Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio
In the Shreve High football stadium,
I think of Polacks nursing long beers in Tiltonsville,
And gray faces of Negroes in the blast furnace at Benwood,
And the ruptured night watchman of Wheeling Steel,
Dreaming of heroes.
All the proud fathers are ashamed to go home,
Their women cluck like starved pullets,
Dying for love.
Therefore,
Their sons grow suicidally beautiful
At the beginning of October,
And gallop terribly against each other’s bodies.
At Johnnie’s after Basketball Practice
After James Wright
By Billy Lombardo
I have to remind myself to be reluctant of therefore,
to leave the false calculus to planners—their
shames and their dreams like seeds in their sons.
Secret factors. They grow
them, their sons, in factories of plans. Live suicidally
for them, then sleep through all the beautiful
moments. Like that night after basketball at
Johnnie’s Beef. We had the radio on in the
Nissan that never belonged to us. We were beginning
the negotiation of dipped beefs and a new car and speaking of
math. It was only October
of your freshman year and I was already tired and
worried at your limping through algebra—your rage at the galloping
greater thans—when you remembered, terribly,
about Kenny George and his halfened foot. Against
the math and worry and Spanish and sleep—against each
of our rages, you woke me up to the sadness of others.
To the smallness, even of giants’ bodies.
Five Stories about Kenny George: An Apology for Professor X
By Billy Lombardo
I’ve been holding onto this letter for a long time. I started writing it in the fall of 2007 when I worried that you might return to teach for the winter term of the low-res MFA program at ____ ____ College.
One of the Book Talk classes we could choose to attend during that residency was Nine Stories, and I had a feeling you might be teaching it. So, I put a number 1 by the Nine Stories option, and I got accepted! I figured if you ended up being the teacher, I was going to face the music.
I had a lot of questions about Nine Stories. Like how did J.D. get away with all that POV business in Down at the Dinghy? I had questions about Bananafish, too; I’m pretty sure I got the point—Seymour’s torment and all that—but, wow.
I don’t remember much about the other seven stories. Franny & Zooey is fresher. That bathroom scene with Zooey and Bessie—Jesus, that’s tough to read. He calls her a fat old druid, and tells her I don’t know how many times to get the hell out of the bathroom so he can finish his goddam ablutions in peace. He gets so angry at her at when she says Lane told her that Franny got that little green book out of the library and not off Seymour’s desk where the book had been I don’t know how many goddam years. Zooey says it’s depressing, but it’s something else. But then Bessie says, “I don’t go in that room if I can help it, and you know it.” She says, “I don’t look at Seymour’s old—at his things.”
Zooey isn’t finished being awful to Bessie, but when she says that about Seymour’s things there’s a little shift. He finally reels it back a little. He’s been a dick to her for like two hours, and he finally says, “All right, I’m sorry.”
In your Book Talk did you, like, draw a pile of all the examples of him being a dick to her on the white board and then stack it against that apology?
•
Anyway, I don’t know if you knew this, but after I applied to the MFA program I got a letter saying I wasn’t accepted, and I don’t know if I even cared, then—I sort of expected it—but the next day, the director called me and said it was a mistake. I was in! It was a clerical error, he said, and I was like, no problem, everyone makes mistakes. I was accepted!
The whole low residency program was a little tricky, because 1) I never thought I’d get accepted in the first place, and 2) my wife wasn’t crazy about me going back to school because of the five ten-day residencies I would have to take for the program, and 3) the winter residencies always cut into the academic year at the Latin School of Chicago where I taught.
And that first residency was going to be especially tricky because my son was in summer school for algebra, and if he didn’t get at least a B— they weren’t going to let him go to Nazareth Academy, and I was the one who helped him with homework.
I was still pretty excited about getting into the MFA program, but when I got there they put me in a workshop with all of these very smart people who used words like polysyndeton, as in, Nice use of polysyndeton, there! and I would look at my friend Matthew and make a crazy questioning face and mouth the question, Polysyndeton? Is that even a word? And he would close his eyes and nod sadly that it was most definitely a word, and I started thinking that the real mistake wasn’t the rejection letter—it was the acceptance phone call.
•
Do you remember that piece you read at the faculty reading that first residency when I met you? It was about your old man. It was nice how you read it, too, even though I guess you stuttered a little. I didn’t know who you were or anything, but I was thinking maybe when I got back to Chicago I would email you to see if you might give me a blurb for a book I had coming out that year.
I didn’t even know your last name. And also, there were two other teachers with the same first name. One was a black dude, but the other one, he was also white, and also bald. He borrowed someone’s guitar one night and played a bunch of Paul Simon tunes. But it wasn’t enough to help me remember his last name, so when I emailed one of my classmates to ask her if she knew which one of you was the one I was thinking of, I had to describe you. Isn’t that what everyone does?
So, I said, Hey (friend), who was that old, bald, stuttering guy whose first name is _______ ? He read that piece about his old man? Not the guy who was playing Paul Simon songs that night. The other one.
So, my friend told me you were _________ _________ , and she gave me your email address. All I had to do was select it and copy it and paste it right back in the To line.
I rubbed my hands together like I was getting ready to do something big, and I set the cursor there at the top of that email and pushed all the words of the old email down and got to business.
I wish I still had the paragraph I wrote to you, about how I admired your writing, and the range of emotions in that piece and all that. It was a pretty good paragraph.
And how fast did you respond? Jesus. Back then I would keep checking my email every minute if I was home, but I’m not sure I was home. Maybe I was picking up my son, Kane, from basketball practice or something. He was a freshman in high school by then. Oh, boy. That’s another story.
He ended up with a C— in that algebra class he took. My wife got pissed at me all over again because I chose to get an MFA instead of helping him with his summer school algebra homework that summer, which is pretty ironic (if I’m even using that word right) because that’s the class I had to go to summer school for when I was a kid, too.
So, I called the nun who was the Dean of Academics at the school and told her I was a teacher and I knew about kids and Kane was a good kid and he deserved a chance and our only other option was this public school that was not going to be a good fit at all for him—it was going to be terrible—but this nun was a piece of work. She wouldn’t budge. He should have thought about that before he got a C—, she said.
So, I wrote a letter to the baseball coach because he knew a little bit about Kane playing baseball, and I wrote a letter to the president of the school about how great a kid my son is. And I had Kane’s eighth-grade teachers write letters about his character, and then the admissions director called us in for a meeting, either to tell us that Kane was in or Kane was out—I didn’t know which—and I took Kane there with me, and the admissions director, who was also the basketball coach, looked at Kane and he pointed on his fingers all the things I did to help Kane get into Nazareth, and then he said the rest was up to Kane. They were going to let him in! Oh, I wish I could describe to you how happy we were when the guy looked across the table at and said, Welcome to Nazareth, Kane! Just thinking about it now, I’m starting to cry a little bit.
•
It was later that same year—in December, I think—that we heard what happened to Kenny George. Did you know Kenny George? I won’t be surprised if you heard about him. He played basketball for UNC at Asheville—tallest person to ever play NCAA basketball. Seven feet seven inches!
Back when I taught him in high school, though, he was barely seven- one. Kane was in maybe the third grade at The Latin School, same place where I taught Kenny in high school, and one day I picked Kane up from the lower school, and I brought him to my office and we went into the gym, and lo and behold! who was shooting hoops all by himself on the roof gym? Kenny George! You should have seen Kane’s face. It was the first time he ever saw Kenny up close. He didn’t even come up to Kenny’s belt!
Kenny put his hand way down by Kane’s head and gave him a low- five and Kane gave Kenny a high-five. Then Kenny had some fun with Kane. He passed the basketball to him and then went under the basket and stood there flat footed and every time Kane took a shot Kenny put his giant hand up and caught the ball. Every time. Every time Kane just looked at me like did you see what just happened? That basketball was like a little cantaloupe in Kenny’s hand.
•
Kenny wasn’t too good at moving around. He always came to classes late because his body didn’t work like the rest of ours. He didn’t get around so gracefully.
One time I was sitting on the stage in the auditorium waiting to make an announcement, and I looked in the back of the theater and there was Kenny by the theater door; it was propped open with a stopper and Kenny stood there resting his chin on his hands on the top of the door! That’s how tall he was!
Anyway, that winter of Kane’s freshman year at Nazareth, I picked him up from basketball practice one day in December, and we went to Johnnie’s Beef in Elmwood Park. We had the radio on in the Nissan. Kane was struggling in school, and that’s what we were talking about. That’s almost all we talked about. He was angry at how easy it was for his friends and how hard it was for him, and he said he didn’t think he was ever going to graduate. One time, we were in Chipotle in Oak Park and Kane told me that. He said, “I don’t know how I’m ever going to get through high school, Dad.”
But that night at Johnnies Beef, all of a sudden Kane remembered what his basketball coach told him about Kenny George.
Oh, I almost forgot, he said. Coach Bonk told me to tell you what happened to Kenny George.
Every coach in Chicago knew Kenny George. And Coach Bonk knew I had taught Kenny, so the coach told Kane to tell me that Kenny had part of his foot amputated.
I was holding my beef sandwich up, and it was dripping onto the waxed wrapper on my lap. The Nissan was a new car then. Kane would smash it up on New Year’s Eve a couple of years later. He wouldn’t get hurt, though.
So, Kane told me about Kenny’s foot, then, but only like he was relaying a message; I’m not sure he understood. I was holding the last part of my beef sandwich there and Kane paused in his anger just long enough to tell me about Kenny’s foot, and I guess I just stopped eating.
I thought about a story a kid told me about when Kenny’s high school coach made one of his point guards run suicides wearing Kenny’s shoes, because the kid was making fun of how slow Kenny was. I guess Kenny used to get his shoes from Shaquille O’Neal when Shaq was done with them, and when Kenny’s feet got too big he had to keep wearing Shaq’s shoes, because I guess no one made shoes that big. His feet were always bleeding.
So, there we were at Johnnie’s, Kane and me—worried about algebra and Spanish and religion—while Kenny was lying in a giant’s bed somewhere with half a foot, and I just kept saying Fuck. One second we were eating beefs and the next second I was swearing and the next second we were both of us crying.
•
Anyway, that day at Johnnie’s was around the same time I asked you for a blurb for that little book I had coming out. I want to say it was only about fifteen minutes after I hit the send button on that email when I got a reply from you. This is what you said:
Old, bald, stuttering guy. Let me get this straight. You want a blurb?
I scrolled down to see all I wrote in that original email, but you had deleted it. I was going to go back to my Send box to find it but when I saw it sitting there I don’t think I even read it. I didn’t want to see it anymore, so I deleted it. I wanted to delete everything I ever did on a computer.
I wrote another email to you right after that, too. I can imagine what I wrote. I know how I get when I do shit like that; I say things like, I’m a dick. I’m just a dick sometimes, and I don’t think. My problem is sometimes I want to make people laugh, but I’m not mean.
•
Listen to this other thing I did once—this proves what I dick I am. It was me and a group of us from Bridgeport, I don’t know who all was with us, but we were like five or eight of us there—all about sixteen or eighteen years old—and we were at Oak Street Beach, and there was a bunch of black dudes sitting on those giant cement steps, and one of them asked if we wanted to buy weed, and one of us said, No. Then the black dude said, What’s wrong, you don’t like weed?
I can’t even tell you what I said. I don’t think I’ll ever tell anyone what I said. It was another thing I said that I wish I could forget. There’s a lot of things like that. But I said it. I most certainly said it.
And the big dude picked up a bottle—looking at me the whole time— and he cracked it on one of those cement steps like in a movie, and he came at me with it.
That’s what it took for me to realize what I had done. A broken beer bottle coming at me like that.
I never thought I’d tell that story to anyone.
•
Anyway, after I wrote whatever I wrote in that email, in the way of an apology to you, there was something like a hot wet washrag around my heart. It was almost as hot as the water gets straight from the faucet. I make bread on Sundays and for the yeast to rise it has to be in this little window of temperature between 105˚ and 115˚. The washrag was a little hotter than that. That’s pretty hot for an exposed heart.
I kept checking my email every minute to see if you had responded to my apology, but there was nothing. You never responded.
So, my second residency was that winter after we found out about Kenny George’s foot. You weren’t at that residency, and I was like, phew. Same with my third residency that next July. And then the fourth one came, which is when I signed up for the Nine Stories Book Talk and I got in it and read the stories right away. But then I got an email from the program administrator who said, There’s a problem. Call me.
I was like, Oh, shit. ______ ______ is going to be there. I just knew it. You didn’t want me in the Nine Stories Book Talk because it was going to be awkward. The program administrator felt bad for me when I told her the story, and then she put me in another Book Talk and I had to read a war book I can’t remember for shit.
My classmate who emailed me your name felt bad for me, too, but she was like, Anyway, Famous Actor is going to be there, and that’s all anyone is going to be talking about.
And I said: Who’s Famous Actor, and she told me a couple of films Famous Actor was in, and none of them clicked for me. Everyone at the program was excited. He left the residency one night to go to the Golden Globes.
Anyway, I tried to avoid you, but on the third day, I walked into the computer lab and there you were. I was so focused on my apology that I don’t remember exactly what you said, but what you said was something like, I get it. I get it. I’m a teacher, and you’re a student—and I don’t remember any of the rest of what you said, but it didn’t make sense and it was completely wrong, and I tried to muscle my way through an apology, but you didn’t want to hear it. You weren’t ready to change your thinking. So, I just left. Maybe I checked my email first.
What I didn’t get a chance to tell you is that about three days after that stupid email I sent you, I had this reading at the Latin School, and another book—not the one you were not going to write a blurb for, but a different one you were not going to write a blurb for—was coming out that next spring, and the librarians at school had a nice little reading for me. The librarians were there and faculty, and even a couple of alums— all people who wouldn’t have liked me when I was a kid. And there were white tablecloths and wine, and it was so perfect, and that hot washrag around my heart finally went away for a little while.
But on my way home that night, I started thinking about those two me’s: the one that had that beautiful reading in the library and the one that sent that email to you. All those people who’d just left my reading sort of thought I was pretty all right, but somewhere you were only thinking about what I dick I was. I get it, though. You get to a point where you think people will finally stop saying shit about your stammer, and I come along like a dickhead and say what I said.
And that’s the story I didn’t get chance to tell you—or I did tell you, but you didn’t want to hear it. Whatever.
Anyway, I can’t remember the route I took home from the library reading that night, but somewhere along the way I had to pull over because I couldn’t see. Usually it’s because of something beautiful or sad that gets me like that, but this was something else. I pulled over because I couldn’t see, but I was also just beginning to see. It was one of those days. It was a reckoning.
Also, perspective sometimes makes me cry like that. Like the day in the Nissan. We were just sitting there eating our beefs and thinking about Kenny George, a sweet giant who is just too big for this world. I’m not kidding about Kenny. He stood flat footed on the court and he curled his fingers around the basketball rim without leaving the ground. He was so big. He was somebody’s son, too.
This is probably going to sound crazy, but that night, me and Kane in that Nissan, eating beefs and crying about Kenny George, we were both of us—we were so alive.
Billy Lombardo is a writer, editor, and teacher from Chicago, Illinois. Billy is the author of The Logic of a Rose: Chicago Stories, The Man with Two Arms, and Meanwhile, Roxy Mourns. His novel, How to Hold a Woman will be re-issued by Tortoise Books as Morning Will Come in January 2021. His most recent work has been published in Hypertext Magazine, Ireland’s HCE Review, The Tishman Review, Tikkun Magazine, The Chicago Reader, The Chicago Tribune, and Triquarterly. Billy is the 2011 Nelson Algren Fiction Award winner. He is currently at work on the House of Fiction Deconstructed for the Apprentice Writer. Billy is also the founder and managing editor of Polyphony Lit, a student-run, international literary magazine for high school writers and editors www.polyphonylit.org. An international staff of two hundred high school students comment on every one of more than 2,000 submissions that come to Polyphony Lit from more than 70 countries so far. Billy can be reached through his writing and editing, business, Writing Pros/e, at www.writingprose.org. He lives in Chicago’s Albany Park neighborhood.
