mutating the signature

I used to go swimming with my brothers and my youngest uncle. My father, by virtue of his job at the local port, had a membership to something called the Business Professional Men’s Club or something along those lines. It was really just a mediocre restaurant attached to a private pool that could offer its clients an African-American free experience. This was where we swam — we got our shoulders wet and stayed that way for weeks a time in summers. These are Southeast Texas Summers, patent pending, 110 percent humidity and well over a hundred degrees Fahrenheit.

One afternoon just before I was to hit the age that made the BPM Club seem intensely boring (sometime around 15) I was swimming there with the guys. I liked to swim underneath the water dribbling off the end of the little water slide that separated the “deep end” from the “shallow”. It made a particular sound, a gurgle like a handful of heavy things dropping over and over into the water. I would test my ability to hold my breath this way, in the shadow from the slide that kept the water there a few degrees below the rest of the water. I would count one minute, one minute and a half, and get up toward two minutes before that little fire in my lungs got just too much to bear. Pop up and eat big pieces of the air pie, swallow so much air I’d float up, the crown of my head scraping the slide’s feet.

My dad’s youngest brother, the uncle we joined for these outings, he had a bit of a mean streak. Swam over while I was holding my breath — he waited for me to surface. I remember he was scratching behind his knee. The sound of the scratch moved through the pool water and hit my ear as a foil package of rusty nails would sound if you, ya know, shook it. A scratchy scratchiness of which kind I’ve never heard the equal.

So he waited for me to come up and told me that the black line painted on the pool’s floor (that normally indicated “deep end” vs “Shallow end”) was painted with a special paint that made it give off an odor. He contended that it was put there to alert swimmers who may have their eyes closed that they were, ya know, passing a barrier between pool depths. Said it smelled like strawberries.

Fifteen minutes later, one lung full of chlorine and fried chicken backwash and pool water, I’m being pounded back to life my brother. He’s a lifeguard. Not at this pool but at, you know, some similar pool. The water didn’t smell like strawberries, it smelled like a book of matches or a ball of fire ants.

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touch the jackal’s back as he passes
underfoot the wagon short one wheel this a/m
two kids lost already to the spotty fever heads
hot and tied with old rags no matter
that creek water did no one a lick a good
all got the shits now drawing flies
maybe we’ll get to san antonio
before the lot of us dies at least we got
us a couple pigs not a smile on the wife
since we got off the barge the gulf
licked it right off’n her face had to eat
those bony little fish
dredged up by the wind that cut your lip
midnite no tobacco no coffee no beans no
sex no bible no washing no clean cloth

i guess cactus is less to do with flowers
less to do with glass is less to do with more to do
than glass is less to do with cactus
than with bloody finger’s tip is less to do
with ten is less to do with math than ten
is less to do with the boy the bridge
the boy the stink of bridges less his cash
who rescue under bridge the dog