The Dark Tower

There is a TV is his room, and every day while his folks are gone he takes his after-school snack in there and watches watches watches and he hears her radio in the kitchen, always the oldies, always WCBS, and sometimes he hears her, hears Mrs. Greta Shaw singing along with the Four Seasons Wanda Jackson Lee “Yah-Yah” Dorsey, and sometimes he pretends his folks die in a plane crash and she somehow does become his mother and she calls him poor little lad and poor little lost tyke and then by virtue of some magical transformation she loves him instead of just taking care of him, loves him loves him loves him the way he loves her, she’s his mother (or maybe his wife, he is unclear about the difference between the two), but she calls him ’Bama instead of sugarlove (his real mother) or hotshot (his father) and although he knows the idea is stupid, thinking about it in bed is fun, thinking about it beats the penis-piss out of thinking about the Deathfly that would come and buzz over his corpse when he died with his tongue down his throat like a stone down a well. In the afternoon when he gets home from nursie-school (by the time he’s old enough to know it’s actually nursery school he will be out of it) he watches Million Dollar Movie in his room. On Million Dollar Movie they show exactly the same movie at exactly the same time — four o’clock — every day for a week. The week before his parents went away and Mrs. Greta Shaw stayed the night instead of going home (O what bliss, for Mrs. Greta Shaw negates Discordia, can you say amen) there was music from two directions every day, there were the oldies in the kitchen (WCBS can you say God-bomb) and on the TV James Cagney is strutting in a derby and singing about Harrigan—H — A–double R — I, Harrigan, that’s me! Also the one about being a real live nephew of my Uncle Sam.