Dolores X


Dolores had monkeys on her back.
She was cute beyond adorable
and slept with her older brother,
Fred, 18, Perry, me and June.
We were all 15 except for
the handsome, dark and foreboding
brother who preferred men, but
what did I know in 1957.

Dolores cheered for PHS. She hated
Jocks but Perry and I outside the
rodeo were her special toys, and
she was "out of our minds" perfect.
She was our temptress before
we knew Lolita; she was older
than me but not Perry.

Walter Perry had been her first,
one story was told she had brought
him home from her fifth grade class.
June, 13, was the seductive neighbor
who loved Fred and would do
anything to be like Dolores.

"Fred was weird," Perry said, "but
I won’t blame him. We all did it.
Perry had this silent laugh that made
his short crew cut stand up taller.
We had great times at 42nd and 8th
arcades shooting guns at targets and
laughing at the misfits. We were not
kind, and we hid out on Saturdays
and a few times we brought Dolores.
She said she was coming no shit.

We dressed her as a boy, and she
didn't quite make it, and we almost
got arrested and Dolores was chased
by a freak who had his thing out
running down 8th Avenue between
42nd and 43rd Streets -- we cracked
up in the most unusual ways, but
we were too sane, one future medic
and the other a jet pilot over Nam.

Perry raced through track season
He had ferocious speed --
I made All County, and Dolores,
my mother and June sat in the
middle of the stands as we shook
our heads amazed we had the prize
holding our football helmets like heroes.


My favorite thing was to take down
the punter. I did it many times by
stealth. I loved to beat his blockers
into the cold November mud. With
their single bar face mask,
they ate a lot of shit.

When I practiced, I really didn't
measure up. At 180 lbs how could
I? In a game, any game, I fought
as if murder was a possibility.

Football is not rugby I learned later.
I loved the scrum and when I played
in Dublin I though of Dolores as she
cheered and then had sex with us.

Kids call it buddy sex now. We were
dark angels of course. We didn't
give a fuck, but we were scared.
Big bad Russia was out of control
and Ike looked tired and as I read
the NY Times every day, I saw
my world as one holy whore house
with temptation written in Cyrillic
letters on the tits of a beauty queen.

2.
Dolores’s younger next door
neighbor June, barely 13, chased
Dolores, Fred and myself, playing
the weak, feeble girl, as if that would
work in any age including the 1950s.

Fred took advantage. I was almost
her age, but knew better. I had been
trained by my mother to serve.
I taught them all her adult tricks.

Dolores was impressed, and Perry
looked at me and said, you’re weird.
I was at that time, something other
than an ordinary boy in an adult world.

That went on until June's mother
caught her daughter with her lips
drugged by slippery skin and
fine brown hair. Perry and I watched
but sometimes the girls would not let us
do anything more. Watching became
a disease with us, and when Perry's
Mom found out the truth about
her hero son, Perry waited by
that black telephone as if he were
about to get a call from the President
for beating the national record for the mile.
Perry knew when his mom heard there
would be a scream and his lights would
go out, and his life would be over
"or something like that," he said.

My mother said she wanted to meet
June and Dolores when June's mom called.
I refused to invite her-- but she insisted,
and Daisy engineered the whole thing.
They met and we swam naked in my
Uncle Joe's private lake in west Jersey.

Dolores asked if my Uncle
liked her, you know how, she said
squeezing my hand, and rubbing
my knuckles against her tits.

Your mother hovers you know.
“What's better: mother or brother?”
Dolores asked detailed questions
about my "Uncle Joe" while she
giggled and rubbed her inner legs
trying to get comfortable she said
lying, of course, but pretending
as she liked to tease more than do.

He wasn’t my Uncle. He was at least
nice to Daisy, my mother, and he didn’t
beat her, or have to defend me
from the blast of word knives.
Daisy said, “We are lucky.”
He likes Dolores. Will you give her up?
I knew there were three girls in my
art class who promised me anything,
and Mum as she liked to be called
was persuasive as she moved her
hands down my spine too far.

She asked. “Joe wants to know
if her parents would be trouble.”

I snickered, moved to the other side
of the room. Daisy stopped my smirk.

"We can’t have any trouble.”

“Yea Mum, she fucks her brother
and they make movies of it all.”

“I’m not surprised." "She has that
look. What’s the brother like?”

I knew if I wrote this down no
one would believe it. Mothers
and sons don’t talk this way.

It was as if I were her lover
by arrangement. It is true
when she was beaten by my father,
I was thrown around like a pulp doll
when he passed out we did hold the other
and that led to more when he finally gave it
up one day, tripping off the end of a pier.

Mother found many men for support,
and she wouldn’t marry; she said
I am married to my son, forgetting
she had a daughter five years younger
who often dragged her teddy bear
to my bed, and snuggled, and I helped
her cry it all out. I didn't use her.
My daughter will be a dancer, she said
a bit late. Daisy drank long after
my Dad died. She sobered up
when her father, a good man, visited
with my grandmother, Esther, and my
Rt. Rev Monsignor Cousin. One was a
big time New York priest, and the other
the daughter of a wise Rabbi. They
brought cake from Zabars. New York
bagels and lox were my sweet tooth
almost as tasty as mother’s milk
when I was six when my sister
slept too early and Daisy
complained that it hurt her tits.
She said: “They are tits. Not breasts.”

My Uncle Joe met Dolores, and my mother
at some motel, and I heard from that young
girl how fucked up a lover that the old dude
couldn’t do it really. He wanted to watch.

“Who I said?”

“Idiot, she said. Your mother and me.”

I knew that was what mother wanted,
but I played stupid.

“Now, you’re going to have to pay me
for that terrible night,” she said.

“Pay You!”

“Yes, don’t worry I know you’re cheap.”

Next year, Dolores was too popular for
a crossover intellectual jock that had
defended the queers as they were called
once upon a time. She acted and made
porno loops, and Fred her brother
took her to Vegas right after graduation.


3. 1966-1971
June and Dolores died their
own young deaths, I learned
but that was far down the road.

Perry and I did what did. He
lost his wings, and had a mental
break down and crashed into
the deck of the carrier. They
made him a Flight Officer, I
was a medic in the jungle rot.

I cleaned bed pans instead
of delivering babies until I
was hijacked to Pleiku and
then I cured the sick with
drugs and kept the troops
stoned with whatever I could
cop at the local witch doctor's
whore house/bath and general
resting place for noncoms
at stand down before being
set loose to die in a storm of
dung and dirty Agent Orange
drifting out of the wild blue
yonder. It was a wonderful
day when you came home alive
and you could get clean after
a week on ops. I killed. I
was a medic. We were almost
over run on Tet, and I empty
two magazines and a third.

Sgt asked how they could make
a soldier rated expert a medic.

2. 1971-1985

I lost track of her. Perry almost set
the world record for the 100 yard dash.

I found Columbia more than a playground
Perry, Sean, Fred and Dolores forgot theirs.

Twenty-five years later, Dolores walked
into me in Fort Lee, NJ coming out of a 7-11.

I was married, had two small children.
She looked 60 although, her worn face
and red out door hands had been broken
several timed she said for disobedience.

I didn’t ask her to tell the story. She said
she sold drugs when she couldn’t whore
or dance and he simply crushed her fingers.
He did worse to others. They won’t come home.

“I had learned to play the piano, and I sang.
He knew everything and that stopped me again.
I ran away last year, and he didn’t follow. I left
it all there except some money and what I wore.
I am homeless."

4.
She said nothing more. I asked if she wanted to talk to my wife. Dolores said nothing.

She told me what I knew that Fred had OD'd on Smack.

"I loved him more than I could ever express. We never told anyone we were brother and sister. Distant cousins we said who met at the Jersey shore by accident."

"Fred used you," I said.

That quip didn't help our conversation. She ignored my bad manners.

"I was confused when he died, and I did what any man said. I didn’t even care if I got money, as long as I had some clothes, and a place to sleep, and they left alone when the daylight broke my kitchen window shades. They called me vampire."

I danced in my head while she talked about being a party girl in Vegas. I saw her as the teenager everyone thought would become a famous.

She lowered her head and held my arm as we walked her into my living room two blocks from the store.

She asked if I wanted sex, and I said no. My wife knows I told her, and she wants to help.

"I like girls too. I like them more than guys. Tell her that."

I could take my eyes off her beautiful body clothed in layers of old clothes.


5.
Weeks passed. She loved my children. They called her Aunt Bee, as she asked. She played card games, giggled and got younger and more beautiful. She took two baths a day and said she finally felt clean.

Sad, but day by day, but there was a darker depression. I offered to pay for a Doctor, to call her Aunt, or our friend, Perry, but she refused. Said she would scream and run away if we did anything that was not in tune. She said she liked easy music and played while I slept in the daytime after working all night driving a cab or writing copy, proof reading for an ad agency so I could write poetry and paint murals.

One night, I woke and Dolores stood naked before our bed. She was masturbating. Can I sleep with you? No sex. My wife had reached her limit, and said we will take you for help. They will find you rooms and food, and a job. You need help.

"Sleep with her," and my wife left taking pillows and blankets. Can I be your child, she asked? Here was the star of my sex fantasies in High School asking to be my child, my lover, her father, anything to reach what she assumed would turn me on, knowing I told intricate dysfunctional stories as a writer. I said. "I do nothing but write." I Love my wife. She doesn’t want to raise you. We both know you need help but the system is worse. I tried telling her logically why I didn’t just call the police and throw her out in the black snow on Myrtle Avenue. When I stopped she closed her eyes and turned her back, she didn’t sleep. I watched her. Finally, she let it go and drifted off to sleep waving her arms almost in goodbye.

“Doctors suck,” she said as a whisper. “All they want is to make me sleep, or to write about my life, or fuck me on their desk. One wanted me to beat him his ass with a whip. I did him. It was fun.”

She asked earlier. “Why I had kissed her? Why did you wash her back in the shower? Why did your wife kiss me like her whore? You weren’t in the room. It was true. My wife had told me.

I told Dolores I knew. I said we were weak. Marriage has bad turns to it, but you couldn’t help us, and we couldn’t ask you. My wife, turned on by this kinky threesome, but knew she was She said you were incapable of consent, and at times I felt I had found a lost relative and they put you in a sanatorium if you are incapable of taking care of your life.

She cried. “No, you were so wrong. It would have healed us.”

I had nothing to say.

She might have been better off as our child; I did discover she was smart when she reached back to our times in her bed, on the floor years ago but that was not what her smart, she had learned to speak Russian on her own. “Well, I lived with one for a while, she said. He didn’t think much of me, and wouldn’t buy or bring me books in English so I learned Russian, and read his library in the daytime and he beat me at night with a thick strap while he got drunk on Vodka and bad wine.

I wanted to return to 1958 and Bergen County, New Jersey when we were teenagers and the greatest of our sins might have been sex, and she had her brother to love, and what is wrong with the world when the lights are broken and the millions of rivers flow backward from the daylight to the night. We couldn’t stop loving each other, and when I arranged for her Aunt who I found by chance to take care of her, she refused to speak or even look me in the eyes for what she thought a betrayal of the time we were young teenagers in a town west of Fort Lee in Bergen County. She was beautiful youthful and fresh. At the end I didn’t see the wrinkles, and even my wife, who was an amazing woman, realized we had made a mistake.

In a year, Dolores was dead. She walked in front of a train outside a diner in Hackensack, N.J. A local cop I knew told me that the ME said she was clean of drugs, but she was pregnant, and I wondered how the future could continue after its failure to open doors and not be the usual trite family in the closed circles of America in 1985.