poetry by tony trigilio

From The Complete “Dark Shadows” (of My Childhood), Book 4

The night before my reading at Mac’s Backs

in Cleveland, unaware this would be the final weekend of unfettered freedom of movement before COVID-19, I cue up Episode 745 on my laptop having just read a news account that Italy might simply shut down—which it actually will do three days from now, a country-wide quarantine that will lead to supermarket panic buying and prison riots—and as much as I try to distract myself with Dark Shadows (Quentin emerges in chroma-key from behind a Styrofoam tree and looks solemnly over his shoulder, pretending a painted scrim of the Old House is the real thing), I can’t help but think of the opening scene of Fear the Walking Dead, a passenger jet flying against a pale-blue, smoggy sky, streets filled with cars and trucks and congregating people, the coming apocalypse dismissed as a bad flu—100,000 people infected worldwide thus far (3,000 dead), hospitals in Italy overrun, doctors and nurses succumbing to the virus, but the best response I can scrape together is an analogy to a zombie show that devolved into a video game by its third season—and I can’t stop worrying that day-to-day life soon will be reduced to rudimentary plague survival under a government that two years ago impulsively eliminated its entire global pandemic office, all of us held hostage to a president who last week stood in front of microphones and claimed COVID-19 was a “hoax” perpetrated by political opponents obsessed with destroying his presidency, who a day earlier said of the virus, “One day it’s like a miracle, it will disappear”; we’re on our own now, looking over our shoulders when we hear sniffling in the hotel elevator (at least no one seems befuddled these days when I press elevator floor buttons with my knuckles, as I’ve done for years), and it’s difficult to imagine I felt untouchable only a day ago, in Toledo at a Courtyard by Marriott (stopped there overnight, just past the halfway point of my six-hour drive, to ensure my back wouldn’t seize up from sitting behind the wheel too long), drinking a double whiskey under a bank of bright fluorescents shining in the hotel lounge, two gigantic, wall-mounted flat-screen TVs playing Law & Order reruns: its synthetic environment perfectly suited for middle-management business travelers, the Marriott sits a quarter mile from a highway off-ramp, across the street from a Subway sandwich shop where, earlier that evening, an unkempt trucker resembling Charles Olson, an awkward, hulking giant too preoccupied to wear anything but wrinkled clothes that hung on him like faded draperies (most of the deer hunters of my childhood carried themselves this way, like the men who lived in their mothers’ basements and routinely invited neighborhood boys, myself included, to come over and look through hot rod magazines with them), flirted with the woman making my Veggie Delight sub, the two of them worried that Subway’s corporate office discontinued the sandwich chain’s carrot-cake cookies, the sandwich artist (as Subway calls them) chuckling, her three-inch long, lime-green nails luminous underneath her sanitary gloves; I recall their exchange tonight in Cleveland—perhaps the last vignette of complacent American abundance I’ll experience for some time, if ever again, as COVID-19 burns like a comet toward the Midwest and a Dark Shadows soundstage door squeaks on its hinges while Jenny berates her self-portrait looking back at her from a flat hand mirror—the night before my reading, staying at a Cleveland Holiday Inn for likely my last public outing for the foreseeable future, the systems that sustain us on the precipice of a plague, poised to unravel like a blooper reel; tomorrow, a few hours before the reading, I’ll visit Loganberry Books with Dave Polster on a sunny, lemon-yellow afternoon when I could still abide by the quaint delusion my private life might be immune to global catastrophe, and I’ll buy a copy of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s 1939 poetry collection Huntsman, What Quarry? inscribed “To Frances from Harve” (David Trinidad and I will later, self-isolated from the contagion in our separate homes, spend hours trying to decipher the handwriting until he realized it was “Harve,” short for “Harvey”) and dated August 31, 1939—Harve’s gift, celebrating a special occasion known privately only to him and Frances, presented to her the day before Hitler invaded Poland and launched World War II.

Episode 745: March 6, 2020

What did my mother feel, sitting in front of the television

with me on June 24, 1969, watching Reverend Trask harangue his subservient, nineteenth-century daughter—”Satan is on the run,” he says to Charity, “and we will pursue him to his destruction”—my mother whose family scrapped the matriarchal Catholicism it brought from Italy, the whole brood in thrall to creepy, sinners-in-the-hands-of-an-angry-God church fathers who preached hellfire to keep the immigrants cowed and compliant, my mother chafed to a fine nub by her futile combat with an old-world European patriarchy whose damage she had no name for—the word “feminism” never uttered in a family whose men mocked the “women’s libbers” they feared would someday replace them—and I realize now, years later, how isolated she was, sitting in front of the television with me as I watched her watch Dark Shadows in those early days of the women’s movement; she had no contact with women who spent their lives creating words to name the damage, who wrote books that her son, newly three years old and suffering persistent vampire nightmares, would read in college fifteen years later as he began to understand that his anxious, hypervigilant personality was shaped as much by her nervous breakdowns (I was alert, always, for turns of phrase or tonal shifts that might induce her gale-force mood swings) as by the taciturn deer hunters of his northwest Pennsylvania childhood: what was my mother feeling that day in 1969, watching Dark Shadows with her little insomniac son who hunched his shoulders at night to ward off a vampire, as Charity Trask fell to her knees, belittled, clutching a black velvet purse filled with clandestine dirt Barnabas ordered her to collect from the Old House basement (where, until recently, the vampire kept his coffin), the white lace collar of her nightgown hiding the puncture scabs on her neck, begging for mercy from her father, Reverend Trask, looming over her in the black ministerial robes of his jealous God: “I want you to pray for the deliverance of your soul,” he says at the close of a raving soliloquy, hands clasped imperiously behind his back, the clock on the mantel of Charity’s bedroom stuck at 5:20 a.m. for the entire episode.

Episode 782: May 9, 2021

Collins family lawyer Evan Hanley begins another pompous Prince of Darkness ritual,

six black candles burning over his left shoulder and a tiny, brass genie lamp in his hands filled with infernal holy water—but Reverend Trask’s (Jerry Lacy) shadow flits across the screen as he runs to take his spot for the next scene, interrupting Hanley in mid-sentence of a morose incantation and causing a stagehand to hiss, “Jesus, Lacy!” just as Hanley flicks a pinch of Satanic water with his right hand and intones, “Sprits of darkness, I am in contact with you,” a hectic afternoon in Collinsport, Labor Day 2021, five days past what would’ve been my father’s one hundredth birthday, today’s episode cued up just a few weeks after I unearthed a 1937 photo of my father, age sixteen, playing the trumpet on the farm where he grew up, a picture I found in the same shoebox as a group of photographs of my first concert, KISS, which I saw with him on January 23, 1976, a fifty-four-year-old man and his nine-and-a-half-year-old son in a sellout crowd of 5,250 people at the Erie County Fieldhouse, a boxy hockey barn on the rural fringes of Erie, Pennsylvania, watching Gene Simmons breathe fire and spew fake blood in clouds of dry-ice fog; I remember being mesmerized by Peter Criss’s drum solo, acutely aware that my father was sitting right next to me and experiencing the exact same solo, a concert that I like to think was worth it for him—despite being more than twice as old as just about everyone else in the crowd—sharing a central moment in his son’s life (it must’ve been obvious I was enthralled by the pyrotechnic spectacle and the music so loud it vibrated our bodies) and, later, knowing this night stoked his son’s craving to play music, an evening I also remember for the precious childhood object that recorded it—my cheap Instamatic camera, the photos lit by flashcubes snapped to the top, four photos per flashbulb (I carried three bulbs in my pockets that night). 

Episode 791: September 6, 2021

Count Petofi’s servant, Aristede, arrives in Collinwood in a moody overcoat

topped by a clownish, purple cravat and black Astrakhan hat (a furry winter cap also known as a “pie hat” for its resemblance to Russian pierogi), threatening Quentin with a wavy-bladed Indonesian keris dagger nicknamed “The Dancing Girl,” a soothing dose of supernatural vaudeville—a man in a pie hat poking a werewolf with a dancing girl—on a gloomy, early-autumn, pandemic afternoon in Chicago (696,006 Americans dead as of today, September 27, 2021); upon multiple rewinds, I’m struck by Aristede’s uncanny resemblance to a young Donny Osmond, his soft-focus nose and gauzy cheekbones sparking memories of Osmond’s bland-foreheaded, Mormon boy-toy innocence, recalling for me the blissed-out humanism of his neutered smile on the cover of Portrait of Donny, which I listened to constantly, age seven, along with Paul McCartney and Wings’ Red Rose Speedway, the ex-Beatle’s hit single “My Love” nearly as insipid as Osmond’s cover of Paul Anka’s “Puppy Love,” both songs serving as the soundtrack for my tedious, second-grade English homework, nightly rote memorization exercises which, I confess, helped me become a crack speller despite the antsy boredom of slogging through those academic drills—a young boy obsessed with Alice Cooper and Black Sabbath, and two years later with KISS, but also lulled by the schmaltzy, soft-rock soundtrack of two treacly love ballads whose volume I turned up so high the music came out distorted from the tinny, four-inch wide speaker in my shoebox-shaped Radio Shack Realistic brand portable cassette player with thumb-sized, black plastic pushbuttons for playing tapes, a bright red plastic button for recording, and a slate-gray, plastic pull-out handle that allowed me to carry the device around the house like a piece of hand luggage, another precious childhood object, like the Instamatic camera I took, with three flashbulbs in my pockets, my first concert, 1976, age nine, a KISS show with my father, and as I finish this sentence on October 18, 2021, after a three-week period of revision in which 32,292 additional Americans died of the plague, the sun casting an oddly yellow-white autumn glow in the living room as if cut with moonlight, the trees outside my window on North Shore Avenue beginning their slow fade into brittle orange, red, and brown, I can’t stop hearing the sappy opening lines of “Puppy Love” playing on repeat in my memory (“And they called it puppy love / Oh, I guess they’ll never know”), a song I assumed, as a child, was the heartbreaking account of a young boy pining for a dog who ran away, which caused me to admire Osmond for his ability to stare so placidly at the camera for the Portrait of Donny cover shot despite the loss of his beloved pet.

Episode 792: September 27 and October 18, 2021