REUNION
HUGH FOX
LUMINIS BOOKS
Published by Luminis Books
1950 East Greyhound Pass, #18, PMB 280,
Carmel, Indiana, 46033, U.S.A.
Copyright © Hugh Fox, 2011
PUBLISHER’S NOTICE
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the
author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead,
business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Cover art for Reunion by Alexandra Fox.
ISBN-10: 1-935462-47-4
ISBN-13: 978-1-935462-47-7
Printed in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
To Bernadete, thirty years of jungle delight.
Praise for the work and legacy of Hugh Fox:
“ . . . a new sound built upon Whitman, Hart Crane, Ginsberg
and Snyder that swirls into a kaleidoscope of American life,
personal and public.”
—Choice
“Reading Hugh Fox . . . is a bit like getting on a bus with a ticket
you’ve no idea to where, you are jostled, take some wild curves,
have breath-taking vistas, get to where you’d never expected
sometimes dazed, shaken up, sometimes laughing, never bored,
always a little different than when you began.”
—Lyn Lifshin, poet and literary critic
“Like Charles Ives, like Herman Melville, Hugh Fox is an
American original. There is no one else writing like him today.”
—Richard Morris
Hugh Fox was born in Chicago in 1932 and is one of the
founders (along with Ralph Ellison, Anais Nin, Joyce Carol
Oates, and Buckminster Fuller) of the Puschcart Prize for
literature. He is a poet, novelist, archaeologist, and has published
over 100 works, including Depths and Dragons, Home of the Gods,
and Approaching /Acerando (poems written in Portuguese in
Brazil, translated into English when Fox returned to the United
States).
He was the founder and Board of Directors member of
COSMEP, the International Organization of Independent
Publishers, from 1968 until its death in 1996. Hugh was editor of
Ghost Dance: The International Quarterly of Experimental Poetry from
1968-1995 and Latin American editor of Western World Review &
North American Review during the 1960s. He was former
contributing reviewer for Smith/Pulpsmith and Choice. Hugh Fox
is listed in Who’s Who: The Two Thousand Most Important Writers in
the Last Millennium, Dictionary of Middlewestern Writers, and The
International Who’s Who.
REUNION
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1
“LOOK AT THIS!” Buzzy (Professor Lox) shouted at his wife as
he sat down at the dining room table and opened the day‟s mail.
“What is it?” asked Malinche. Just a trace of accent. Just a
little “spin” on the „i‟s‟ in “is” and “it,” almost “ees” and “eet,”
but not quite. You‟d have a hard time guessing she was from
Karachi and that her native language was Urdu. Kind of lightish
skin too. She could have passed for a lightish Chicano. In fact
often did.
“What a harebrained idea, it‟s an invitation from my
Grammar School. Fiftieth anniversary of my Grammar School
class graduation. They‟re having this big reunion in Chicago in
January. I mean what a crock-of-shit month to have it in anyway.
You wait fifty years and then pick January 12th. I mean it‟s not
even from the school, it‟s from Fran O‟Callaghan, one of the old
gang. Fat Franny. I mean I haven‟t seen her since she was
fourteen and now she‟s sixty four . . . ”
Malinche took the invitation in hand. It was edged in black
and began:
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HUGH FOX
OUR LADY OF PERPETUAL SORROWS SCHOOL CLOSED DOWN IN
JUNE OF 1990, OUR LADY OF PERPETUAL SORROWS CHURCH
CLOSED DOWN THE FOLLOWING AUGUST (1990). THOSE OF US
WHO HAVE MAINTAINED CONTACT WITH EACH OTHER OVER
THE LAST FIFTY YEARS THOUGHT IT MIGHT BE TIME TO HAVE A
GENERAL GET-TOGETHER WHILE WE STILL CAN GET TOGETHER.
“Bizarre! It‟s absolutely bizarre!” said Malinche with finality.
Of course everything she said she said with finality. She was
THE SURGEON, after all, pulled in half a million a year, and all
he was was a Freshman Comp prof at Southwest Michigan Tech
in Grand Junction, pulled in a piddly $45,000.00. Although
(points on his side) it wasn‟t called The Freshman Comp
Department where he taught, but Language Technologies. Like
he taught Language Vectors I, II and III, which was Frosh
Comp I, II and III, but like the secret motto of the department
went “I won‟t snitch on you, if you don‟t snitch on me.”
Accent or not, size or not (she was a solid 5‟ .0003 inches),
The Surgeon was the Surgeon.
“What‟s bizarre?” he challenged her.
“Fifty [feefty] years. You won‟t even know each other. The
face changes „morphically‟ through time. It‟s not just fat and
sagging, but irregular growth, noses grow, eyes shrink, hands
twist, ears twist . . . what I always try to do when I do a
Reconstruct is to get the person back to Stage I . . . but it‟s [eet‟s]
impossible . . . and what‟s that Lady of Perpetual Sorrows all
about? What Lady is that?”
“Our Lady of Baghdad, geek!” he snapped back at her, then
softened, knew better, his fourth wife, after all, and he‟d be sixty2
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four in four months and when he could get it up it had an
attention-span of micro-seconds and there was no one on the
substitute bench waiting to get into his game, “Our Lady of
Perpetual Sorrows is the Blessed Virgin. Like she had all these
sorrows. Like, you know, Jesus and Veronica‟s veil and the
crowning with thorns and all that . . . ”
“Crowing with thorns?” she asked, and the worst part was
she wasn‟t kidding.
“Crowning! Jesus gets crowned with thorns!”
Starting to get sharp and testy again, calming himself down,
activating a little Suzuki Zen . . . coming in and out of Nothing,
coming in and out of Nothing, breathe, in and out of Nothing,
less than Nothing, zero and then into Minus World . . . minus
ten, 20 . . . countdown into Negative World . . .
“And so his mother is sorrowful because he gets crowned
with thorns?”
“You got it! Terrific!”
And he reached over and gave her a little kiss.
All these odd odors as he approached her. He ought to be
used to them by now, but . . . sandalwood and lemon-oil, garlic,
cardamom, just an inexplicable trace of humus around her ears.
“I love you,” he said.
“Me too,” she answered.
“So you want to go down to this thing with me in Chicago?”
he asked.
“Sure! Why not?!? I love Chicago!!”
“OK.”
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HUGH FOX
And it was settled, although, as he walked upstairs to the
computer to write a Yes-letter to Fat Franny, he was full of
misgivings.
There were whole rows of misgivings.
First of all, he was already depressed with all of his six kids
gone, Pepe (40) down in Houston working for a garbage
processing company (“Detritus Engineer”), Conchita (38) in a
mental hospital in Dallas where her mother, his first wife, Maria
del Carmen (Bolivian) lived, very successfully passing for a
Chicano, although she looked like The Andes Incarnated.
Jeeyoun (32) (pronounced GEE ON, as in GEE WHIZ) back in
Seoul with his second wife, Mitzi. Which was a ridiculous name
for a Korean, but . . . three grandchildren who he‟d only seen
once two Thanksgivings before when they‟d come to visit but
didn‟t speak one word of English, and his Korean was beyond
totally rusty, more like dismantled. A Japanese son-in-law he‟d
never met. Then Hannah (24) back in Israel, feeling some sort of
what she called “ethno-historical gene-pull” to return to her
mother‟s homeland, Israel, studying for a degree in Computer
Science in Tel Aviv, married to a soft-spoken, humid-handed
West Banker . . . putting off having children until she finished
her Ph.D. Sarah (21) and Itzak (14) in New York with Sally.
Hannah, Sarah and Itzak all Sally‟s kids. But Sally had always said
“the last place I want to go back to is Israel. I prefer the perfume
business in New York.”
But he hardly saw them either.
Sol, Sally‟s second husband, wouldn‟t let him stay at their
place. And hotels, even the Hotel Wentworth down on Times
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Square, the world‟s seediest dump, was a hundred a twenty a day
now.
And there was this Anti-Pakistani/Anti-Moslem bias that
both Sol and Sally had. So he‟d converted. Why not?
Jesus . . . he‟d actually thought of putting up a big poster
thing in his room in the basement:
WIFE NUMBER 1—MARIA DEL CARMEN ROBLEDO,
BOLIVIAN:
TWO KIDS:
1). PEPE,
2). CONCHITA,
WIFE NUMBER 2—MITZI CHUNG:
ONE KID (JEEYOUN), THREE GRANDCHILDREN,
WHOSE NAMES HE ALWAYS FORGOT SO HE CALLED THEM
MANNY, MOE AND JACK, WHICH GOT JEEYOUN (AND MITZI)
MAD,
WIFE NUMBER 3—SALLY BERNBAUM:
THREE KIDS:
1). HANNAH,
2). SARAH,
3). ITZAK.
It was a fucking mess, a fucking joke.
It was really all the fault of the Fulbright Commission. All
those overseas teaching jobs they had kept giving him, Bolivia,
Korea, Israel, Pakistan. And there was always a pair of eyes that
got “interested” in him. And this exotique impulse in him that
responded to the eyes. And he never seemed to be really getting
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HUGH FOX
along with any of his current wives anyhow, the promise always
out there that, yes, CHANGE, AND THINGS WILL GET
BETTER FOR YOU.
Not that they ever did. He got to the top of the stairs and
looked out. A beautiful October day in Michigan, the leaves all
bright reds and yellows, like flagrant, thriving skin-diseases. The
air crisp and dry. Like you could snap it in half like a Pringle‟s
potato-chip.
But he never got rid of his sense of mortality. One beautiful
yellow-red maple leaf fell from the tree outside the window and
it became a major symbol for his mortality. OU SONT LES
NIEGES D‟HIER? Where are the snows of yesterday? Which in
Hebrew would be something like BEMATZAV HAROEEN
AVAR . . . and in Korean CHANG-NYUN NAERIN NUN-EE
UNDIE Y-SUMNIKA.
Or was the Chang-Nyun supposed to be where the YSumnika was?
Was any of it right? Or do I wake or do I dream?
He wasn‟t sure.
In Urdu?
His brain like a broken microwave oven, a Mixmaster with a
broken OFF button.
He was afraid that some day someone would ask him his
name and he‟d look up and stare as blankly as the noonday sun
in the middle of the Sahara.
MY NAME IS EVERYWHERE-NOWHERE,
EVERYTHING-NOTHING.
Another month and the leaves would all be down. Wasn‟t
there supposed to be some time of fulfillment toward the end of
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a life? A time to sow and a time to reap. A time to sleep and a
time to peep. A time to fuck and a time to roar. What a shame
when there ain‟t no more!
Stood there staring so long at the leaves, projecting himself
out into Winter when all the leaves would be gone and the trees
like so many gaunt grey-brown fingers projecting agonizingly out
of the snow-covered frozen earth, that Malinche came to the
bottom of the steps and tapped lightly on the old oak bannister,
asked “Are you alright?”
“Just meditating . . . meditative . . . ”
“I still think you ought to have your prostate checked,” she
said quietly, as if there were some sort of direct mystic link
between meditative moods and prostate, as if you cut enough
and get “preventive” enough and you‟re going to cut out Death,
prevent It from ever entering into your life . . .
“Check your own!” he said, his meditative flow irrevocably
interrupted, leaving the bright yellow patch of leaves and sun
and going up to his room and stretching out on the bed,
invitation to the reunion in hand.
Only one person from his entire grade school class that he‟d
kept in contact with—Ellen. And even with her, over the last
few years she‟d (they‟d) been getting increasingly arthritic in their
relationship. No space, really, no time . . . no DESIRE to
actually share space-time, her in her perfect little Grimore Park
home and (since she‟d retired from “management”—and he had
no idea of what she‟d been “managing”) an endless series of
quilting events, and him piddling around with Indians, Indians,
Indians, where did they come from, why? Each of them trapped
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HUGH FOX
in his/her private little time-capsule and never the twain shall
meet.
Reached over and picked up the cellular phone next to the
bed, dialed Memory 10—The Berceuse Travel Agency (“Let Us
Cradle You to Sleep for the Perfect Vacation”), Binny answered.
“Hey, Binny! Howya doin‟? Hey, hey!”
“Buzzy, howya doin‟?”
This big act that always went on between them, although it
was true, she was the squishiest ripe tomatoish blonde he‟d ever
known, at that perfect mature peach-tomato age when just
squishing down in her computer chair was an act of delirious
eroticism.
“OK, babe . . . listen, I‟m going down to Chicago on the
weekend of January 12th. Big grammar school reunion. 50
years.”
“Don‟t bullshit me, Buzz, that‟d make you . . . ummmm . . .
sixty-fourish . . . ”
“Only my barber and you know, babe, and let‟s not leak it to
the evening news, OK?”
“And you want your favorite hotel, The Bismarck.”
“Any deals on the Palmer House?”
“Dream on!”
A hundred and twenty a night at The Bismarck, add on
another hundred a night for the Palmer House, although the
Palmer House . . . it was like a trip to Versailles, all the old
mirrors enclosed in Baroque gold curlicued frames, the ballroom
(where they‟d had their senior prom from St. Michael‟s High),
the pool, hot-tub, oh, brother, get Malinche into one of those
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black second-skin bathing suits and heat her up a little bit, turn
on the tambourines and . . .
“OK, the Bismarck it is! And I‟ve gotta come into Midway
because the Reunion‟s out on the Southwest Side somewhere, a
place called The Barn, so I thought I‟d go down on Friday
afternoon, just dismiss my class for a change, send them on a
wild footnote chase to the library or something, let Mal the
Knife get a sub for a change, should she have anything
scheduled for that afternoon, go to the reunion, then spend
Friday and Saturday night at the Bismark, give us a chance for a
little second honeymoon . . . ”
“You mean umpteenth, don‟t you, Buzz? It seems like you‟ve
got another honeymoon every other week . . . ”
“You know how it is when you‟re one of those uncontrolled
forest fires, you‟ve just gotta burn yourself out, babe!”
As if there was anything to burn out. That miserable little
recalcitrant stub of his that refused to obey the most minimal
commands from Headquarters any more. What he‟d liked to
have done was to court martial it and take it out and give it to
the firing squad, “Ready, aim, blow that fucker off the face of
the mother fucking EARTH!!!!”
But Malinche was kind and patient, wanted him to get
prosthetic implants, the kind that inflate when you push a little
button, so that Señor Thing would become a kind of remotecontrolled automaton, a venereal robot, but he was against that,
would bring in The Divine.
“What curses God has visited upon me . . . I do the best I
can.”
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HUGH FOX
And once she herself got going, with a combination of dildos,
prayers and her unbridled HEAT, something, anyhow, usually
happened.
Sometimes he felt like forgetting about it altogether, just
retire Señor Thing into oblivion, not even try any more, but if
there was one thing he had it was WILL: “Move, you bugger, or
you‟re history!” And he‟d usually have a little explosion, get the
poison out of him. Like his old friend Jerry Dombrowski (male
nurse, Boston) used to tell him: “You don‟t fuck, you don‟t
survive, all that radioactivity in the semen builds up and that‟s
how the tumors begin.” He‟d even made up a little song about it
years before:
SEMEN IS THE DEMON,
AND IT‟S GOTTA GO,
NO MATTER HOW YOU DO IT,
IT‟S GOTTA BLOW,
RECOGNIZE THE KILLER FOR WHAT IT IS,
CLEAN THE FUCKER OUT IF YOU WANNA LIVE…
Which was the half-assest little song that Buzz had ever heard
in his life.
“How you gonna rhyme IS and LIVE!” he‟d objected to
Dum-Dum, and Dum-Dum had turned to him with that
Bostonian literary sneer of his, “Ever heard of Emily Dickinson,
asshole?”
“OK, Buzz, I‟ll get you in there on Sparrow Airlines. They‟ve
got these weekend specials, you know . . . ”
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“Come on, Bin, I want a real plane, not one of those coffins
with wings. OK?”
“Then I‟ll have to route you through Detroit on Northwest.”
“Whatever. Whatever you can do.”
“And two nights at the Bismark?”
“Great.”
“I‟ll have it for you by tomorrow.”
“Beautiful. You‟re a beautiful person . . . ”
“I try.”
Over and out. He could just see her cross her legs and secrete
a little. Buzz knew he had that effect on Les Girls. One of the
great ironies in his life—oodles of ammunition and a wounded
gun. Wounded warrior, that‟s Sally used to say about it.
“Maybe you should just retire him [heem] to the Old Soldier‟s
Home.”
Would have made the perfect parish priest, man. If you make
it a sin to use it, he‟d like be an automatic saint. Six kids, though.
That was the miracle of miracles. Started drifting off into
dreamland, drifting down the Indus River out of Afghanistan,
his head starting to fill with year-symbols. He had this “thing”
about year-symbols, the whole solstice-oriented sweep of the
year, the year‟s death and rebirth, King Sun fucks Mother Earth
and it all begins anew.
Only he was almost an Aztec when it came to this dying-sun
time of the year when the days got shorter and shorter and then
they really screwed the whole thing up with Daylight Savings
Time so that there essentially wasn‟t any more afternoon, just
High Noon and High Midnight.
Halloween weather.
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HUGH FOX
Mercury/Hermes descends into the Underworld and all the
channels are open into Hell, time for the demons to make their
visits, the Hopi feast of Wuwuchim, put out a little milk for The
Dead when they come to visit. His literary enemies (and N.Y.
agents) said that all he was was garrulous erudition. But what did
they know? Did their spiritual life hang on the ancient hinges of
the year the way his did?
He‟d said it a million times: “Man hasn‟t been in contact with
The Real since the Middle Paleolithic.” Caves and spirit and you
take The Sacred Drug and the transformations begin....
Just drifting off into dreamland, descending into the
Underworld to meet his Dead, when the phone rang, he reached
over and reluctantly lifted it off its cradle.
“Hello?”
“Hi, Buzz, this is Ellen. I just got this invitation to Our Lady
of Perpetual Sorrows Fifty Year Reunion. Are you coming?”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah . . . ”
“So, listen, why don‟t you stay here. I mean, when are you
coming in?”
“Like Friday morning to Midway, hit the Art Institute, do a
little shopping, Water Tower Place, then take the „L‟ back to
Midway, pick up a cab to The Barn . . . then down to the
Bismark . . . ”
“Too complicated. You‟re staying with us, OK? So you come
into Midway, go downtown, OK, then take a train out to
Howard. I mean call me before you leave. As you come out of
the station at Howard there‟s a bank across the street, I‟ll be
waiting for you there . . . OK?”
“Well, I had wanted to . . . ”
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“I had wanted to have ten kids until I had one. Just call me,
say, noon . . . you can come out here, get settled in and then
we‟ll drive to the reunion together, you come back out here. I
don‟t want you wandering all over Chicago like a lost lamb . . . ”
“What are you, the Good Shepherd!”
“Close! I‟m anxious to see you. It‟s been, like . . . ?”
“I don‟t know, a couple of years . . . ”
“OK. Over and out . . . ”
And she hung up. And he was pissed. Get Malinche into a
hotel and something biochemical happened to her. It was like
she left her entire collective past behind and she was the lewd,
primal Earth Mother again, The Mother of the Caves, juice and
bean sprouts and rutting rabbits. Here on the everyday level . . .
she was studying for Neurosurgery Boards now, always getting
more and more and more specialized, like taking the Great Out
There and slowly fencing it in, wrapping the fence around her
tighter and tighter until all she could move was her index finger.
How much do you have to make a year before it‟s enough? What
was she trying to prove?
Redialed Binny at Berceuse.
“Hi, Bin, it‟s Buzzzzzzzzzzzzz . . . ”
“You‟re going back to Mohenjo Daro?”
“No, everything else the same, only cancel the hotel. This old
compañera de classe called and wants we to stay at her place . . .”
“Oh, that‟s a shame, I know what a hotel room means to
you.”
“I talk too much,” he said.
“Not enough! But OK, I‟ll jettison the hotel. Seeya!”
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