Chico Has an Identity Crisis
Four poems from “The Marx Brothers” by Jesi Gaston.
CHICO HAS AN IDENTITY CRISIS
Your soul’s hunger-distended belly in the trashcan out in the alley.
At issue: what to do with all this stuff accumulated.
It does no good but no bad either to contend with you.
Said into a mirror: the above.
And, also, that the schtick of being what they asked wears on you, a person.
That Chico has to become present yet again, so worn, when he just wants to be.
How adept you’ve become at taking yourself away from you.
It does neither good nor bad, and yet you’re tired.
We know from the billion examples there is no hard limit to this.
We know from a million more it can weigh too severely to be held up.
That a million more can drop the weight by dying off.
Your death prematurely in a meadow or a river or the kitchen, just so.
A fantasy: the directly preceding and in particular the meadow, which has flowers.
Sun, cutting in, beats down on all your disappointments.
Chico remembers the road and Arkansas summers, groin punched and left for a field.
That it was always men after a debt is so Chico, so very much Chico.
Now with all the money nothing’s changed.
Addendum to above: the beatings come from someone now he’s never seen, but nothing changed.
Obligation pulls everything away but the room and of course you won’t slough it off.
And you wonder if there’s peace to be had in being, especially across from the mirror.
When no other option comes your way anytime soon.
It is evergreen to say this: that no other option comes anyone’s way anytime soon.
So, thinks Chico, who deludes himself: the above.
Then goes out and wonders: will he ever come back?
Then thinks of whens and one days he can fall on.
You know these whens and one days well.
Your soul you left behind to fester has them.
A SCHÖNBERG STORY
Abraham or Alfred or Adolf or Albert, his exact
name now lost,
was brother to Miene, and, like Miene, was sired
by Levy or Louis, who all called Lafe,
and borne of Fanny, who started a Salomons
but now was a Schönberg, like all her kin,
and all her kin, like her, were entertainers.
In Dornum, as the boy who would be Shean
was born, Lafe eked a living out either
as a magic man or ventriloquist,
while Fanny, of a line, unbroken,
of women through the aeons
passing down its music,
strummed the sinews of a folk harp,
as Miene would, in time, and
in more time, in New York,
Al would be a man of vaudeville,
while Miene, for a length, would
leave the harp, to be
Minnie, wife of Samuel, born Simon,
a frenchman from Alsace
who all called Frenchie, of the name
Marrix diminished to Marx,
and bear six boys with him:
Manfred, who died in his crib,
Leonard, who learned to talk Italian-ish
to fend off mean-mugged toughs and
looked the spitting image of
Adolph, later Arthur, who all called Ahdie for the time
and took his mother’s harp up, who spoke so soft and shy
and looked the spitting image of
Julius Henry, who looked
just the sibling of Milton,
who wore rubber galoshes to keep
from getting sicker and looked
a distorted image of
Herbert Manfred, named for the baby
Minnie never forgot, who would chase
Julius, Arthur and Leonard
across a half-century and his life’s breadth.
The home these Marxes made was
over-stuffed and warm with
the seven of them filling it,
and they lacked only money, so,
of a Schönberg spark, Minnie said
to Al, who had summited vaudeville,
the highest height any of them knew,
the boys were meant
for song and dance and stage, and,
continued Minnie to her brother, all
they would need
was the start he could give,
and he gave it freely, and, in time’s
gradual unfolding past those first
few unsteady years of growth, she
was proven right. Then,
in butcher paper on the table of the kitchen,
some years later, Al, of some renown
still, but aging, wrote,
with Julius, Milton, Leonard and Arthur rapt
in watching, all around him, a routine,
now lost,
that would be the first hit
on their way towards summits
of which Al never dreamed.
HERBERT MARX IN A KISS IN THE DARK
Reads the only extant evidence of Zeppo’s having been involved in this
picture, which itself no longer exists, “…brother of the famous Harpo
has only brief appearances, but he surely makes them count…”
lines which, sorely, as an indication of foreclosed futures’ nonexistence,
would Zeppo, withered, read later, but, in the moment, having shot
a bit part in a project even then deemed unremarkable,
Zeppo heavy-stepping through the lot to the room where he’s given
what he’s owed, his day’s pay, proud, maybe, of his work,
being as he was twenty four — young — and lacking otherwise, too,
in inner resources, so always after indications, oh so human,
of his worth, and maybe feeling, in his heart, glad
to have given all, done well, of his performance, to take back
to his brothers as a proof of what he did not know — but at that moment,
just then, of all that moved or did not move him, forgetting all the rest
that may have raced across his brain, what is certain
of Zeppo then, with life ahead more than behind, is he
was being paid, and more, was young enough to still
be of the mind that here he was enough, handsome,
not unkind, a wit, that of him nothing lacked, and so,
A Kiss In The Dark bore no significance in this,
his must-be fated rise above, to fame and all, which,
as he heavy-stepped out of the lot, he thought was
happening all the time, wholly of the notion, as he was,
that lacking nothing of the things that people liked,
nothing stood between him and the rise, and nothing of himself
was non-negotiable, so all the pesky details of a personhood
to put to face were but a detail later to be filled and he
was only thinking, as he heavy-stepped away, of how he’d like,
next time, a bigger close up and to kiss the girl and maybe sing a song, but
nothing of this film would he have called an indication
of things to come itself, because he was twenty four,
and altogether lacking in thinking things to come.
ONE NIGHT, N’EVERYTHING’S KNOWN AGAIN
Just that once, that time one night in Flint,
were they all up together. One time only,
in those years when, daily,
they would drop the smallest bit
new in the soup they had on slow boil:
their Hi Skule daze,
of tough-to-chew hunks of routine
motor-mouth — was all their lots,
not excepting red-wigged Brannigan —
the greening base, rancid stock
not fit for bouillon, who’d buy it? —
nonetheless, this concentrate their all,
and that in which
the reducing down of Patsy to
The Nondescript, of shut up lips, and
Herr Teacher, der Pumpernickel, to
Jones or something similar, is mixed about
with the residue of shipyard brine,
itself a substitution for a
river villa’s salty air —
see their soup’s general algorithm:
reduce, deracinate, thicken,
keep only working proportions —
waste no half-rancid scraps
wholesale, trim the rot, toss em back, be
economic yet unprecious —
what wafts away in simmer is
no big loss.
And into this soup, armed with
these edicts, all five, like a fist,
came together.
Of what there was to see that night
on stage of them, any schmo watching
in the audience would call
remarkable the same old schticks,
the pot gristle; those schmoes wouldn’t know
the one-night-only miracle unfurling
reverse them. Let all who watched
be judged a schmo, even Minnie
in the wings — let all know:
not one among us ever will
know their revelation on that stage,
to have watched
was to have witnessed nothing
of their interior, and their
thing of beauty, so sudden,
was only interior, as if
we schmoes bore witness to a breakfast.
On the stage, then, they,
like over coffee and maybe eggs some morning,
in the midst of nothing different,
all the song and dance’s slop,
by rote doing funny’s motions,
when like a fist they find between them,
clutched like in a fist,
amid their arbitrary dips to the
pot’s bottom,
some centerpiece, till then
caked over with waste, hard
as industrial diamonds, in wait
at the bottom of the pot,
shook loose for just this,
going easy into their collective mitt.
And what a hard bit they caught,
we schmoes must assume, how shocking
in that instant to discover,
where any among them before’d’ve said
only vague memory’s limit was,
the source of all light; beheld the five
together: something more and less
than five lives, than a future, than a truth.
We do not and can never know
of what import this all was, nor
even what it was discovered.
We groping schmoes, our only hope
is to assume, and our assumptions’
best projections seem, in rough
comparison, like Eve in Eden’s photo,
— like a new thing of the past, unasked for
and upsetting. Our tongues grope
for approximate words, and spit
only phlegm; we can assume opened
up in them up there a fissure,
never to be sutured shut.
Jesi is a writer and filmmaker based in Chicago. Other works from this manuscript have previously been published in Queen Mob’s Tea House, We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics, and on Action Books’ blog. They have work forthcoming in Chicago Review.
