Bird-Self Accumulated. Don Judson
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BIRD-SELF ACCUMULATED
ELMER HOLMES BOBST AWARDS FOR EMERGING WRITERS
Established in 1983, the Elmer Holmes Bobst Awards in Arts and Letters are presented each year to individuals who have brought true distinction to the American literary scene. Recipients of the Awards include writers as varied as Toni Morrison, John Updike, Russell Baker, Eudora Welty, Edward Albee, Arthur Miller, Joyce Carol Oates, and James Merrill. The Awards were recently expanded to include categories devoted to emerging writers of fiction and poetry, and in 1995 the jurors selected winners in each category, Lori Baker for her stories, Crazy Water: Six Fictions, Don Judson for his novella, Bird-Self Accumulated, and Debra Weinstein for her collection of poems, Rodent Angel.
BIRD-SELF ACCUMULATED
Don Judson
NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS
New York and London
Copyright © 1996 by New York University
All rights reserved
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Judson, Don, 1950–
Bird-self accumulated / Don Judson.
p. cm.
ISBN 0-8147-4229-7 (alk. paper)
I. title.
PS3560.U375B57 1996 95-50173
813′.54—dc20 CIP
New York University Press books are printed on acid-free paper,
and their binding materials are chosen for strength and durability.
With love to my mother and to LeAnn
CONTENTS
In Security Lockdown: Prison, 1981
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to thank Barbara Epler for her wonderful job of editing, and Phil O’Connor and Howard McCord for believing in me, though I often gave them reason not to.
Parts of this book have been published in Descant and Happy.
THANKSGIVING, 1979
I had decided to borrow someone’s car for a drive down by the water. The place where I worked at the time—it was a hospital for emotionally damaged children—couldn’t have been more than a couple of miles from the bay. My whole job consisted in being at my room by nine o’clock and waiting there to evacuate C and D wards as well as 9-North in case of fire.
But I went to find the security guard and bribe him with two of my pills.
“What are they?” he asked.
“Can’t you see the blue and green specks?” I insisted.
We were on the second floor hallway and I didn’t want Nurse to come walking up unexpectedly.
“Listen,” I urged, “it won’t take long. An hour at the most. I might stop, get out at the picnic benches—what could happen?”
He held the pills cupped in his hand underneath a lamp and moved them up close to its bulb where they looked like teeth polished and set side by side.
“Are these those things that were going around last summer?”
“Right,” I agreed although in actuality I could not remember where the pills came from, or when.
“Because those were all cut with rat poison.”
“You’re kidding?”
“Uh-uh.”
“Well, these are probably from a different batch. They’re good.”
And it was true. My head already felt as if it had been broken up into some kind of powdered substance. I could see right through the darkness into where autistic children lay asleep dreaming, though I could not imagine what those dreams might be or if they were even anything you or I would recognize as dreams at all.
Somehow I got lost. I drove up and down staring at streets whose names I remembered but now looked like different places altogether. I kept finding the same abandoned filling station. It was a cinder block square, busted out and with concrete pads where grew a series of wires capped and shut—but out front of its parking lot someone’s belongings were stacked sidewalk to sidewalk in a neat semicircle with a chair at each end, and several extension lines had been run through the alley from some other building’s window for a lamp; beneath it, a man in green sweats and a baseball cap worn backwards and lined with tinfoil fingered the band of a ruined watch while mumbling sternly at the lines of passing traffic as if we were, each one, rude and ill considered guests.
And at this street’s other end, where it narrowed, there was a bar; and here, people who could not understand their own fate stared out toward the rest of us from behind slightly darkened windows. Soon, most of them would be back in jail. It was that kind of place. Some of the same ones, my comrades and road dogs, stood around at the corner waiting for something, anything. I recognized them all. And several did call out. But when I pulled over, these people only seemed to turn on me with murderous intent for a moment and then disappear, or were not really there at all to begin with. It reminded me of a time when I was no more than six and my mother and father had a party. We lived in the suburbs then; my father and another man were in business together—they ran a funeral home—and the plan was for us to move into a huge apartment right above it, but that never happened, and soon in fact my father was kicked out of the business and was gone anyway on drunks more than he was with us and we could barely afford to live . . . but on this night there was a party. I’d been shown around a little, the kind of thing adults love when they’re drinking—the cute boy in pajamas serving peanuts and such—and after that I was put to bed. But at some point I woke back