M.P. Powers
Hinterhof
In the soft gray light outside my window, the bare trees dribbling rain, the brown leaves in the garden lay wet and curled up in the mud, and there’s a crow perched on a water-logged wooden post in the corner, its hoarse caws rattling the air. In the distance, behind a network of thin, spidering branches and soggy evergreens, there’s a pale apartment building full of unlit windows and empty balconies, clouds hanging over everything, and elsewhere in this city there are trains jammed with people, noises of delivery trucks splashing through puddles, flowers erupting, the sky drowning in itself, ghosts of two world wars wandering Sankt-Hedwigs-Kathedrale and the Elsenbrücke and the halls of the Alte Nationalgalerie.
And the people in the cold and the rain and the soft gray light, the people bracing against the elements as they move along the damp pavements, their faces buried in their scarves and collars, the dim light in their eyes speaking of the dumb-felt misery and melancholy of the day.
I walk upon my bed, yank the curtains shut. I jump off the bed. A shadow leaps across the wall. Tea light flames become the bodies of electric eels. Rachmaninoff’s Fantaisie-tableaux hurls itself around the room. And for a moment I am seized with euphoria: I’ve got hours ahead of me. To write or to drink and to be inside myself. To be locked away from the rain and the cold, from the crow’s croaking prophecies, from the brown wet leaves curled up in the mud, and most of all from the people.
Why I Write
I do it because there are things in me – impressions, nuances, reveries – things I can’t express in normal conversation or in any other way. But they are so alive in me, something else would die if I had to keep them inside. To express myself with sincerity is part of it, but sincerity is only one feather in the pigeon’s breast. The rest is the play of language, the creation of vivid images, of mood, of atmosphere, the accurate transference of emotion, cultivating the perfect lie, the perfect truth, lyricism, the slowing of time, the flowering of eternity, the flower in mid-blossom and just out of reach.
It’s the reaching for it, that’s why I write.
Madrid, July 2012
In Berlin, a woman I wasn’t talking to anymore had my baby in her belly. I was, at the time, in Madrid, at a cheap hotel on the Gran Via. When I first got there, they gave me this depressing room on the fourth floor. It faced the inner courtyard, had rat-chewed baseboards, cold water showers, little light, and all day, without a break, I could hear this strange buzzing sound coming through the window. It sounded like a malfunctioning amplifier.
Some noises I simply can’t deal with. Sometimes it’s the human voice – especially when it speaks in a language I understand but don’t want to - sometimes it’s lawn equipment, bad or old tired music, sad music, ring tones, barking dogs, beeps, buzzes. This was a buzz and occasional leaking water sound and the sound of my conscience too of course.
I wrapped my pillow around my head. The room was sweltering. No a/c. July in Spain. And if I opened the window to get some fresh air, the noise would only get worse. So, I soaked the sheets, and hardly slept that first night.
The next day, I asked the lady at the front desk if she could move me to another room. I asked her in English first, but she didn’t understand it. Then I attempted my best Boca Raton High School Spanish on her.
“Disculpa… por favor… pero… uh, yeah, the noise… outside my window… it sounds like… asi… brzzzzzzzzz… mi no gusta… otra sala por favor…”
It worked.
She moved me up to the 7th floor where I was alone except for the maids who kept their supplies up there and would make occasional visits during the day. My window looked down on the Gran Via, that busy causeway which, with all its rumbling traffic and disembodied voices, was no less loud than the buzzing contraption. But somehow it was more endurable, even though sleeping was impossible until after the room had cooled off and the city had gone quiet sometime after 2 a.m.
I can do a week here, I said after the first night. I might even do the rest of the month here. Or longer, depending. I took the stairs down to the second floor. There, a thin, gray-haired man stood at a little mahogany podium.
“Hola,” I said.
He looked up at me and back down at his paperwork.
At first, we had a terrible time communicating. But when he found out I was on the 7th floor, where the bathroom was down the hall, he let me know I get a discounted rate: instead of $23/night, it’s $20/night. He added it up on the calendar for me. “One week,” he said, in Spanish. And touched his index finger to every number from the 9th and the 16th. “Viente, viente, viente,” he said, seven times.
“$140.”
“Perfecto…”
I gave him the money. He took it and I watched it waving lightly in his hand just over his knuckle where the fan blew it, and I watched him writing and I watched him irrigate the corners of his mouth with his tongue. He then rubberstamped my receipt. And gave it to me.
“Wait, is this?” I started to ask.
He took it back and stamped it again. In another place. With the same stamp.
It was now official: I could stay in that noisy furnace for another week.
The Rise and Fall of Captain Kirk
When I first hired Kirk Matthew Pankz, aka Captain Kirk, he was homeless. He was spending his nights in the sawgrass behind Nat’s Den, a biker bar on the railroad tracks not far from my shop. Then I gave him a home in the back of a cube van that was parked on my property. It goes without saying this was a significant upgrade for him, especially after he outfitted the van with a sofa and a dresser and a little TV. He’d gotten the items during his late-night adventures through the neighborhood, getting high and sifting through people’s trash.
I don’t know when he slept. I don’t even know if he did. He’d always be waiting for me when I got in in the morning, cheerful and anxious to chitchat about whatever gossip he gathered the previous night. I didn’t like talking first thing in the morning. I’d set him to work on the lawnmowers, the weedeaters, the stumpgrinders. He wasn’t a very good mechanic. He wasn’t even a mechanic. He was a hacker and a parts-changer according to most. But the business was barely scraping by in those days, and he was affordable, and always friendly to the customers, so I kept him on, helping him save enough money to eventually upgrade from the cube van to a Winnebago which I secured for him through a friend. The Winnebago, though somewhat old, was in near perfect condition when he got it, but he smoked his cheap 305 brand cigarettes in it, burning little holes in the carpet and upholstery and curtains and eventually filling it up with piles of detritus he’d scrounged on his 2 a.m. wanderings. Pretty soon, it was stuffed beyond capacity – you couldn’t even walk in it - and the overflow spilled out into the yard where I kept all my machinery. That’s when I discovered that much of what he’d been hoarding had not come from trash cans around the neighborhood, but from my own trash cans.
“Captain,” I’d say. “I threw this shit away for a reason. It’s trashed.”
“I don’t know ‘bout that,” he’d say. “I reckon I can jerryrig it.”
Of course, he didn’t. He didn’t even try. He just liked having it and kept collecting more of my garbage, the spillage spreading out all over the yard. He had everything out there. Track lighting, torn-up leaf blower engines, amputee mannequins, disemboweled car seats, gas masks, dry-rotted hydraulic hoses - anything that struck him as remotely salvageable or sellable or shiny, which was pretty much anything that was a ‘thing.’
In the end, I took a sledgehammer to everything I threw in the garbage, knowing that if I didn’t, it’d pop up in the yard like a whack-a-mole the next day, and either I, or a customer, would trip over it.
Then came the blowout: the morning I began deposing his mess and he freaked out, chasing me around the building and out into traffic with a 7-foot bullfloat pole. This was the closest I’d ever come to being killed in my life, dodging cars and trucks and that big waving aluminum pole. But he gave up midway through the chase and trudged back to his Winnebago, slamming the door and watching Jean-Claude Van Damme movies the rest of the day.
Strangely, and to many people’s surprise, I didn’t fire him after that. We made an agreement. I said he could stay if he tidied up his little space and started selling things off. He began right away, but it must’ve crushed him. His possessions, no matter how absurd or junky, were like family - by losing them he lost his ambition to work. All he wanted to do was lounge in his Winnebago smoking crack and 305s and watching movies.
I finally canned him.
He knew it was coming. He probably wanted it, either consciously or unconsciously. He sold his Winnebago and downgraded to a teal riceburner which he had no license to drive. He mainly used it as a storage facility and was homeless again.
Then one of my customers offered him a job painting a newly constructed house in Fort Pierce. He was also allowed to sleep in the house overnight, but the house had no electricity, so Captain Kirk brought a generator to the job. The generator, incidentally, was thrown out by me months earlier because it wasn’t worth fixing, but Captain Kirk resurrected it somehow. It was the only thing – the only piece of detritus, I should say – that I ever threw out that he resurrected. He set it up in the garage at his new job and closed the garage door and ran a cord from the generator to the bathroom down the hall and plugged the cord into his little TV and sprawled out on the newly tiled floor drinking Colt Ice and smoking crack until those toxic generator fumes crept down the hallway and into the bathroom and onto him and into him and giving him the best night’s sleep he’d ever had.
I could hear sirens in the background when the police called me the next morning to tell me what had happened. They called me because both of Kirk’s parents had long been deceased, and he had no other family. The only relative he was in touch with was a cousin, a filmmaker from California who, incidentally, had come into the shop just two weeks before looking for Kirk. Unfortunately, I didn’t know how to get ahold of Kirk at the time, so he left his business card and told me to give it to Kirk the next time I saw him.
Well, the next time I saw him it was morning and he was drunk and came stumbling into the shop wanting to borrow money. I said no. I had loaned him money several times in the four months since I’d fired him, but no more. I had to cut him off sometime and forgot to tell him that his cousin had stopped by.
It was 6:30 in the morning in California when I called to give his cousin the news. I was rattled, sweating, my heart hammering in my chest. I had never made a call like that in my life and had no idea how he would take it. I used the phrase the police officer had used when she called me. “He passed,” I said. Then I told him how it happened. Fortunately, he took very well. It almost seemed like he was more worried about my emotional state than his own, and soon we were speculating on what exactly had happened.
“Do you think it was suicide?” I asked.
“No, Kirk wouldn’t do that,” he said. “Kirk would do a lot of dumb things, but he wouldn’t do that. He was probably just high and paranoid that someone would steal the generator, so he kept the garage door closed. Or he was just too lazy to open the doors and windows.”
We laughed. He knew Kirk even better than I did and we wrapped up the call soon after that.
All this happened on December 11, 2006, and I haven’t thought too much about Captain Kirk since. I don’t think anyone has. But sometimes, late at night, when I am battling insomnia, if I really listen, I can hear somewhere outside the faint sound of leaf blowers, weed eaters and all that other machinery Captain Kirk hoarded and never could fix, or never bothered fixing – I can hear it rumbling in unison, playing its dark and joyful song on the winds.
Mood: Crepuscular
It’s no news to anyone who knows me that I am no fan of sad songs. Sad songs cut too deep into my emotional circuitry. They get me thinking about that heaviest of all themes, loss, either the ones I’ve experienced, or the possibilities of others, and turn me into a wreck, especially if I have a few drops of booze in my bloodstream.
Give me cheerful and uplifting songs. Give me ones that let me hear the laughter of the gods. Give me ones that help me forget I am human for a moment. I am tired of playing this same role every day.
I want to be the mouth of a flower opening in cold rain; I want to be the ocean’s blue gurgling belly; I want to be the city as the sun sinks into a slagheap of crumbling apartment buildings, spirits away its golds and pinks from the people, the trains, the trees, the cobblestones, when the only place there’s any sun left is in a sword stuck in a cloud and the wings of a high-flying gull, two spots of fire in tumbling green twilight.