The Drink Tank 072 (2006).pdf

The Drink Tank’s Final Resting Place...

Or is it?

issue 72

beloved by

some

No, it’s Not!

the

drink

tank

The Drink Tank Issue Seventy-Two

This issue happened because Mike Swan

and some other guy sent in two differ-

ent and completely unrelated stories about

Tombstones. I figured this was a sign for

a Theme and sent an email. I got responses

from Fannish Legends like Arnie Katz, good

friends like Judith Morel and Andy Trem-

bley, Pro writers like Jay Lake and Eric

Mayer, and so many more.

lowers and the marble and the grass

perfectly maintained. It was a place I’d

go to run around, to play with my ball.

Even as a kid, I knew enough to stop

running and walk gently by when I

saw a family member anywhere near a

grave. That was the way it went.

When I was 11, I went there at

night. At 12, I went at night alone. At

13, before I left for the love that was

Chicago, I took a date there and we

kissed. How Goth.

That graveyard was a part of

my vision as an adult. I went back to

my neighborhood and always to that

graveyard. The two visits I made were

both at night, both after climbing over

a low fence that they must not have

meant to keep real people out. I walked

along and found names I remembered

from the old days. James Hathouser.

Lucas Sweet. Miles Milo. Louisa Lusi-

tana. I could remember where they

were, how I would bounce my ball and

pass by them. Lusitana’s grave had a

horizontal slab of granite that I would

lay on in the heat of summer. It stayed

cool in the shade all day.

The death of my Uncle meant

that I had to go there on oficial busi-

ness. It was also the irst time I’d been

to a funeral. I arrived early, he was

being buried at ten and I was there by

seven. I walked around the sprawling

grounds and looked at the tombstones.

For the irst time ever I wondered why

we put them in the ground, why we

bothered putting a stone and saying it

was in memoriam. I never knew until

that day.

The Neanderthals buried their

dead. They also may have left lowers

and tools and such with them. They’d

place rocks on top, presumably to

keep wild animals from digging them

up. Early Chinese burials used stones

to mark the site of bodies. Same with

most Middle American tribes. Stone

was a way of keeping the bodies down,

the animals off of them. The stones

were practical once where now they are

merely symbolic.

I used to run around that grave-

yard, every inch of it, playing like a

kid would play on a playground, but

now, standing next to the casket that

was lowered into the Earth, I realised

that I had been doing it all wrong. I

should have been avoiding it, should

have been staying on the paths, mak-

ing every effort to avoid stepping on

the patches of beautiful, perfect green

grass that rose above the bodies of the

fallen. Those stones, those intricately

carved pieces of granite and marble,

they told you where the bodies were

buried, where you could walk.

On the way out, I went to see

James Hathouser’s grave: I took one

I hope you will enjoy.

We Mark Where We Place Our Dead

So We Will Never Walk There

Mike Swan

I grew up across the street from

a graveyard. It was beautiful, all the

path to the next, then I stepped care-

fully in the rows and paid my respects

for a moment, secretly apologizing for

the foot falls that hit him in my youth.

under the old, overgrown yew trees.

There we heard only bird calls and

the buzzing of the honeybees in the

luxuriant clover which half concealed

lat grave markers. I’d be thrilled and

horriied to ind I had set my sneaker,

unknowingly, on a slab of polished

granite.

At the oldest end of the place,

lichened stones leaned against the

fence and sat in neat piles, inscriptions

too eroded to identify. I was awed by

their age. What inconceivable vastness

of time would it take to wear away the

names and memories of the living?

The family plot was at the edge

of the newer end, in the sunlight, just

beyond the yews. In early summer

there were sweet, wild strawberries to

be found in the grass.

The night after I watched my

grandfather’s cofin lowered from view

I lay in bed and thought about him out

there in the dark, in the cold, alone, so

close I could have heard him shout for

me.

Then it was different when my

grandmother and I walked to the

cemetery. Then I was old enough to

read the dates on the gravestones.

I helped my grandmother tend the

geraniums by the grave. When she

fussed with the lower bed I saw her

straightening my grandfather’s tie.

A few years later I watched an

aunt buried and in twenty years I

returned again -- this time not from

the end of the street but from another

state -- to see my grandmother join

them. Most recently it was my father.

I noticed that the cemetery

had expanded but the rusting fence

hadn’t been extended to replace the

vanished trees which had edged the

yards beyond. There was no longer

any demarcation between house and

cemetery lawns. The graves simply

petered out a few feet from a childrens’

swing set.

There is room in the family plot

still.

My instructions, though, are

irm. I will be cremated and my ashes

scattered far away, perhaps over water,

A Walk to the Graveyard

Eric Mayer

Fifty years ago I considered it

a treat to walk with my grandmother

to the cemetery a block from where

our family lived. When you’re six the

end of the street is a long way and the

cemetery on the far side of a road you

can’t cross by yourself seems even

further.

The small cemetery might have

been another world, enclosed by a

painted, wrought iron fence with a

gate that creaked as we entered. Inside

was quiet. The sounds of passing

trafic did not penetrate the shadows

Clean

by Jay Lake

Dad sits on the curb each

morning and duct tapes fresh plastic

grocery bags over his shoes. “Can’t

be too careful about them germs,” he

mutters to the mossy pavement as the

Oregon wind cuts damp capers around

his weathered lesh, blousing his four

shirts for a moment to goosepimple his

street-grimed chest. With his iron hair

and his piercing gray eyes, Dad could

be any age at all, any age of man over

thirty and not yet under the ground.

“Got to stay clean ,” he tells an orange

tabby sauntering by. The cat pays him

no mind.

Dad’s shopping cart stands

guard behind him, a tutelary spirit

of rusted steel encaging the many

mansions of Dad’s world. Dad has

carefully wrapped the cart’s handle

with leather salvaged from the

steering wheel of a stripped Datsun

260Z. When he can ind oil, he

greases the wheels -- sometimes it’s

sewing machine oil, sometimes it’s

axle grease, once it was a half pint of

gray grease he found in a bus stop

trashcan, labeled “Bear Fat” in spidery

handwriting. Those thin, cold weeks

when he’s too hungry to remember his

own name, Dad licks the grease off the

shopping cart’s axles with a q-tip, just

enough to calm his angry belly.

But he’s always clean.

Second Nordstrom’s Bag

-- Hairbrush with no bristles

-- Six Barbie doll heads, shaved

bald, strung together on a bent coat

hanger poked through the tops of their

stubbly pink scalps

-- Portland Trailblazers ticket

stub from two seasons past

-- Squirrel tail

-- Reproduction Confederate

army brass button

-- Empty Nivea cold cream

container with a cracked lid

-- Little girl’s left shoe, size

ten, black patent-leather pump with

scarred inish

-- Three-pack white athletic

socks, new in bag

-- Aviator sunglasses with one

lens missing, prescription

-- Eight ball, genuine ivory

antique

-- Marine Band harmonica, key

The shopping cart leads him

on journeys different and strange.

For Dad, even the sidewalk outside

Goodwill on Grand Avenue can be

an afternoon’s distraction. His eye is

caught by the natural history of gum

receding into the concrete like those

evolving ape pictures in reverse. A

hypodermic needle lodged in a crack

glints its hard story of lank young

women lost to themselves and their

worried mothers back in Springield

or Wenatchie or Hood River. A broken

bootlace requires careful consideration

as to its salvage value, which of Dad’s

many mansions it might service.

“You never know,” he says

to the blur of passing metal on the

busy street. “A man could need to tie

something tight one day, hold it close.”

On occasion the shopping cart

leads Dad down peculiar avenues

dark with terror or overlowing with

history. The simple confusion he inds

on the sidewalk just west of Goodwill

multiplies like locusts.

Fourth True Value Bag

-- Baseball with raveled thread

and loose cover

of F

-- Photograph of young Chinese

girl in stroller, torn and taped back

together

-- Delated soccer ball

Dad doesn’t tell people his

shopping cart talks to him, because

he doesn’t want them to think he is

strange. It doesn’t have a voice like a

person, or even one of those electronic

toys -- Dad had a Furby for a while,

but the batteries inally died. Rather,

the shopping cart has a special code

of squeals and squeaks and clanks.

When it wants to tell Dad something

very important or complicated, it uses

sign language.

One day not long after they irst

met, the shopping cart led Dad to a

billboard that read, “You’re Not Fully

Clean Unless You’re Zestfully Clean.”

Dad had stared at the giant couple in

their matching green towels with their

perfect white teeth and perfect pale

skin until the sun went down.

Now the shopping cart helps

him ind fresh grocery bags for his feet

almost every day. Whenever he begs

a little money, Dad stocks up on duct

tape, even before essentials like malt

liquor and Listerine. The cart likes

the heavy thump of a new roll of duct

tape landing in its wire-bound body.

“Here you go, old friend,” he says, then

kisses the leather-wrapped handle,

which is worn smooth as a child’s

hand.

doesn’t want to. The hardest journey it

leads Dad on ends among Douglas irs

and tightly mown grass, surrounded

by plastic vases with wilted lowers,

stumbling over little rocks with

memories hammered into their faces in

the name of the unforgiving dead.

Dad unwraps his plastic bags,

picks off days’ worth of duct tape, tugs

at his mismatched shoes, removes

three socks from his left foot and two

socks from his right, and stands on the

sprinkler-damp lawn. The shopping

cart sighs contentment in the summer

breeze as Dad braves the unclean

world to bring his love closer to me.

residence under a tombstone were

mostly a mystery.

My immediate family and the few

relatives that survived the Nazis did

discuss such things. They loved to

discuss the medical condition of

everyone they knew – and everyone

who knew everyone they knew – but

the mechanics of the thing were part

of the adult world into which kids were

not invited.

I knew at least a little about Death

as far back as grade school. Although

I didn’t experience the deaths of my

grandparents, all of whom died before

I was born, one of my closest friends

developed leukemia in 4 th grade and

I went to the gut-wrenching funeral

about a year later.

Even then, though, I only went to

the service. It was felt that my friend’s

mom would not be able to stand the

sight of us at graveside, so we returned

to school in deference to her feelings.

So it was perhaps not surprising

that I had some serious gaps in my

knowledge of this subject. I recall being

especially perturbed when my parents

announced that we would be attending

the Unveiling of my late Uncle Joe.

First Safeway Bag

-- Man’s wedding ring, 18 karat

gold

-- Thirty-eight mismatched

Kwikset keys

-- Seven gray pebbles

-- Gideon Bible

-- Wooden rosary, ire-blackened

-- Small rubber monkey

-- “Porn Star” belt buckle,

cracked

-- Empty Pepto-Bismol bottle

-- Gravestone rubbing, tightly

folded, “Ellen Mei Yuan Ewell, Beloved

Daughter, 1997-2001”

Dad is always clean because

bad things happen to dirty people.

Dad rubs Listerine on his hands every

morning and gargles with it and drinks

a little to purge his stomach. He’d

duct tape plastic bags to his entire

body to keep the bugs out, but then

people would ask too many questions.

His shopping cart keeps his life

separated for him, a different piece

of Dad in every plastic mansion. It

leads him where each of those different

pieces needs to go, even when he

Tombstone Territory: The

Unveiling

by Arnie Katz

When I was very young, my

understand of death’s rituals wasn’t

very comprehensive. I got the concept

that I wouldn’t be seeing the deceased

next Thanksgiving, but the steps

by which a living person took up

His funeral, which had occurred

about a year before my folks gave me

this news, was the irst I fully attended,

from service to interment. I hadn’t

forgotten, and would never forget, the

sight of my Aunt Ida trying to leap into

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