep
sitting, with their eyes open. I have tried this, but its a skill I dont have and cant
seem to learn. I smelled old pee and sweat. In that big room was sorrow, too. An old
woman, who might not have been old at all, talked constantly to something that wasnt
there. I have heard that talk. I used to ask my pop if Bethany saw it clear, whatever it
was. By then my pop couldnt talk about the voice and didnt. I watched the woman closely,
and she turned her head and caught me looking. She didnt stop talking, but she gave me the
finger. I smiled like a stupe. Why do I do that?

I sat until the sun came up. Then I got an apple juice out of a ma- chine, went to the
dirty toilet, and walked my Raleigh up to Seventh Avenue. It was five-fifteen in the
morning, and I had ten cents in my pocket.

Ten cents, I said out loud, under the Madison Square Garden sign.

What? I turned around. You say something? a young black coffee vendor asked. No. I mean, I
just said ten cents. What ten cents? I laughed. Thats all I got. Good enough. Cream and
sugar? he said, businesslike. Uh . . . yes . . . please.

I gave him my dime and drank the wonderful coffee. By the time I had finished, the street
was alive. And the people gave off the same feelings I got when Mrs. Fox took our
fourth-grade class to the Nar- ragansett Electric Company. We were studying turbines that
made the electricity. This is what I remember. A feeling of energy, of something
unbelievably powerful and electric. This is the same feel- ing I got from the New Yorkers
on the street on an early Monday morning. I got onto my bike and pedaled with the traffic.

It was a nervous ride from Pennsylvania Station at Thirty-fourth Street. Everybody
screamed at me or honked at me or gave me the finger. Pedestrians, too. I was so frazzled
by the time I reached Four- teenth Street that I had forgotten being embarrassed about my
fat ass and huge belly. When our family came to New York, we went to Radio City and Mom
made us stroll Fifth Avenue. That was New York to me. It was cleaner then. Nobody gave us
the finger.

Wheres Fifth Avenue? I said to a group of kids. They pointed east.

I followed the flow of Fifth Avenue a few blocks and came to a white arch with a crumbling
sculpture of George Washington. Be- hind him was Washington Square Park. In Rhode Island,
parks are used occasionally. Thats it. It would not be an overstatement to say our parks
are not used that much. New York parks are used. They are crammed. They are the magnets, I
guess, for interludes. Does that sound right? I sat on a bench facing an empty fountain.
Now, this is not by any means a complete list, but in five minutes I saw roller skaters,
baby carriages, bikes, skateboards, pogo sticks, stilt walkers, Indians from America in
full headdress, Indians from India in full tur- bans, beautiful girls with large breasts,
a group of Spanish kids kick- ing a soccer ball in a circle, men holding hands with other
men, an old man with a ponytail in a black leather jacket that said speed on the back, a
kid with blond hair who had to be seven feet tall, and, di- rectly in front of me, on her
hands and knees, a woman who looked like a hag in one of my nightmares.

She was nearly bald, except for a few wisps of long white hair, and the top of her head
was shiny with sweat. She was wearing a pair of baggy overalls, torn and covered with so
much paint I couldnt see the denim. She had drawn a circle of blue chalk on the pavement
and on the inside had drawn a beautiful blue-and-gold bird. Light or I guess it was
supposed to be lightshot off the head of the bird in silver and orange and red. She worked
fast, grunting and groaning, and when the light was wrong off the bird, she would erase
the dusty chalk with her bare hands.

Bad, bad . . . good . . . good, she said.

I leaned forward on my bench. She was putting clouds under and around her shiny bird.

Art, fat boy. Art. Art. Art, she grunted, not looking up at me. Her hands moved quickly
over her sky and through her clouds.

Its beautiful, I said, and I meant it.

Notes, thats all. Want to remember it. Want to put it in my nog- gin. Watch this, fat boy.

She reached across the top of her circle and arced a purple piece of chalk just outside
the blue arc.

Thats all, fat boy, thats how you remember. Notes.

She struggled, grunting to her feet, and stood looking down at the bird and the sky.

Im eighty-nine, she said, still staring down, and that bird is always here. There. Up
there. Thats a bird, and now hes down here, too.

Its very beautiful, I said again, and, since the purple over the blue, I meant it even
more.

After a while she stooped down and dropped the bits of chalk into a canvas sack, then
walked to my bench and sat. She was quiet and looked even older sitting next to me, but
her eyes lived hard in her head and flew across the park.

Look, she said, nudging me, other side of the fountain. Venelli. Venelli the fraud. He
sells for hundreds of thousands, and Venelli is a

fraud. Maybe thats not Venelli. Wait. No. No, thats not Venelli, but explain this.
Paintings of squirrels? Still life with the carcass of a poor squirrel, and Venelli sells
it for hundreds of thousands? That is the university painter in a nutshell. I went to Art
Students League. Pay what you can, they told me. They were happy to have me. But they
taught the tension of preparation. The notes. There. I wont forget my bird. Hes there. I
wont forget. OKeeffe was there, too. Of course, thats poster painting.

A bunch of kids with book bags walked by, looking at the picture as they went. They liked
it, I could tell.

Thats the real McCoy, children! she yelled after them. Thats Omega there. Thats Gods work.

She went quiet again, and we both looked at the bird. When I glanced over at her, she was
staring at me.

Art, fat boy. Beautiful. People? I dont use them in my notes or my canvas. And when I

had just the cardboard, and when I had just the . . . what? Plywood, I dont use them.

A man on those single-line roller skates rolled by. He was wearing a Roman soldier
uniform. Sword, too. Nobody seemed to notice him. My father would say, Art and light, art
and light, thats all you ever talk about. But I knew a secret. People suck the light, they
dont give it off. I could get more glow from a tree. Big trees. Chestnuts? Oaks? Oh, yes,
fat boy, big oaks, too. I come down from Pennsylva- nia. Nineteen twenty-seven. My father
had hands like this. Big hands, and he would kiss the girls, my father, but even he sucked
the light. All people, really. In 1927 I thought Peter Ogilvy might not

suck it, but he did, later he did. A breeze ruffled the leaves and it felt good and
comfortable. Pi-

geons moved together from one end of the park to the other. I real- ized I wasnt aching
very much. I was relaxed and rested, but I still saw Bethany in her hard pose, under the
arch. She wore blue like the

chalk, and the breeze shimmied her loose dress. A brother sees a sis- ter, thenwithout the
lagers, the pilsner, the occasional pale ale.

Turned out he loved men and women, which is all right and modern, but, dear God, fat boy,
I was twenty-two and in love and had defied my father. There was no going back on that.
Running to the big city with the poet Peter Ogilvy. So lovely, lovely, lovely. We made
love at night on the train. On the train.

She laughed and coughed and grunted. She slapped her hand against the bench.

Making love into New York City. I just climbed right over him. Then we were on Union
Square, and it wasnt pretty, and it wasnt artistic, and the damn windows were always
dirty, and Peters father gave up on him and stopped the money, and he would cry like a
girl. Peter Ogilvy would sob, would weep!

I cant write, hed cry. And I would cry, too, and I would say, Light, I have to have
light. The windows are dirty. I need light to paint. Then one day Peter Ogilvy comes home,
and I think I had done a crow, a blue-black crow that had a face like tar, and I was so
happy with it, and he has this young man with him. Did I know him? Im not sure. Here she
is, he says to this other man. I stand covered with paint, gesso. Here she is. I go to
kiss him hello, but he turns away. Here is this artist, he says. Here she is. She cant
find light in people. They are both drunk, and I see it, and Peter tells me he is a bad
poet. I remember him saying over and over, Im a bad poet. Im a bad poet. Then he tells me
I dont need him and he is going to fuck this other man. I cant believe what he said. So I
asked him what he said. He said it again. Dear Peter Ogilvy. I can still hear them in that
room while I grabbed all of my paints.

I listened, and I watched my sister float between the columns of the arch.

On the street. Rain. Cold. Was it April? Above me, my poet and another. I hold my brushes
like this. In my fists. My sack of paints and thinners. On the street, in the rain,
without love. That! That

place, fat boy, is where you must go before you can think of the fact of Art. Im
eighty-nine, and a fuck is not as good as a bird on a branch or a wagon a child has pulled
in the afternoon. Light. Light.

She nudged me.

Is that Foreman by the maple? Could it be that fraud? He sells and sells. They swoon at
the galleries in the warehouses. Its shit. Al- ways children in some future pastel. Is
that him? Fraud. Im tired now.

The old woman nudged me again. Whats this? My Raleigh. She looked hard. My maroon bike. I
looked back to the Washing-

ton Arch, and Bethany was not there. I did a series of six sets of bicycles. Nineteen
fifty-two. Flyers

and Schwinns. Over there. Across by the college. There were bicycle racks. And no chains.
There are chains now that cover the world, but without freedom is there a world to paint?
Now? I did the bicycles with Joan Dupree. She worked faster than I did and without the
color, but her quick look, that quick-look, I liked the immediacy of it. But . . . I could
never love a woman. Sunfeld. That was a man. A lover. An artist who, dear God, made a
handsome living. Sunfeld was immediate, contemporary. He knew what they wanted, and he
gave them what they wanted. I was thirty and forty and ripe as a plum in the sun. And
Sunfeld said that. He would hold these breasts, and he would kiss them, and then he would
give them the pastels of chil- dren in the park, and he would paint their pets, and he
simply sold his art until his art sold him. Killed himself, this happy lover, just here in
the head. Bang. And there was the other woman of course, the wife, and there I was in the
rain, the wet cement, my brushes all in my little fist. Again.

A small girl in a wheelchair passed us. She was alone, and she la- bored at the big wheels.

Norma, I said out loud. There was Douglas Owsley, she said, and there was Chris Lamb,

and there was Robert Clavert, and there was that Argentinean who hit me. They were the
real item. Not like, over there, by the mens room. Is that Nigel Tranter? I thought he was
dead. He would be at least a hundred twenty-five. But he was not the real item. He was a
fraud. Once you do a circus elephant, you can put all the Latin names in your title, but
it remains circus posters. Youre a fraud, Tranter.

I watched the little girl in the wheelchair. Then looked over at my old hag.

I ought to call my friend Norma.

I ought to be back at my studio, fat boy. The men across the hall keep my windows clean.
Birds and clouds. Look at my notes. Its not a struggle now. It was a struggle before, and
the struggle was subject. Now I know its the birds, because theyre the closest to light.
It whams, it just whams off them. Once I painted a silver place setting by the window in
the sun while Larry Monsanto kissed my naked bottom. Nineteen thirty or 1940. It was a
different kind of light.