Mom says a real friend is someone who doesn’t knock you down, but I say it’s anything that doesn’t. Don’t look to a source for any of this. I understand about the world of inanimate objects. A sock monkey is a friend of mine. I understand the term age appropriate. Mom tells me that it’s understanding the limits of my mind that keeps me in the basement. I tell her to turn off the light already, and I reattach the thumbtack to the corner of the sheet that keeps the light from coming through the ground-level window. I push the thumbtack back into the wood. At night I take it out. In the darkness, I like to look out at the grass. I like to see the leaves that pile against the side of the house and rot. But in the day I want it gray. My sock monkey lives in shadow. He’s a little shadow monkey who I love. I’ll describe his mouth. It’s a straight tender line. His mouth is like my mouth when Mom is downstairs telling me about the limits of my brain. This is what it means to show friendship: it’s a hard line. This is what it means to love and hate: a body, or anything that skitters away. It’s my gray world in daytime, like Mom says, my almost-coffin.

I used to play the glockenspiel, which is like a xylophone, but you’re wrong if you think it’s a toy. Germans play them, but not only Germans. They’re open to the public, I guess. I was what you’d call a natural. But as Mom says—and here I agree—I’m not a natural at open to the public. How many solitary successes have I had? It was my musical ability that put me going somewhere. You’ve got to have the spark. That’s a jazzy term.

Mom was supportive at first. This was when I was her upstairs-son. I practiced on songs like Lionel Hampton’s “Go, Go, Re-go,” and on other pieces like Van Halen’s “Get off the Train, There’s a Lady with a Gun.”

When you get comfortable with a thing, you feel like breaking out. This was before the upstairs was called the upstairs like it’s called the upstairs today. This was when the future tense was used in terms of joy. If there’s no basement, there’s no upstairs-downstairs family. There’s just family. Like if there’s no utensil on the draining board, there’s no threat of laceration. This should be obvious to everyone.

I gave a little concert once. Mom and the sock monkey were there. Dad was gone, even then. Mom said he wouldn’t knock her down, not when he was gone. She said Never again. I said Bullshit. She said Stop. At my concert I played “Little Tennessee Blues” by Blind Boy Fuller, which surprised my audience but which I’d been practicing in the basement. Even then there was a basement—okay—but it was a different kind of thing.

Something happened when I played Blind Boy Fuller’s “Little Tennessee Blues.” It came out a much sadder version of the same exact song. Understand that I threw myself into this. Understand that I would not back down. The glockenspiel is an instrument that amplifies perspective. It’s an instrument played by a people of great industry and feeling. Mom says Industry is an important word because it points to an essential concept in terms of me. She said this not then at my concert, but yesterday, having flicked on the lights. At the concert she stood up and cried, which I understood because the song, itself, was emotional, and I condoned it even though I don’t condone some of her other weaknesses.

What I like to do now is  think about the future. It will be open space, and when Mom is gone, I’ll get the house, unless she wills it to the Christians.

Let’s forget the concert. Let’s say that I’m retired. That I am not violent, and my upstairs is a lighthouse. My downstairs is the stink-earth. I have company here, and anyway, who’s counting? If it’s true what they say, we all will be forgiven.

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Photo credit: mumucs / Foter / CC BY-NC-ND