Diary of Tadpole the Dirtbag

by Rob Cook

Far From Troy

Last night I found the face
of a lost childhood friend and tormentor
shining from a puddle on Rivington Street.

I stepped on his forehead
and the moon shorted out.

I put the puddle in my knapsack.

I wanted to take him home
to my woman and two cats
and show him I was no longer afraid.

That I could close my eyes once
and nobody would find him again.

Where I live those without homes call the night Ed Glory.

He’s failed at moving beyond what everyone’s told him:

that his question marks would never go away,
that he was so skinny he left bruises
on his one blanket, that he could disguise
his voice like the blurred drawings of Steve Ditko.

But tonight we walk to the ends of the shipwrecked housing projects.

My apartment is both minutes and years
from the Lower East Side.

The dark stays in our eyes.

The 2am predators wait on the next block.

Young, white and homeless,
the remains of a Trojan settlement
that crawled out of a manhole behind us.

I can already hear what they’ve done
to their shadows.

I let the puddle out of my knapsack.
I don’t know if it will tell anyone its name
on its passage through the arson districts,

but I know it will never reach the river alive.

Diary of a Dirtbag

On my way to American Folklore 236
a co-ed passing by looked directly and
determinedly into my face and voiced
her unfavorable opinion of me.

She was middle-tier at best: short, crooked
blonde hair, brown eyes like
pennies in a mud puddle, sweatshirt
covering breasts the size of Rolaids.

But I am ugly: possibly the only
long-haired man on campus, and
have weeds growing under my eyes.

I wondered where this girl picked up
such enormous ego. Looking over her
delicate shoulder she called out dirtbag,
then a well-articulated Ugh!
to make sure I heard.
This is what happens when you leave the house
without proper grooming, I noted silently
and continued down the walkway with my

oversized verdant overcoat, loose
shoelaces, pulled out my comb
like a switchblade, and began raking
my hair with the plastic teeth.

Letter to Myself at Twenty, 1989

Dear Tadpole,

Fifteen years from now you’ll be able to find Doctor Dardik on a computer site called Quackwatch.com. But today he’s promised to heal your chronic depression by having you bounce on a trampoline. You’ll wear a plastic heart monitor strapped around your torso, and a watch that looks like a shrunken television. And simply, you will make waves of heart rhythms. Bounce in place until you reach 125 beats per minute then stop, breathe your way back to 80 beats, and repeat so your heart keeps changing its echoes and the florets in the hollow places of your blood keep opening, letting out their moonlight. For $100,000, this ex-vascular surgeon who invented the Dardik Biograft will mend your body, your house of fractals replicating everything you were in high school, the awkward friendless space that followed you through Biology and Trigonometry and Metal Shop, the girls with faces and the girls without faces who called you a living abortion, your guitar that failed when it tried to protect you, all still happening in the electrons that wake you in the morning demanding eggs and toast and something to wash away the sleep on your lips. Doctor Dardik boasts: I healed myself of rheumatoid arthritis and now I’m curing people of multiple sclerosis. The universe is built on superwaves and waves shifting inside them, there are no particles, even an atom is made only of movement and rhythm. Listen to this man who is the best thing for right now. Write down your thoughts every night and leave them in the woods for the possums. If you follow the words far enough, you will find rich emptiness, and a woman who almost likes you.

Keep driving across the morning’s gentle slaughter to the Dardik farm in Great Meadows, New Jersey. You will exercise with Tim Brockway—he is your friend, but has a hard time seeing you through the migraine that’s been lodged in his head since marriage. He didn’t know you in high school, he is also crumpled into stagnant cardiovascular waves, so don’t be afraid. You will spend the summer here with Tim and a tanned anorexic named Randi Derringer, who will be attracted to you if you cut your poodlehead perm and stop walking around with your hand in front of your face asking if you need plastic surgery. You will ruin the doctor’s guest cottage: darts in the walls, a month of dirty dishes, furry slime plantations spreading over the sink, important because every place you live you’ll leave behind books that cannot be cleaned. But now you will eat from the doctor’s freezer stocked with only hamburgers and ice cream sandwiches, enough to last until you run out of money and a family of wild turkeys leads you back to the field promising a way to live through the slowness in their wings. The parts of your depression you like best, the patches of dead light you cut from a leaf stay behind in the fields, making you darker, more like dusk, something the fawns search for once their mothers are gone. Nobody with tenure will listen to me because my theory is so simple, Doctor Dardik tells you before getting in his white Ford pick-up to drive to yet another university physics department and explain how the universe is made of waves that copy each other in every biological system, how every heartbeat can be felt in outer space, how God is the millions of waves that make it possible for you to believe in this man.

Letter to Myself at Twenty-One, 1990

Dear Tadpole,

Today you will ride to Promised Land State Park with Ed Glory. A Monday when no one else exists away from their coffin-desks. Both of you unemployed, turned down by Manpower because they didn’t like your typing and couldn’t decide which of you was more afraid. Turning the key in your station wagon, the engine will cough and make the sound of horses and then die. This is the only way to get Ed to drive. He will give his Oldsmobile a bath before leaving, the car strong from him calling it his brother, the maroon Oldsmobile he raised from the time it was an egg that he carried in his pocket. This afternoon the sky will be blue as the best day of your life, clouds drifting in tribes that you and Ed will follow into Pennsylvania, moving past the September moodiness of Stroudsburg and Tobyhanna, Mount Pocono and Canadensis. Driving on a road of loose gravel, Ed will feel the pain of the tiny stones licking the paint off his car, and he will curse you for this, and pull over and make you look at the damage he’s suffered, though not one spot of color is missing.

When you arrive at the park, you will be the only ones there but Ed will lock the car anyway. You never know with all the deer in these parts, he’ll say, putting the keys in his jacket and then shutting it in the trunk. You won’t know this for hours yet, after the two of you feel good about yourselves because you’ve been hitting and catching a baseball. If another person were there to watch, you’d forget how to use your hands and your eyes, the sky dark, vanishing behind a hawk or the brief aftermath of an airplane. Ed will drop your fifty-dollar glove in the grass on his way to the restroom and forget where he left it. Searching, you will find only crickets growing out of patches where the ground’s been torn. Ed will decide, after ten minutes, that it’s time to go home. And then he will remember where he put his keys and curse you again, pointing at the locked trunk.

He will refuse to call the police or a locksmith. My Oldsmobile does not need to be hurt any further, once they cut open the lock I’ll never be able to drive again. And he will believe this because he doesn’t have a mother or father who will go searching through Pennsylvania for their son. His mother, who doesn’t set a place for him at the table, who lurks outside his bedroom muttering loser, worthless, and calls the police about the wrinkles in her neighbor’s drapes, this mother who makes Ed afraid to turn off his television and listen to what she’s left for him in the walls, she loves her Lincoln Towncar more than any of her children and will not risk its life by driving out of New Jersey. Ed will make a fist and force you to call your father who will come out to save you from the deer starting to gather, the animals lured by the holes in Ed’s voice, the two of you standing there helpless with a baseball bat, Flight of the Griffin dying on the boom box, Ed hiding behind his glasses whispering Don’t worry, I’ll protect you, I’ll protect you. Ten years from now, waiting for your generation to happen again because you couldn’t find it the first time, this is what will show up in your mailbox, something you wrote the morning Ed agreed to drive, when you were already missing, when you were already a permanent part of that day, and that day only.