Peru. Gordon Lish
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Even if he didn’t actually say it, I think we can say he theoretically said it—the statement of what I stood to gain, of what kind of a future I would stand to have as a man, from getting my mother to feed me the eight greens which the colored man said to me he ate.
I loved watching the colored man—but it wasn’t anything like the love, it didn’t come anywhere close to the love which I had for the times when I was actually with Andy Lieblich in his sandbox. This was the single best feeling in the world—this was the single best thing in the whole wide world—there wasn’t a sadness that I myself could ever have thought of which just being in the sandbox with Andy Lieblich could not have totally but totally got rid of, especially if I stopped to think to myself, especially if right in the middle of doing something, of getting sand and filling up a pail with sand to make a building, for instance, or of packing it down to get it to really have the best chance of sticking together when it finally came back out of the pail, for instance, when I finally turned the pail over and tapped it and got it to come back out, the sand, especially if I said to myself that the colored man was taking all of this in, even if it actually happened to be a day when the colored man wasn’t even there at the Lieblichs’ in the first place, or even if it was a day when he was—either way, could he see around the house from the front of the Lieblichs’ property to the back of the Lieblichs’ property and see me doing things? Of course not, of course not—no one had to tell me that the colored man could not actually in fact do this, of course—but even so, even so, it still felt to me like he could—or it felt good to me when I thought that he could, even if I really knew otherwise, even if I knew that the colored man was probably just a big man and a strong man and was not any of the other things I thought he was.
I was always the boy who was winning.
Whichever one the game was, whichever game Andy Lieblich and I were playing, whether it be Builder or Gardener or Farmer, I was always head and shoulders above Andy Lieblich when it came to who would come out winning it, to who would be the one who would come out being better at it, even if he himself always had the shovel—and make no mistake of it, even if nobody actually said it was a game, even if nobody had gone ahead and said it was a game to begin with, set it up that way as a game to begin with, still and all, there was always a winner, there was always a winner, and the loser knew it just as much as the winner did, just as the nanny always herself did, just as she herself from just sitting there did.
The chair she sat in was a slatted chair. By this I mean that it was a chair which was made out of wooden slats like slats of wood, which I think, I have the idea, that this was a pretty common kind of a chair for the out-of-doors back in those days, which were the days of 1938 and 1939 and 1940.
His muscles were so amazing to me—the muscles that I could see in his back when the colored man had his back facing me, I could see them even though he didn’t have his shirt off, even though he always had a shirt on, except for when he went into the garage to do his changing into one and then, later on after that, out of one—you could always see the colored man’s muscles through his clothes because he had so many of them and they were so big.
I tell you, it was so amazing to me, it all was so amazing to me, how wide his wrists were, how thick his wrists were, or how the way the back of his hand looked when he kept the water from the hose always running over it so that there always would be fresh clean water in the sponge and so the dirt wouldn’t get rubbed back on all over the Buick again after the colored man had got it all washed off.
You know what was amazing to me?
The way the colored man turned over the sponge.
It made me tremble. It made me almost tremble when the colored man lifted the sponge up off of the Buick just a little ways and then flopped it back down over on the other side of it—and then some of the soppiness in it flounced out, flushed out, flooded out, before the colored man mashed his hand again back down on it.
Fluffed out—that’s the way it looked—I am trying to really say the way all of these things actually looked.
You could really make a list of favorite things. You can’t do it anymore, you can’t do it now—but you could have done it every day of your life when you were six—Andy Lieblich and the sandbox first, the colored man after that, the colored man next, the colored man and the Buick after Andy Lieblich and the sandbox, then Miss Donnelly and the storybooks coming third.
Other things which I can think of are these—namely, seeing Iris Lieblich’s place, or actually her seeing my place, Iris Lieblich seeing my place—and then the rest would be things I smelled or hearing the corduroy or just looking at the house where the Lieblichs lived.
I almost forgot.
Mah-jongg—I almost forgot.
When the ladies came over to my house to play mah-jongg with my mother—talk about favorite things, talk about favorite things—the sound of them doing it and the things they said, to me this was one of the greatest things in the world—plus the fact that it usually worked out to me getting at least one whole handful of All Sorts, which was another one of my favorite things.
Killing Steven Adinoff—there is no sense in not saying so, there is no reason for me not to say so—killing Steven Adinoff was one of the best of these things.
Not that there were not times when the colored man must have seen me in the sandbox. Because it stands to reason that when he came out back to hook up the hose, or to get it back off of the spigot, that the colored man could have seen me doing different things in Andy Lieblich’s sandbox, he could have looked up and seen me in the middle of doing something which not just any boy could.
The nanny, however, there was not an instant when she herself was not always there, keeping an eye out for us as regards our behavior, keeping an eye out in relation to how we were playing, to the whole question of if whether we were behaving ourselves and playing nicely enough and not letting any of the sand get out of the sandbox and get out into any of the Lieblichs’ grass back there, and meanwhile keeping herself busy with the thing she always had of rolling up and down a wristfiil of rubber bands on her wrist, actually rolling them up and down over her wristwatch, so that the rubber bands kept rolling over on themselves, kept twisting, kept winding up too much and then untwisting and making all of these sounds of unwinding and snapping, which you could hear, which you heard going on all of the time when you were playing something in the sandbox.
I’ll tell you one of the worst things in my life. This is one of the worst things in my life—a day when the nanny said that I couldn’t come over and play but one when she went ahead and changed her mind later on and said that I could actually do it—and then it started raining just a little bit after she’d said it, like just instants, just instants after she had given me her blessing—and then for the whole rest of the day, all the rest of that day after Andy Lieblich went in and the nanny went in with him, I sat down inside of our garage and kept feeling funny and out of the ordinary, like as if I was in some kind of trouble and that certain things which I did not exactly know about yet were probably dangerously unfinished, lying lopsided somewhere and being dangerous, and it made me feel a terrible wildness, this strange feeling, it made me feel like as if I had to feel the wildness if I was ever going to get rid of the strange feeling, which I think, to my way of thinking as a child, was the worse one, the feeling before the feeling of wildness, the feeling of incompletion and of chaos, a feeling of things