MiPOesias Magazine

David Need

Haunted things were always happening around Mary. I’d seen matches spontaneously flare in her hands, and for a whole month, just before she’d call, a certain song would come on the radio, or it would blare out of a car and then she’d come around a corner. And I got good at reading the signs—and not just about her. One time I was looking for Joanne down around Kenmore Sq I saw a friend of hers, some punk BU kid dealing cocaine out of the tower dorms, nobody I liked, and he asked me if I wanted to get some coffee, and I suddenly saw that, if I had coffee with him, when we were done, Joanne would be coming down the street. So we had coffee and, just as we were leaving, sure enough Joanne steps by out of the crowd.
               But it could be strange too. One time I’d gone out to Amherst to try to have it out with Mary. I’d spent the day shifting around town without finding her. Her roommate said she’d gone north to Anson’s father’s family’s house—and that was probably true, but her friends were always lying to me, so at the time I didn’t know how to read that. There was a bus back to Boston around 8 PM and I’d mostly decided to take it, but I was still wondering if there was a way to find her.
              I had some time on my hands, so I sat down in the student union building at UMASS. After a bit, this wild looking guy sat down with me, asked if he could have a cigarette. I let him roll one from my pack of Drum. He was dressed pretty much like a street person. His hair was unkempt, tan, whispy, but he talked okay.
             After a bit, he pulled out this note pad and started to write—strange symbols that he jotted down pretty fast. The whole time he was looking at me and talking, explaining that he’d known Kerouac, and that he was a magician.
            As we were talking, I started having the thought that Mary might be at the record shop at the Union, and I wondered if I should go look to see if she were there. The guy suddenly looks sharply at me and says, “Let’s go to the record shop,” and I get the sense that, if I do, she won’t be there, and that, somehow, because of that, I’d be under this guy’s spell.
           Looking back, I think it was a kind of paranoia—I was suddenly afraid I’d be exposed and ashamed. And I had trouble letting people control me at such times, like the time the girl in Quebec City dragged me around the city in an elf suit after I wouldn’t sleep with her.
          Anyway, I take quick stock of the situation. I had a bag with some food, oranges, or peanut butter sandwiches, and I say, “Let’s have something to eat.” It’s just a temporizing move, but somehow that takes up the time to when the bus is going to leave. He is still drawing symbols, page after page. I pack up the trash and tell him my bus is leaving, and he looks at me and says, “Good move with the food kid.

See, the thing is that we are all telepathic to some extent. We don’t acknowledge it, and we tell ourselves these lies like “no one can ever know another person’s thoughts.” Let’s face it, as soon as you walk into a room and look around, you are reading people. It might not be a perfect transmission, but the messages are there. Mary’d come home from shopping, her dark Italian eyes wide talking open saying how she’d been reading this guy on the bus, caught in his dreams. I found for me it was kind of hit or miss, not something I could control, just something that’d come to me like an idea.
          I’d be walking behind someone I knew and suddenly get that they’d decided that, in a few days, they were going to go off to Mexico. And I made a practice of checking, asking, “Hey, are you thinking of going to Mexico?” Like that.
          The thing is that telepathy is so fucking doomed romantic, like the French film, “La Jete”. In fact, in my experience, there is a cinematic form to the way thoughts get read, as if you are suddenly in a theatre, watching, and there is an aura and a sense of light, the way it feels when you are caught in the glow of the screen.
So here’s just one story about telepathy and how normal it is. It was during the first month or so that I got involved with Mary. I’d gone over to her apartment. It was open like it always was, and the cat was coming in and out of the window in the main room where Mary slept. This was in the last days of my friend Russell’s Ken Kesey trip, a few weeks after we’d all eaten raw lamb on good Friday (he’d stolen it from Safeway), tripping in the Amherst night. Anyway, for about a week after I’d been feeling as if Mary and Russell were having some kind of wizard’s duel over me. (It didn’t help that Mary and Cheryl were running around Amherst carrying wands and laughing about spells they were putting on people.)
          No one was home at Mary’s, so I sat, began to do some yoga, killing time, paranoid. Mary and Anson come home—he was just three and a half then. I said nothing, but he takes one look at me and says, “Oh David, the wizards are not fighting.”

Of course things never worked out with Mary, even though we kept banging against each other for four years, like a door that won’t shut in the wind. It takes so long sometimes for a catastrophic relationship to fall, as if it were a tower that, very slowly, were toppling. A tower that took four years to fall, even though it was always falling, steadily, the way the seasons inexorably proceed. So there is lots of time to run about and try to save things, to make something out of the wreck anyway.

I don’t know why Mary moved into an apartment in the North End of Boston almost a year after our first collisions. Mercy? Guilt? Of course I agreed in an instant. I was going to walk into that fire no matter what.

The apartment was haunted. On the fourth floor of a tenement on Margaret St. The steeple of the Old North Church was all lit up out one of the windows. Floors covered in old linoleum and slanted over them support beams. No heat but the gas stove, though later we found out that we could use electric heaters since we were not billed for utilities.
          It only lasted a month, maybe a little more. Mary was already bringing other guys home, and, of course, I was driving her nuts. But the place did have this strange Catholic magic, and one night I saw what Mary called a “rage ghost”. She was out, and, half asleep I heard her come in, walk around the apartment, open my door, and then sit on the end of the bed. I looked up out my slumber and there was a shape sitting at the end of the bed, dressed sort of in the same grey sweater and red dress Mary’d been wearing for a week, but definitely an apparition. I put my head back under the covers and said, “Go away”. And after a bit, I heard footsteps, and then the front door close again.
         I probably dreamed all that. My whole life I’ve had really lucid dreams in which I seem to be awake, double and triple dreams at the edge of awareness in which I wake up, then wake up again. But Mary took it seriously enough and cast a purifying spell the next evening.

It was around this time, that I has a series of experiences I call, “the three miracles I’ve seen”. The first happened when I was at work—I was a shipper-receiver for the Brentano’s bookstore in the Prudential Center. (God knows how I held this job considering what was going on in my head.) One day opening boxes, I put my box cutter down and after I turned back to take the books out of the box (it’d be nice if it was a shipment from New Directions with Djuna Barnes or Henry Miller, but I can’t say that for sure), and I suddenly knew I’d never find the box cutter again. I turned back, and, sure enough, I’d lost it.
           Now, this kind of thing happens all the time, right? But I was in this frame of mind, where, instead of just being inexplicable, I thought, “Well yes, it is possible for the story to have these kind of continuity errors. That is, the scenario I am living can have these kinds of slips and folds, because its hard to keep the whole thing exact from moment to moment. So, sure, I could put something down, but also out of the picture, just like that.” So I wasn’t alarmed as much as bemused. Of course, I cannot say what really happened to the box cutter. I never did find it, but who is to say it did not persist in some corner, the way small things accumulate in a house and at the edges of things. (Oh, the history of paper clips and pens and other patient, silent, loyal friends.)

The second “miracle” occurred after I’d moved out of the North End apartment into a rooming house on the back side of Beacon Hill next to the Church of St. John the Divine. It was around the time I’d taken all my journals and writing—all the worrying about high school friends and Mary—and thrown them into the Charles River to wash up, sludge like, against the Science Museum dam.
            There was a common bathroom on each floor, and I was taking a bath, reading the pealing and mottled ceiling plaster like a map the way I often did, when I suddenly noticed that I’d seen something blue drop from the ceiling out the corner of my eye, something blue that had landed in the tub at my feet. I sat up and found a piece of blue toilet paper floating in the water.
           There was, of course, no blue toilet paper in the bathroom, and there’d been no blue toilet paper in the tub when I'd started to fill it. I suppose there could have been a piece of blue toilet paper stuck to the ceiling that’d come free and drifted down into the bath water, but that seems a stretch, no? So where’d that toilet paper come from?
           I don’t know, but at the time I laughed a bit. It seemed kind of whimsical and sweet that God or an angel or spirit’d make this point about the stability of matter in such a gentle way. You know, lightly nudging me, “Hey David. World can shift. Things are fragile soft-breathed stuff of dreams.”

I could have made a bigger deal of this I suppose, but you have to remember, this was a time when things like this were happening a lot. Just a day before a woman getting off the Andover bus handed me a St. Michael’s medal without saying a word to me, and Mary was always giving me little stones she’d cast spells on, even though I began to give them back. Or I’d be walking down the street and some street-person I’d never met’d look at me and say, “Hey David, what’s up?”

I think there was something especially clean in the air of the rooming house Maybe someone was praying for me and that was coming out in these gifts. Or maybe I was starting to really let go of Mary and walk clear of the spell (though it’d be at least a year before I could walk in the woods without feeling the trees were turned against me for some shame I’d done). Anyway, the third miracle happened when I was moving out of the rooming house.

My room was on the first floor. It had one window that looked out onto an air-shaft. You know, the closed-in space they drop down into buildings in the city, often filled with trash, MacDonald’s wrappers and old clothes. I’d been out the window a few times, back and forth over the sill. I liked to climb buildings, and sometimes the guy who lived upstairs locked himself out of his room, so I’d climb up to his window to let him in.
             Anyway, after I was done packing my bag—I had just a few things in my Granddad’s old Navy duffle bag—I went over to the window to shut it for the last time, and there on the inside of the sill were these two small, stamp-sized cardboard pictures of saints. I stood there in the slanting morning light, touched them, then left them there in that light.

When I tell this story, people often ask me if I still have them. I suppose for a second I thought about taking them, but truth to tell I never really thought they were mine. It is important not to ask for too much, and the showing was enough.

I don’t know how those pictures got there. They’d not been there before—this room was maybe twelve by twelve and I’d been out that window several times. No one had ever visited me. I suppose someone could have gotten into the air-shaft and left them on the sill for me, but why? And why that day?

Looking back, I think of all of this as a gift. It was hard enough to live through, but at the same time, I often thought it was kind of a blessing to be shown so carefully that the world was shot through with magic/spirit. I say carefully, because it was not too much, after all, to bear. I survived it, somehow worked and ate despite the fact that I seemed to be caught in a dream or spell. Because that is the thing about magic. It is, after all, not so special or strange. And one has to live anyway.