You Knock Me Off My Feet
by Jan Schmidt
by Jan Schmidt
With their dark, silent faces, more than twenty white computer monitors are usurping every bit of walking space in JD's living room, like a sea of blank headstones huddling together after a war. But this isn't a graveyard, we're bringing these ghosts back to life. It’s 1999 and we enterprising women, JD and I, are fixing up these used Macs whose systems have been wiped clean by her job, to give to the kids on the block. At the Starship Command Couch, JD and I are braced for take-off, each with a keyboard on a lap, a mouse in a right hand, (mine on the arm rest, hers on the cushion,) stacks of computers before us ready for reloading. I'm the empathic one, JD is Spock, all brain, no emotions. Or so she wishes. Interstellar radio blasts us back to the sixties: The Way You Do the Things You Do.
These passionate teen love songs digitally surround-sound us, but we're reinterpreting them with thirty adult years of living. Encoded messages. Decoded. Recoded. I used to grasp life hard, afraid of falling over; I was unstable, a table missing a leg, a computer minus an operating system. I stick another disk in the slot and I am beamed out into the starry ether-space where my head funnels all thought to my son, the young man I just met with his adoption mother three months ago in Wisconsin, my baby lost to me for these thirty years.
With what seems like random access, I sing out, Je ne regret rien. Spock looks at me curiously. That was my theme song, but she knows I no longer feel that way, though I always used to say, no big deal that I made a mess of my life, mistakes are what make us human.
And, believe me, I have done many human things.
In fact, I've done every stupid thing possible and still I don't regret them, not smashing my head against a brick wall five hundred thousand times before I realized that brick walls were actually harder than my head and all I had to do was stop; not jumping off that billion-foot tangerine-colored cliff straight into the dusty, unbroken surface of dry harsh reality; not staring for years at a time at a television I couldn't even see.
Someone once gave me a diamond. Perfect in every aspect. The world's most precious diamond, most expensive, biggest, extracted from my own diamond mine. And I gave it away. Never mind that I thought it was the best thing to do, that I thought I couldn't care properly for that diamond. Never mind that the diamond was better off somewhere else.
I only regret one thing in my life. Only one thing that I truly and completely regret, utterly and without doubt. Perfect and ideal regret. Solid physical regret.
I rue the day.
I rue the day I did that.
But you can't go back again -- never, never, never, never, never. You can't take those words back you said yesterday, though they weren't cruel or evil, just stupid and thoughtless, and you wish you could suck them back in, rewind the tapes with the erase head on, unravel the sweater, but no, you can't, not now, not ever, not to yesterday's words, not to stupid acts of thirty years ago.
And I've done so many stupid things, how could I ever say I know anything at all? Yet I don't regret those years lost in a heroin stupor, not the time spent passed out in parks, alleys, stranger’s homes, not the lost income from a life without jobs or security. But I regret signing that paper, nearly thirty years ago, the ink discharging in clots from the cheap dime-store pen onto the forms, my life my blood my baby flowing away from me with every drop.
JD pulls the hard drive out, then the motor, then the CD-ROM drive. All this to stick in the chips, two 16 MB's of memory, and zip zip, in two seconds it’s done. Now she reinstalls the CD-ROM drive, the motor and the hard drive. Pushes the button, the startup sound sings out and the happy Mac face grins at us.
I’ve got sunshine on a cloudy day. I got a raise at my job, my boyfriend’s cancer is in remission, and I found my son. And not just my son, but he comes with a wife, a son, a daughter. A whole glittering abundance of diamonds, rubies, emeralds. And he lets me call him every week.
I ride the bus to work in the morning, feel his small boy's body molded to mine, head nestled into my chest, blond straight hair tickling my nose. I point -- see that man with the big snake wrapped around his shoulder, see the light as it bounces off that white stone building, look at the sky with the clouds moving so fast.
My little diamond boy, the one whose sapphire eyes return a flood of sparkles to mine, refract off the many facets of his little self, mirror to my soul, he isn’t really here, not even in memory, only in loss and emptiness. If he were here, here on this bus, he'd be too heavy to sit on my lap, too big to hold his head tight to my chest. It’s been thirty years since I held his infant body and so now even his son with the coral lips, the ruby cheeks, the red-amber hair, is too big to sit on my lap. Even his daughter with hair the same ivory color mine was at that age, with the same serious look, won't be jumping up to curl into my shoulder, won't be snuggling into my breast.
I stuff another Photoshop 3.0 disk into the computer. I want JD to open up my head, remove the skull cap, shove aside the gooey gray matter and stick in a new chip. Insert in me the memory that will turn back time, give me back the diamond I so recklessly gave away. I want all those memories retrieved as though I had kept that most pure of all diamonds, the most blue-white, the most flawless, its crystal structure bonded so effortlessly, so strongly, so perfectly, to me. That five day old infant released to someone else, to a woman I didn’t know, couldn’t know. A stranger whom I was sure was better than me. In every way.
I walked into that hospital two people, I walked out one.
Please, please, JD. Hook me up to the Jazz drive and download all those files that are the story of his life without me. Insert all those files in me. You can just copy them, let his mom keep a set in her, but put them in me, too. Copy them. Install them. Hurry.
I met his mother. She is everything I thought she'd be, knew she’d be, kind, funny, loving. Kind and loving to me, too. And I just wanted to rip her head open, tear out all those memories of her and my son, pull them out and install them in my head, my heart. But I’m the one who is gutted, left lying by the side of the road, and it’s no one’s fault but my own. My fault for not believing in me. Still I can't get back those years, no amount of wanting will bring them back, no new Steve Jobs program, no new memory chips.
JD and I continue, install operating systems, Word, Norton Utilities, Ram Doubler. We shift gears, direct a mouse to the right spot, click, click, next, continue, next, continue. Read the contents to see what we’re dealing with, what memory, what processor, what hard drive. R. Kelly croons out from the rap station his end of the millennium song: If I could turn back the hands of time, my darling you would be mine.
A few short months ago, I had no face to my son, no history, no story. Then, after searching for years, through my ancient powers of telepathic urging combined with computer age communications and social worker advocacy, he called. His voice over the wires like intergalactic super-balm. His voice so sweet, he could have been a candy; my head so fired, I can rewrite the Temptations. He reinstalled the Motown in my life. He makes this little girl talk out of her head.
I’m late getting to work. I see my bus on the corner. I take off, a real sprint. Knees pumping high in my work clothes, pounding the cement in my platform clogs, dodging in and around the folks taking their children to school, shopping at the Korean market, hanging out in front of the methadone clinic. The bus lurches into the stop, just yards away. I run right out of my shoes, stumble, black clogs turned over, bare feet on the tarmac, put the clogs back on, run, jump onto the bus, laughing, because I found my son and nothing can get to me now.
The bus driver, smiling, gives me a lecture on heart attacks. I want to tell the bus driver about my son. I want to tell my son about the bus driver, but how insane this must sound out there in Wisconsin, where they just get up and get in their cars and drive ten minutes to work. What idiot lives where buses don’t have schedules, can come four at a time, then none for twenty minutes. Where once you catch one, you can stand for the first fifteen blocks crammed up against perfume and bad breath, purses and backpacks as the bus stops at every block making your travel time to work an hour and you live in the same borough.
All day in my head I describe every detail of my life to him. He’s with me all the time. I sing, I dance. Do the mashed potato. Do the locomotion. I love my baby boy. I found my baby boy. Twist and shout.
JD tells me to start up with the extensions off, they could cause conflicts. Yes, that's all I have to do, make sure the old programs are not causing conflicts with the new programs, that those preference files for believing the rug will be pulled out from under me, that behind good luck lies the swift harsh turn of the wheels of fortune, will not conflict with the new preference files for accepting whatever is in store for me, for enjoying the pleasure of the moment.
Look, there's my son, he is being chased by monsters, ghouls, it’s the middle of a dark night, I gallop in on my white horse (maybe black), reach down and grab his tiny hand, whip him up into the saddle with me, and ride off, (maybe in a Porsche, cause I’m very rich and important) and he’s happy I came back for him. Knew I would.
Was he shocked to see my real face, see me? Not a rescuer, not famous. I was shocked to see his face. Not a baby, but a man who looks like me, talks like me, is of me, from me, my DNA, my stubborn streak, my eyes, my hair. Whatever does that mean?
Know-it-all. That's what he says the guys at work call him. A know-it-all. They want him for their union rep, because he does speak out, because he doesn't budge. I tell my boyfriend, my son says he's a know-it-all. My boyfriend says, yes, of course, so are you.
I am?? I am?? Me, a know-it-all? I go to work and ask the people there. They all passionately agree, yes, know-it-all, that's you.
So what does this mean? Of all my qualities, this is what I've handed down to my son? I tell him, you don't have to worry, you're not responsible for your know-it-all ism, it's genetic. He says that might be true if we knew whether my dad was one. Oops, he says, of course he was, he was an English teacher. I fall out laughing. Dad must be busting out of his grave hearing his grandson equating being an English teacher with know-it-all-ism. Hearing the literature he loved, all narrowed and made smaller, turned into know-it-all-ism. But I love my son for saying that, it means he might have weathered my dad, all alcohol-closed and depression-negative.
Besides, I wouldn’t have let my dad tear him apart the way he did the rest of us. Or is that true? Could I have stopped the onslaught, not just from my dad, but from all that fear and anxiety already installed in me? If I’d kept him with me, would we have crushed his open defiance, beaten down his spirit? I walk along the street, turn his child-head away, cover his ears, don’t want to show him the swearing woman on the corner, drunk, pissing on the building. Mortal apparition of the other me. On the next block a young man with a dirty blond ponytail and crusty fingers strums his guitar which only has three strings left. He repeats the same two chords while the case lies open before him for the money to catch the next high. Would that be my son, if he’d stayed with me?
Oh do it now JD. Load the program. Put those memories in, how I raised my son well, healthy, strong, smart. Let those memories sear away the loss.
JD and I lift up a monitor, replace the CPU under it. Start again. She removes the cover on hers, I take the one she just did, start loading the operating system. Who could have guessed that all those tunes of lost teen love would come true for me in the form of my son, lost to me for thirty years? Tell Laura I Love Her flows out of the radio, not the 1960 version, but the reissue by Pearl Jam, 1999.
He told me about the night of one of his high school graduation parties that ended in the police arresting them all, handcuffing my son. I laughed as he told the story, thrilled with his gift to me of this memory-byte from his life. We said good-bye and I hung up the phone, drifting on good-feelings through taking out my contact lenses, brushing my teeth.
Walking from the bathroom through the living room, suddenly I was flooded with anger: they touched him, they laid their hands on him. The adrenaline flushed me so strong that I understood deep inside that I can go back in time, can reach through the fabric of our three dimensions and grab those police officers by their shirt fronts and pick them up and toss them away from him like I was Robocop.
But I can't go back again. He can't crawl up on my lap. I can’t suck that ink back into that pen, take back my baby boy.
He let me touch his head that moment before saying good-bye at the airport, let me touch the spot that shines through his army buzz cut where no hair grows. A mark of his birth, a place scarred, we think, from the electronic heart monitoring device attached to his infant skull while he was being born. He bows, lowering his head to my hand. My fingers reach up, trembling, heat rises between us, and I feel the small circle of flesh surrounded by baby-fine hair. Electricity. Bombarding ions. He uncompresses thirty years of crammed up emotions: anger, joy, jealousy. All. All inflated. Even regret is welcome. Scuse me while I kiss the sky.
JD and I sit, two mine disasters, gave away the diamonds from our quarries, now rebuilding the computers--a new kind of giving away--rebuilding our lives, flying off in space, always a new frontier, always more adventures, more life till there is no more. No matter what worlds we explore, no matter what parts of ourselves we discover, no matter anything at all, we can’t go back again.
But that's okay, I've found a whole new operating system. I found my son. I'm as saturated with color as a billion-pixel monitor. I am re-membered: a missing limb restored. Stable, yet, even on two legs, or because of them, he can really bowl me over.
The way you do the things you do.
Baby boy.
As Stevie Wonder says, your love, knocks me off my feet.
These passionate teen love songs digitally surround-sound us, but we're reinterpreting them with thirty adult years of living. Encoded messages. Decoded. Recoded. I used to grasp life hard, afraid of falling over; I was unstable, a table missing a leg, a computer minus an operating system. I stick another disk in the slot and I am beamed out into the starry ether-space where my head funnels all thought to my son, the young man I just met with his adoption mother three months ago in Wisconsin, my baby lost to me for these thirty years.
With what seems like random access, I sing out, Je ne regret rien. Spock looks at me curiously. That was my theme song, but she knows I no longer feel that way, though I always used to say, no big deal that I made a mess of my life, mistakes are what make us human.
And, believe me, I have done many human things.
In fact, I've done every stupid thing possible and still I don't regret them, not smashing my head against a brick wall five hundred thousand times before I realized that brick walls were actually harder than my head and all I had to do was stop; not jumping off that billion-foot tangerine-colored cliff straight into the dusty, unbroken surface of dry harsh reality; not staring for years at a time at a television I couldn't even see.
Someone once gave me a diamond. Perfect in every aspect. The world's most precious diamond, most expensive, biggest, extracted from my own diamond mine. And I gave it away. Never mind that I thought it was the best thing to do, that I thought I couldn't care properly for that diamond. Never mind that the diamond was better off somewhere else.
I only regret one thing in my life. Only one thing that I truly and completely regret, utterly and without doubt. Perfect and ideal regret. Solid physical regret.
I rue the day.
I rue the day I did that.
But you can't go back again -- never, never, never, never, never. You can't take those words back you said yesterday, though they weren't cruel or evil, just stupid and thoughtless, and you wish you could suck them back in, rewind the tapes with the erase head on, unravel the sweater, but no, you can't, not now, not ever, not to yesterday's words, not to stupid acts of thirty years ago.
And I've done so many stupid things, how could I ever say I know anything at all? Yet I don't regret those years lost in a heroin stupor, not the time spent passed out in parks, alleys, stranger’s homes, not the lost income from a life without jobs or security. But I regret signing that paper, nearly thirty years ago, the ink discharging in clots from the cheap dime-store pen onto the forms, my life my blood my baby flowing away from me with every drop.
JD pulls the hard drive out, then the motor, then the CD-ROM drive. All this to stick in the chips, two 16 MB's of memory, and zip zip, in two seconds it’s done. Now she reinstalls the CD-ROM drive, the motor and the hard drive. Pushes the button, the startup sound sings out and the happy Mac face grins at us.
I’ve got sunshine on a cloudy day. I got a raise at my job, my boyfriend’s cancer is in remission, and I found my son. And not just my son, but he comes with a wife, a son, a daughter. A whole glittering abundance of diamonds, rubies, emeralds. And he lets me call him every week.
I ride the bus to work in the morning, feel his small boy's body molded to mine, head nestled into my chest, blond straight hair tickling my nose. I point -- see that man with the big snake wrapped around his shoulder, see the light as it bounces off that white stone building, look at the sky with the clouds moving so fast.
My little diamond boy, the one whose sapphire eyes return a flood of sparkles to mine, refract off the many facets of his little self, mirror to my soul, he isn’t really here, not even in memory, only in loss and emptiness. If he were here, here on this bus, he'd be too heavy to sit on my lap, too big to hold his head tight to my chest. It’s been thirty years since I held his infant body and so now even his son with the coral lips, the ruby cheeks, the red-amber hair, is too big to sit on my lap. Even his daughter with hair the same ivory color mine was at that age, with the same serious look, won't be jumping up to curl into my shoulder, won't be snuggling into my breast.
I stuff another Photoshop 3.0 disk into the computer. I want JD to open up my head, remove the skull cap, shove aside the gooey gray matter and stick in a new chip. Insert in me the memory that will turn back time, give me back the diamond I so recklessly gave away. I want all those memories retrieved as though I had kept that most pure of all diamonds, the most blue-white, the most flawless, its crystal structure bonded so effortlessly, so strongly, so perfectly, to me. That five day old infant released to someone else, to a woman I didn’t know, couldn’t know. A stranger whom I was sure was better than me. In every way.
I walked into that hospital two people, I walked out one.
Please, please, JD. Hook me up to the Jazz drive and download all those files that are the story of his life without me. Insert all those files in me. You can just copy them, let his mom keep a set in her, but put them in me, too. Copy them. Install them. Hurry.
I met his mother. She is everything I thought she'd be, knew she’d be, kind, funny, loving. Kind and loving to me, too. And I just wanted to rip her head open, tear out all those memories of her and my son, pull them out and install them in my head, my heart. But I’m the one who is gutted, left lying by the side of the road, and it’s no one’s fault but my own. My fault for not believing in me. Still I can't get back those years, no amount of wanting will bring them back, no new Steve Jobs program, no new memory chips.
JD and I continue, install operating systems, Word, Norton Utilities, Ram Doubler. We shift gears, direct a mouse to the right spot, click, click, next, continue, next, continue. Read the contents to see what we’re dealing with, what memory, what processor, what hard drive. R. Kelly croons out from the rap station his end of the millennium song: If I could turn back the hands of time, my darling you would be mine.
A few short months ago, I had no face to my son, no history, no story. Then, after searching for years, through my ancient powers of telepathic urging combined with computer age communications and social worker advocacy, he called. His voice over the wires like intergalactic super-balm. His voice so sweet, he could have been a candy; my head so fired, I can rewrite the Temptations. He reinstalled the Motown in my life. He makes this little girl talk out of her head.
I’m late getting to work. I see my bus on the corner. I take off, a real sprint. Knees pumping high in my work clothes, pounding the cement in my platform clogs, dodging in and around the folks taking their children to school, shopping at the Korean market, hanging out in front of the methadone clinic. The bus lurches into the stop, just yards away. I run right out of my shoes, stumble, black clogs turned over, bare feet on the tarmac, put the clogs back on, run, jump onto the bus, laughing, because I found my son and nothing can get to me now.
The bus driver, smiling, gives me a lecture on heart attacks. I want to tell the bus driver about my son. I want to tell my son about the bus driver, but how insane this must sound out there in Wisconsin, where they just get up and get in their cars and drive ten minutes to work. What idiot lives where buses don’t have schedules, can come four at a time, then none for twenty minutes. Where once you catch one, you can stand for the first fifteen blocks crammed up against perfume and bad breath, purses and backpacks as the bus stops at every block making your travel time to work an hour and you live in the same borough.
All day in my head I describe every detail of my life to him. He’s with me all the time. I sing, I dance. Do the mashed potato. Do the locomotion. I love my baby boy. I found my baby boy. Twist and shout.
JD tells me to start up with the extensions off, they could cause conflicts. Yes, that's all I have to do, make sure the old programs are not causing conflicts with the new programs, that those preference files for believing the rug will be pulled out from under me, that behind good luck lies the swift harsh turn of the wheels of fortune, will not conflict with the new preference files for accepting whatever is in store for me, for enjoying the pleasure of the moment.
Look, there's my son, he is being chased by monsters, ghouls, it’s the middle of a dark night, I gallop in on my white horse (maybe black), reach down and grab his tiny hand, whip him up into the saddle with me, and ride off, (maybe in a Porsche, cause I’m very rich and important) and he’s happy I came back for him. Knew I would.
Was he shocked to see my real face, see me? Not a rescuer, not famous. I was shocked to see his face. Not a baby, but a man who looks like me, talks like me, is of me, from me, my DNA, my stubborn streak, my eyes, my hair. Whatever does that mean?
Know-it-all. That's what he says the guys at work call him. A know-it-all. They want him for their union rep, because he does speak out, because he doesn't budge. I tell my boyfriend, my son says he's a know-it-all. My boyfriend says, yes, of course, so are you.
I am?? I am?? Me, a know-it-all? I go to work and ask the people there. They all passionately agree, yes, know-it-all, that's you.
So what does this mean? Of all my qualities, this is what I've handed down to my son? I tell him, you don't have to worry, you're not responsible for your know-it-all ism, it's genetic. He says that might be true if we knew whether my dad was one. Oops, he says, of course he was, he was an English teacher. I fall out laughing. Dad must be busting out of his grave hearing his grandson equating being an English teacher with know-it-all-ism. Hearing the literature he loved, all narrowed and made smaller, turned into know-it-all-ism. But I love my son for saying that, it means he might have weathered my dad, all alcohol-closed and depression-negative.
Besides, I wouldn’t have let my dad tear him apart the way he did the rest of us. Or is that true? Could I have stopped the onslaught, not just from my dad, but from all that fear and anxiety already installed in me? If I’d kept him with me, would we have crushed his open defiance, beaten down his spirit? I walk along the street, turn his child-head away, cover his ears, don’t want to show him the swearing woman on the corner, drunk, pissing on the building. Mortal apparition of the other me. On the next block a young man with a dirty blond ponytail and crusty fingers strums his guitar which only has three strings left. He repeats the same two chords while the case lies open before him for the money to catch the next high. Would that be my son, if he’d stayed with me?
Oh do it now JD. Load the program. Put those memories in, how I raised my son well, healthy, strong, smart. Let those memories sear away the loss.
JD and I lift up a monitor, replace the CPU under it. Start again. She removes the cover on hers, I take the one she just did, start loading the operating system. Who could have guessed that all those tunes of lost teen love would come true for me in the form of my son, lost to me for thirty years? Tell Laura I Love Her flows out of the radio, not the 1960 version, but the reissue by Pearl Jam, 1999.
He told me about the night of one of his high school graduation parties that ended in the police arresting them all, handcuffing my son. I laughed as he told the story, thrilled with his gift to me of this memory-byte from his life. We said good-bye and I hung up the phone, drifting on good-feelings through taking out my contact lenses, brushing my teeth.
Walking from the bathroom through the living room, suddenly I was flooded with anger: they touched him, they laid their hands on him. The adrenaline flushed me so strong that I understood deep inside that I can go back in time, can reach through the fabric of our three dimensions and grab those police officers by their shirt fronts and pick them up and toss them away from him like I was Robocop.
But I can't go back again. He can't crawl up on my lap. I can’t suck that ink back into that pen, take back my baby boy.
He let me touch his head that moment before saying good-bye at the airport, let me touch the spot that shines through his army buzz cut where no hair grows. A mark of his birth, a place scarred, we think, from the electronic heart monitoring device attached to his infant skull while he was being born. He bows, lowering his head to my hand. My fingers reach up, trembling, heat rises between us, and I feel the small circle of flesh surrounded by baby-fine hair. Electricity. Bombarding ions. He uncompresses thirty years of crammed up emotions: anger, joy, jealousy. All. All inflated. Even regret is welcome. Scuse me while I kiss the sky.
JD and I sit, two mine disasters, gave away the diamonds from our quarries, now rebuilding the computers--a new kind of giving away--rebuilding our lives, flying off in space, always a new frontier, always more adventures, more life till there is no more. No matter what worlds we explore, no matter what parts of ourselves we discover, no matter anything at all, we can’t go back again.
But that's okay, I've found a whole new operating system. I found my son. I'm as saturated with color as a billion-pixel monitor. I am re-membered: a missing limb restored. Stable, yet, even on two legs, or because of them, he can really bowl me over.
The way you do the things you do.
Baby boy.
As Stevie Wonder says, your love, knocks me off my feet.