Uncle Sam’s Decline

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Imagine June in America of 1992, or at least a surreal likeness of such, and lean Zak Dazen arrives down from the cold white Hyperborean north and done with four years of hibernating in a small college library. Face flushed from his penultimate joint, he flushes the last of the unlit and vows to quit the quiescence of the dark winter sport. Fatherless and thus fitting the times, he leaves his belongings at his mother’s modest apartment and walks toward the park. Home again for summer, just a few days removed from finals and last failed romances, the makeshift stirrings of an otherwise stagnant college stay. But now, finally released into the soaking hot city summer, he plans an end to cerebral stasis and a new stab at life. 

To get to the Spark, Zak rounds the corner, walks up the block, and passes through the same Catholic-school yard where he and his public-school friends once played two hand touch and stickball. Back then thumb-sucking Benny Lawless spat on the base paths as Tracey Tomgirl beat it home barefoot. Just passing through today, Zak sees the demographics of the cement scene have changed. He meets mobs of agile double-dutching Lao, tough little ass-balling Cambodians, and wily two-hand-touch Vietnamese as well as your regular working-class black and white stickballers. All the tiny suited children screech and scream in Dionysian glee, enjoying their precious undisciplined hour as only the confined, if confessed, can. 

Out of the yard, Zak heads down 45th, hauls his horses across MLK Boulevard, shuffles onto Faulkner Road which merges into Lincoln Ave at 48th where he passes some colorful storefronts. Among them stand Chang’s Kosher Deli, S&M Steaks, Dewayne’s Thai Taik Aout, Tip the Barber’s Shop, and finally the all-night Gas N Grub at the corner of Lincoln and 47th. For young Zak, these places hold peripheral meaning as compared to the Spark. Past the Station of Brotherly Gas N Grub—aka the Gas N Grub or the S.B.G.G.—Zak stands at the park’s small welcome sign, heated from below by a steamy turd. 

Young Zak, no clinchpoop, returned home each summer full of the best shit one might retain at school. None of that ordinary preprofessional crap, Zak studied the old school—its literatures, philosophies, and histories—the best bathroom reading found in America. He went to one of those cold New England colleges somewhere between the city and the country, where somewhere between two and three thousand potty-trained youth take more cups of coffee than classes each day. They wore holed if holistic clothes, smoked cloves, ruined lungs, fondled loves—suburban doves desperately searching for soul in Nineteenth-Century Russian Lit or Contemporary Jazz Music Crit. Up North, Zak learned to privilege the other, signify the Mother, and love not thy Father so much as thy brother. But of course, rhyme was forbidden, and by sophomore year, while his virginity pledged to remain on hand, his eyesight left without even a word of goodbye.

As a celibate senior then, in a course taught by a Foucaultian Futurist, he learned his college-brochure career had been bitch-slapped and tickle-tortured by transnational polyglots prospering in a new America despite everything they scribbled against it. A steamy Euro-Asian couple—M. Jacques Dans La Baches and his doting chain smoker, Madam Tran S. Povertie—had stolen away with the economy, and so there was no longer any point to graduate-school app-ing or even a heteronormative search for work.

But Uncle Sam’s decline is of no relevance to his more pocket-bookly correct peers. After college, the precious little piglets of capitalist-hog suburbia drive home to roost as their more ambitious cousins, en masse, migrate to NYC and SF to become subsistence-wage writers or cash-poor interns. If at home, they live free and unattended in entire floors abandoned by their parents in satellite-city castles far from Zak’s home. 

But now, at the Spark’s entrance, Zak’s gaze turns to grin as crater-sized dimples reveal his true love. A couplet trespasses through his brain: “Oh park, dear Spark, how fond I waxed for thee/ while twiddling my thumbs in said Northern library.” Zak’s ebullience defies reason. Could he be fond for a depressed second-string city? Fond for a city park? From a cursory view, it seems like an ordinary park. At one end stand the half-eaten nets, at the other a jungly gym for children—logs, tires, pipes, and junk sculpted into a dog in crapper stance. Over the years, multitudes of cross-fucked mutts have gotten the hint, and like many city parks, stale and fresh doggy doodoos dot the terrain. 

Most of these fell in a huge enclave at the center of the park where this muddy middle also acted as a natural amphitheatre for disc throwing, dope smoking, shit sniffing, sun bathing, and other mind-hazing activities. Whatever beast you might be, or at least consider yourself, you could find good sport and good cheer in the inverted pleasure dome. 

But the Spark also has an original history whose favorite son, Copernicus Weaver currently blushes seasick like old Poseidon, but son of a sea god, he was no mean fish in his day. Rather, Copernicus was a kind, gentle sort, one of those stare-at-the-stars good-doers, Westphalia’s first and most famous philanthropist. Where city funds fail, his trust fund maintains the Spark.

Zak knows little of Copernicus’s starry tale, and he learns no more of it today as he strides quickly past statue and plaque. As he ambles by in his preoccupied state, Zak feels graduated and free but within the context of disheveled weather and hazy head. Consumed with both home and away, he is neither here nor there. Caught in reverie, he drifts past all the good parts of park—the shots of rocks and smells of turds, the tosses of disc and talks of dat, the occasional joint whose light might still surface, an unidentified frying object, more illicit and expensive, if lonely and expansive, than ever before in war-on-drug America. 

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Alex Kudera’s award-winning adjunct novel, Fight for Your Long Day (Atticus Books), was drafted in a walk-in closet during a summer in Seoul, South Korea. He has also published a second novel, Auggie’s Revenge, with Beating Windward Press as well as a Classroom Edition of Fight for Your Long Day with Hard Ball Press. The e-singles “Frade Killed Ellen” (Dutch Kills Press), “Turquoise Truck” (Mendicant Bookworks), and “The Betrayal of Times of Peace and Prosperity” (Gone Dog Press) are available most anywhere books are downloaded. His published short stories include “Free Car” and “My Father’s Great Recession” (Heavy Feather Review) as well as “A Thanksgiving” and “Over Fifty Billion Kafkas Served” (Eclectica Magazine). Kudera currently supports English language learners in urban public high schools.

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