PoetryAloud
E. Michael Desilets Reads
Jazzing the Accelerator
Snowy mornings were the worst, the old man
clomping in the hallway outside our bedrooms berating us in unison with the neighborhood wind: Come on, boys, snap it up. Movie stars, every last one of you. Up all night, sleep all day. Our eyes clamped shut, we could still see him, can still see him now, doing his exasperated flatfooted dance in his Stetson fedora and Robert Hall topcoat, his cheap rubbers barely covering his wingtips. While we were still screening our drool-drenched dreams he had showered, shaved and moved his bowels: The Clockwork Dad. You guys should eat more fruit and follow suit. He'd smell sharply of whatever scent we'd given him last Father's Day or Christmas or Anniversary. If we didn't look alive fast enough he'd prod the bottoms of our feet with his car keys until our brains pulsated with patricidal fantasies. Seven sons united in filial impiety. Incensed by our lethargy, he'd call each of us Hey Joe, though none of us was so named: Hey Joe, you’ve got somewhere to go. And there were always four or five jalopies to start up to get us wherever that was. Cursed by driveway snow, most had, like us, succumbed to the horror of the broken day. Our father, under each hood with his few tools—pliers, screwdriver, hammer, bloody handkerchief—would bang his magic into carburetors and spark plugs and alternators and radiators and batteries while we'd sit sullen and frozen and underdressed behind steering wheels turning keys awaiting those totemic words: Jazz the accelerator and let's get this tin can rolling! So we'd give it the gas, trying to nap with our right feet pumping away. The old lady, cleverly sedated by The Up All Night Creature Feature, would be snoring away like a movie star, soon to be upstaged, we hoped, by multiple roaring engines. |
E. Michael Desilets
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