POETRY : Dear Lou / Cassandra Dallet
We are big Cassandra Dallett fans here at The Racket. Dallett’s piece “They’re building a morgue at the prison” was published in Issue Twelve of The Racket Journal and we’ve been eagerly awaiting another chance to work with the author.
And then she sent “Dear Lou” - this poetic ode/discussion/exploration of a man’s life and a the effect of this life on another penned in letter form - and we couldn’t wait to share it. It’s somehow both succinct and sprawling, a beautiful ramble that encapsulates how two people’s lives bounce off each other.
Dallett very kindly recorded a reading of the piece and it is worth your while to check it out.
“Dear Lou”
by Cassandra Dallet
Dear Lou,
I’m here swimming in sadness. You left without me when I had so many things I wanted to share, to show you, to see you, now your gone. I thought I would visit you in Ashland one day and I’d have time to hike there on your cold high mountains, time to drink there in your favorite bars.
Dear Lou, remember how you came to me sleepless and confused? Your partner of 45 years or whatever long-ass time, was gone, and on his exit, he was not himself. He was mean and irritable. This was shocking because in all those years, he’d never been bitter despite being a drunk. It was something you shared, and honestly kind of made it look good, you were regulars in bars, travelled the world consuming and finding hole-in-the-walls, you taught me to put tonic in the ice tray to keep the G&T’s un-watered-down in New York City humidity. Ya’ll inhabited The Village damn near my whole life. As W 10th Street went from a hovel to a gold mine. A little cubbyhole of apartment looking out on a small patch of plants, it was certainly not southern facing, no grand view or garden roof, it was ground level, at the end of the hall-black and white checkerboard tile. You were everything I didn’t know but wanted to about city living. The tub took up the whole bathroom, the kitchen-dining-living-room-bed, one room of books and pictures.
A map of the world with push pins in all the countries you’d travelled to, scattering huge laughs and snorts through foreign lands. Eating the cuisine and drinking with locals, you laughed at my disdain for tourists when we had breakfast at Pier 39, some yummy breakfast restaurant I never thought to go to I’d walked right by for years. I was a native I claimed, and we didn’t eat where the tourists did, really, we were just too broke to eat more than a churro when we worked down there. Me and all my homegirls in those little tourists shops, misprinting T-shirts and selling wind-up toys, and sweatshirts to freezing middle Americans, while we plotted to rob the cash from registers, to buy more drinks and drugs when we got off.
You told me you loved tourists and were always stopped to give directions around Manhattan, being a Canadian that had transplanted long ago in the real grit years of Times Square and The Deuce. I buy coffee table books of that time and place now.
In the eighties I came to your door a runaway dirty and stinking with my stupid friend in tow. You graciously made space for us on your floor along with your own daughters. Who else would have invited us in when space was so precious? Privacy so hard to come by and we had nothing but bad attitudes and no idea what we were going to do. CBGBS was our destination point and we’d struggled just to hitch rides. We covered ourselves in cardboard sleeping in a SOHO doorway, you laughed at our choice of wealthy neighborhood. Where someone threw one dollar bills at us as we slept. We said we’d come to meet our friends, Michael cracked up and said that should be no problem in a city of eight million people. But first night on Saint Marks we found them with ease. Bumming change and drinking forties until his mother rescued us, showing up at your house without expecting the warm and genuine welcome that she received. She didn’t know how our folks rolled. How you’d hitchhiked to Dad’s house in hip bellbottoms and green army jackets all curls and curves. How Michael stuttered and pursed his lips had the only real New York City-born and raised accent around.
He was so good with us kids. So gentle and charming his smile did light up any place and I think my Dad knew him as a junkie, those guys they all helped each other, kick and live and roll some joints, crack a beer and go on. But the liver damage was done and came back to haunt, to pollute their minds and make them mean in their last days. Looking out for each other was just how it was done and why it wasn’t strange to them at all when I showed up shaved head and homeless on their front stoop.
When I visited you as an adult Lou, you made me lists of kid friendly and free things to do in the city. I was so lucky to have you, and I knew it. I dragged my pouting son around the hot streets to children’s museums and water parks, he complained most of the time unless Michael was there, to wrestle him, flip him upside down and tirelessly tickle.
Laughter. I guess that’s what I’m trying to say. Without you two where will the laughter come from? Filling rooms and spilling onto sidewalks, we could be talking about gentrification and life in Panama right now, but no matter the topic a twinge of Canadian pronunciation and a huge laugh joyous and irreverent. Never bitching about living in a studio and working your ass off, but doing good, while still having the energy to go to the bar after work, eat at the buffet with your friends and neighbors. A crazy collection of actors and intellects, bums and hippies. It didn’t matter to you all, as long as they weren’t assholes.
You taught me to listen to Amy Goodman and keep my eyes on Dick Cheney, about the new world order, the middle eastern countries they were planning to take down. Since then, I’ve watched them all fall, right down to Syria just like you showed me they would. We traded Kingsolver titles and you smartly got them from the New York City Public Library and kept only one bookshelf full under the loft. Ya’ll kept what was necessary and treasured.
You both were necessary to me, extended family I treasured, I learned from, was blessed to share laughs with, you made the world better in a subtle and loving way. I am ever grateful for you taking me in, all those times.
I just wish I had one more chance to show up on your doorstep with a smile and an ice cold G&T in hand.
Cassandra Dallett is a five-time Pushcart nominee. She has been published in over a hundred anthologies and journals. hosts the monthly writing workshop On Two Six, is a facilitator at MOWW, (Mills Oakland Writers Workshop) hosts The Badass Bookworm Podcast, (iTunes, Spotify, Soundcloud, Stitcher, YouTube) and co-hosts and co-curates the quarterly reading series MoonDrop Productions with Kelechi Ubozoh, as well as her own monthly Oakland based reading series, The Badass Bookworm’s Lit Loft.
