My Broken Nose

My friend Gregor’s younger sister was running away from his mother when
she jumped off the stone bridge. Margaret fell the hundred or so feet to
the base of the gorge. She consciously flew downward. On impact her body
was crushed in on itself. Her Lutheran arms outstretched, her head went
first. She was unhappy in love, unhappy in life, inconsolable. She
gorged out, like so many. The occasional young woman’s body, bloated and
deformed, found floating in the springtime inlet by a father and son
gone among the cattails and duck weed to fish for carp. As with so many
it was over for her and the unborn issue.

Gregor works for me tending mason as we build fireplace chimneys. We
carry stones and bricks and clay tile flues and he follows me around
talking the meaning of his life and I resent his submission. We argue a
great deal about anything. Life sucks, suicide sucks and the work sucks.
Gregor is an artsy idealist, a German romantic, his head in the clouds,
or up his ass depending on your perspective. I want him to be hard and
tough. I want Gregor to be pissed off. I want Gregor to give a shit.

I am working on the scaffold above Gregor in the air and when he is not
looking, tending to his work, I drop globs of mortar off my trowel. The
mud in a lump glides downward. It splatters on his head. I apologize.
Bored with the work I spend the day entertaining myself and aggravating
Gregor by dropping mortar. I want Gregor to stand up. I want Gregor to
fight back. I want Gregor to hate me if only for him to gain the power
of his angry self. Gregor is not angry. Gregor does not strike out in
anger. He thinks I am an asshole and cleaning up at the end of the day
we leave it at that.

For our dinner at the Cobblestone Inn we play nine ball at the quarter
table with bent cues and get drunk on Rheingold. The building leans
precariously into the small cow stream that runs behind the country bar,
the table leveled out with legs set on bricks and matchbook wedges. We
argue. There is no place to go with our lives. Every day is nothing more
than one more piss in a crooked urinal. You have to hold on to what you
got. Together we are keeping a wobble time caroming our high and low
balls. Gregor drops the nine ball and then he curses. I lean over
walking and strutting around the table gloating over my easy win and
whack him back of the head with my cue. I rag on him, “Margaret was a
good lay right up to the end.”

XXX

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