| David
Alpaugh
Deconstruction
This
was no playhouse but a house in earnest.
—Robert Frost
At
Mattel® Toys in Rahway, New Jersey, in 1973,
we
built Barbie’s vinyl playhouse by the skidful
to
go under your Christmas tree.
We
did, my colleagues, and me.
To
my left a youth who wanted to kill Whitey;
to
my right a Honk-if-you-love-Jesus nut;
straight
ahead a Cuban exile someone said
was
really built (all I could see was her butt).
The
man in the middle was me.
And
I was as white as the housewife’s
wash
you see every weekday at three;
yes,
I was whiter than Moby Dick,
bobbing
on an Ahab-angry sea.
Maria
snapped in isinglass windows.
Curtis
stapled on the roof; Nat, the floor;
Joe
College (I) got the thinking man’s
job—attaching
the “detachable” door.
Then
I’d pass it to the Jehovah’s Witness
who’d
wince as she put Babylon in a box;
and
off it would go on a conveyor belt
to
L.A., Sioux City, or the Bronx—
where
America was fabricating dreamgirls
with
oohs & aahs beneath a tinselled tree:
”Look
at Barbie’s playhouse!” Megans
&
Tiffanies cried. “She even has a tiny TV!”
I’ve
seen photographs of weary Asians
laying
track for the railroad industry.
I’ve
seen real Mexicans on their knees
picking
lettuce for the A&P.
Many
have worked hard for little;
few
harder for less than we—
who
sweated in worn out jeans and khakis
for
a doll who cried APPEARANCE IS ALL.
as
the White House began to fall in 1973.
Mr.
Siereck Gets a Sense of Humor
There
is a sense in which
I
can slip my hand
into
my side
pull
out my liver
and
slap it down bleeding
on
pink butcher’s paper
to
ave atque vale poor Hans Siereck,
laid
out last week at a hundred and three
in
Plainfield, New Jersey,
gruff,
humorless butcher of my childhood,
lord
of the long glass casket,
through
which housewives viewed chops, cutlets,
legs
of lamb, t-bones, kidneys, sweetbreads,
who’d
watch in silence each week
as
a boy eyed flesh and organs,
compared
per-pound prices,
seeking
affordable provender
for
hungry snapping turtles.
“Please,
Mister Siereck,
can
I have twenty-five-cents-worth
of
your very worst chopped meat?”
And
two stores down, on an errand for mother,
“Six
hard rolls and a loaf of Jewish rye.”
If
I were Jay at Leventhal’s bakery
I’d
say, “You don’t have to call our bread
Jewish—just
say with seeds. That’s what
your
mother means, isn’t it?”
And
if I were Hans Siereck, I’d say,“Vy don’t you try
your
own liver? I cut you nize slize.
Snabbing
turddles love it
and
ist gut for them.”
I’d
wipe the dark blood on my apron,
laugh
to myself in High German,
and
put another quarter in the register.
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