Why I Can’t Write

by James Cagney

Speak what should

remain unspoken

— write what

should never be

said aloud.

1He was the third psychiatrist I’d seen in my life. The third shrink I’d sat with in a year and, like a bad date, I found him on the Internet. I Googled my issues — yeah, Blood: Googled. My. Issues. And this dude pops up. Even in his photo he appears to be listening — as if you could print his picture, thumbtack it to a bedroom wall and talk to it.

He was poised. Concerned. Serious. I e-mailed him from work like you’d write the word ‘help’ with boulders on the island of your problems.

He called my office faster than some of my relatives would. Before me a queue of shaved, toned, white boy attorneys file past into the conference room toting coffee and cell phones and legal-sized Redwell folders swollen with papers. While I’m directing the delivery guy with the 1950s buzz cut to stack boxes near the storage room, and printing an e-mailed shopping list from a secretary who works for an attorney not quite as old as her firstborn son, the doctor says gently: “I’m responding to the e-mail you sent me the other day…”

While signing a packing slip, I’m whispering into the phone words like: isolated, pain, failure, loneliness… and the voice on the phone listens by writing notes so heavily it sounds like a dot matrix printer, and the delivery guy says “I think you’re short a box because the manifest says___,” and one of the attorneys shuts the conference room door on me and him and the boxes and my issues with a firm slam.

I say into the phone: “I just wanted to reach out to somebody. I wanted to reach out for help before…”

Before… Well, James — before what, exactly?

“I wanted to reach out for help because I need help.”

Scribble.

“…because I really don’t have anyone to talk to.”

Scribble.

“Because I don’t know what to do to help myself.”

Scribble.

2 The shrink’s waiting room is as quiet as a buried coffin. It’s a living room with no evidence of life. The plants are plastic and the air smells bottled.

The doctor comes in. Gray hair. English accent. Olive skin. He’s not pure white — something exotic is mixed in there. Think Omar Sharif. I sit on the couch and lay out a summary of my last decade, my isolated weekends, my adoption story. I tell him about death and loss and foster parents and biological mothers and identity and being denied college to take care of seniors. With every turn of my life’s plot, he hisses like a bus pulling into a depot.

He asks me if I’ve thought of suicide with the same voice someone might ask, Have you thought of St. John’s wort?

I oversell my answer. I tell him I’m chicken. I want to be a better man. I don’t want to quit — I want to see where this life is going. This can’t be it. God’s blessed me before. Certainly this feeling in my gut (hopelessness, worthlessness, ennui) won’t last…

Scribble.

He nods “So you’re optimistic.”

That sounds wrong. But I agree.

3 The first time I met my biological mother I was unimpressed. Initially, I hadn’t been told who she was or why I was being asked to meet her. Just another old woman from my mom’s beauty school days, I thought. And now it’s been years since I’ve known her and only recently has it occurred to me…

That my father — whom I thought was my father and was not — remained hands-off where I was concerned, now makes sense because I didn’t belong to him. He could not look at me and see anything of himself. How frustrating that must’ve been.

That my mother — whom I thought was my mother and was not- — was so open to helping others and being a den mother to her students, friends, nieces and nephews, even her own father, now makes sense, because she couldn’t have children of her own. For her to look at me every day and keep such a huge secret… How frustrating that must’ve been. That my birth mother — whom I never knew I was supposed to know and now know and wish I didn’t — did the unthinkable and passed me off to strangers, now makes sense, because she couldn’t afford to keep me; her life then was a nightmare and the woman she wanted me to stay with was so kind and so unhappy being childless, that it was the wrong thing to do for all the right reasons or vice versa. That she had this ‘other child’ she had to forget about… How frustrating that must’ve been.

And what about me? Well, fuck me.

4 “And what about your relationships?” The doctor asks. I saw my parents kiss once, The only sign of affection I’d seen between them. He was dressed for a trip to Reno and had broken out the cologne. She was staying home that weekend and was elbow deep in the sink when he walked up. I was in elementary school, doorknob high. I stopped in the doorway behind them, saw him lean toward her and peck her, quick and dry, on the mouth.

The day before my dad’s funeral, my mom, while picking lint off her nightgown, said: “I guess in his own way he loved me.” She wept. I held her.

They married in 1945 in Bakersfield. I have their marriage license. It is creased, tattered, the color of coffee with crème. Death did them part in 1993.

Again: “And what about your relationships?” the doctor asks. “Never had any.” I shrug. “I can’t get close to people. Everybody sees me as their “friend”.”

For example, I had a date with a prospective “friend” a while back. When I told my “friend” that I wanted to be more than just “friends” and no, I didn’t want to have a platonic dinner before she left town and yeah I purposefully forgot to return a call, she emailed me this:

Hmph. I cant figure out why you, or my bf for that matter, would be into me that way…. self doubt issues and stuff like that… and I, I dunno, had to like really effort to convince the guy that you weren’t a threat. I love the guy, though I know it seems like he and I are always in a bind when I’m talking to you… but he’s where my heart is at right now. I duly appreciate your honesty… but I can’t continue on as anything further than friendship< I am not a threat. Repeat.

I am not a threat. I keep asking myself: Why is it so hard for me to create love in my life??

Then I look at my childhood. My parents didn’t seem to love one another so much as tolerate one another. After how many years is love replaced by habit?

“Would you like to make another appointment?” The doctor grabs his calendar.

I can’t write this. Because love is the fuel I need to creatively burn, and I’m running on empty.

5 Remember me?

We worked together for three years

We went to church together

We carpooled

I sat next to you in Mrs. Yan’s American Government class

I lived around the corner from you

I dated your cousin that summer

I was the janitor at that place where you volunteered

I was close friends with your brother —

I spent the night that one time

I’m your friend I’m your co worker I’m your classmate

I’m your son

I used to belong to you

6 Remember me?

7 Remember?

I can’t write this. Because the only words trailing my pen are tainted memories, and who wants to read that shit?

8 Every so often, my father would look at me and tell a joke about the day I was born. No birds and bees. He’d say: We was out there on the river one day. Damn it was hot.

And my mom would say: Honey, stop. And he’d say: we saw this log floating down the river and looked. Good God! There was a baby propped up on that log! And my mom would say: That’s not funny.

The big finish: And we looked at one another. I say, Honey — what we gon do! So I hooked the log with my fishing line and reeled you in.

And from then on we had us a baby. Good God. And he laughed. He was skinny so it was like a skeleton laughing. And my mom would shush him while holding back her giggles like one would hold back vomit, and I would laugh too despite that I never really got the joke.

Until now. The joke is me. And I most certainly can’t write about that.

9 I am trying to imagine that darkened room and the death that separates us like a gate. I see you heaving, sweating, stretched out like a spider across a bed in a backroom in Oakland. You are alone despite the laughter drifting in from a bid whist game in the living room. There is something wrong with the baby and you know it. Ten and a half months. No movement. You know. I see you gripping sheets with the anxiety of a virgin. I imagine you reaching within, searching for a hand, as if the infant was too bashful and had to be lured out. I see you pulling gently, using one hand to deflate your stomach, then the other to guide …

Well, what’s the word here? Him? Her? It? What’s the word for a child that’s never heard the sound of its own crying?

What do you call a mother who births dead children?

Again: I see you pulling gently, using one hand to deflate your stomach, then the other to guide… it… out. And like meat that has been overcooked, I see flesh dripping off the bone.

What were you thinking then? I should have asked. You told me most of this story while you baked bread in your kitchen. You kneaded dough as your story dripped like fevered sweat. You said this was the year before I was born. You said you were in a backroom in a house in Oakland, that your husband and his parents and a few of your brothers were in the next room, playing cards. You were alone, the baby was dead, you pulling it out of yourself. You used the word: molting. Then your mother-in-law, this small Native American looking woman, had come into the room after you’d struggled birthing this dead flesh and announced to the house: “She done kilt the baby.”

I see a mound of wrinkled flesh like steaming chitterlings laying before you. I see the others gathered around the bedroom door like crumbs around a mouth: What happened? What has she done? I don’t see crying. I see heads shaking, empty bottles rattling, cigarette smoke flowering sideways out of exasperated mouths. I don’t hear any prayers. I see trash bags and the stuff being hauled out of the house in plastic. Throw the baby out with the bathwater. Ha. Ha. Ha. I see sheets and smell incense burning. And I see you left alone and the card game going on like nothing worth talking about had happened.

That was the year before I was born. Maybe a year and a half or so. Because you’d gotten pregnant again and said once you’d gone another 10 months with me, you checked into the hospital (actually just sat in the waiting room) and stayed there, telling the doctor about the last time but he didn’t believe you. They hadn’t tested you for diabetes. But you were stubborn because you’d learned your lesson. Didn’t you?

I don’t feel like a motherless child.

I sometimes feel like the abortion that got away.

I can’t write about this. I can’t write about being cultured in the womb of the dead. Because somehow I’m still living in it.

“You said ninety dollars, right?” Right.

Shit. I can’t afford therapy. Maybe I should just start drinking.

James Cagney’s collection Black Steel Magnolias in the Hour of Chaos Theory was published by Nomadic Press in 2018

.James Cagney is writer, poet, and performer currently residing in Oakland, CA. His work has appeared online and in print in Caduceus, Sussurus, Un-mute.com, Oakland Local, and Sparring With the Beatnik Ghosts. Originally published in Pact’s Point of View in 2011.