Hebrish

At the confluence of tea roses and Russian sage we made a right at the curved iron fence, one of my dead friends beside me explaining how trees communicated but I couldn’t understand a thing because it was all blurry — the way it gets — and though I knew him well I couldn’t say for sure now whether it was Larry or Phil or Galway or Charlie until I realized it was me talking in some kind of Hebrish they spoke in my town by the Delaware and it was used for code the way one of the Amerindian languages was used in World War II the Germans couldn’t in a million years break since they weren’t as pragmatic irrational and in-your-face as the English and Americans were. I noticed the bees were digging in for a late lunch of what for them was boiled beef and horseradish or maybe it was just for me and they were bent over guzzling madly while paying no attention to the two of us or in any way tired of the nectars since it ran the whole gamut from oysters to soup to — well — boiled beef to strawberry-rhubarb pie and a little whisky after, some of it spilled on the vanilla ice cream that underlaid the pie it had once overlaid, all of this depending on the blossoms they circled over and bent down upon, a cafeteria as good as the one on Broadway called Stanley’s I circled and bent over expending nickels dimes and quarters when the Dulles brothers ran the country. It was Larry, I’m sure now, and what we talked about was cardboard and we were amazed that in the open spaces beside the hotel on 47th Street there were four or five small cardboard “houses,” both of us remembered, the homeless had claimed to sleep in and provide a safe place for their black plastic garbage bags, the size of a room at the Sloane House on 34th Street near the Pennsylvania Station where I put up the price of a meal then for a clean pillowcase with little or no stuffing and a cardboard bed as stiff as metal and a cardboard breakfast of cardboard bread and eggs and between us we talked cardboard, shirts from the cleaners with sheets of cardboard we drew on, cardboard soles in ruined shoes we both wore when we were children, cardboard hats, cardboard to lie on listening to outdoor concerts and cardboard masks we made with scissors and crayon for costume dances, balls is what we called them as if we were art students in Paris about to swim in the nearest fountain. Though what I want to say is the bees were too busy to do us any harm and it was packs of wild dogs, not swarms of bees, that terrified me (Larry, too) except for one occasion when I pushed the wrong end of an old broom into a hive of yellow jackets on the underside of a low-lying garage roof and an angry swarm chased me through the yard and over a fence hating any form of criminal intrusion, urban renewal, or gentrification, I who couldn’t resist intrusions, who never could, omnivorous as I was, living on apples and bananas as well as baby lamb chops, who ran like hell that day (Larry, too) for we in our separate ways didn’t want to be paralyzed then eaten by larvae, none of us dead ones did.