Salvatore Buttaci

YOUNG BOY LEANING OVER BAKERY COUNTER   Maybe it would have helped if I had raised my hand some decades ago and told my story. “My name is Jeremy and I’m a sugar addict. I’ve come tonight seeking help.” But I didn’t. Nor did I look to psychoanalysis to help me. My father had raised us to distrust “those meddling brainpickers.” In fact, even before dementia riveted him to the same sound-byte loops in which repetition ruled at the slightest provocation, Father was well on his way with a favorite shrink line of his. When he told it, he held his rotund belly, then in raucous laughter his beach ball belly would jiggle and bob as if it had a life of its own. “Anybody who goes to a psychiatrist oughta have his head examined!”  It was no surprise in his last years one had only to say “shrink” or even “doctor” and there he’d go shouting out that absurd retort he’d manage not to drop down the grating of memory. He’d held onto it, a harmless chatter to break up the routine of senseless, often violent episodes. It broke my heart to visit him. I would ask the nursing home attendants to page me to a phone call, the main desk, the parking lot––anything to free me from this man who had been my father, this man who’d now stare at me, ask my name again, then confide in me there was a conspiracy against him. The nurses. Attendants....

' YOUNG GIRL BATHING: Painting by Auguste Renoir (1890) Poem by Salvatore Buttaci (1994) Not a stitch!   Oh, if ma mere and mon pere could see me now! Their little daughter naked as the day she first saw the light. Let me say Pa Pa would put enough of his belt to me that no artist would ever care to paint me again.   I should tell you I am not a model. Monsieur Renoir chose me  from a crowd of giggling schoolgirls. "You have a model's presence," he said. "Who me?" I asked.   He smiled and touched my hair. "Would you sit for me?" he asked.   Now my classmates began teasing me: "Justine has a new beau! A new beau! A new beau!" But I pretended not to hear and asked the man, "Sit for you?"   He laughed, still touching my hair. "Yes!  Yes!  Sit for me! I am the painter Renoir. You have heard of me? Well, no matter, child. I wish to paint you. Of course, I will pay, more money than you've seen so far!"   He laughed again. "I fear only that I will not find the proper colors to paint your hair. Red like fire? Orange as the sun? Long as a cascading waterfall? That will be the true test of how good a craftsman I truly am!"   My hair. My hair. My hair. You'd think it was a portrait the monsieur was wanting to paint. I was grateful. He...

FLASHING MY SHORTS by Salvatore Buttaci A flash of painful remembrance, a memory of a wounded World War II veteran, a tale of Uncle Pete who wasn’t really Uncle Pete at all, and then the darkness of a life once lived in unrestrained laughter.    Encounter    Years of hard drinking had driven him to seed.  He slept under cardboard  on the coldest New York City nights, and his days were taken up begging for spare change.   One morning a passerby stopped to look at him.  He turned his unshaven, toothless face away.  But the woman continued staring.  “Is your name Thomas?” she asked.  He shook his head.  “Thomas Cole?” she persisted.  Again he gestured no.  He could see the tears wetting the woman’s face.  She could not see his. Leaning against the streetlight, he watched his daughter lose herself in the rush hour of pedestrian traffic.                                                                                             #     War Hero   “Crazy Joe” Devlin was a war hero, but to neighborhood kids like me, he was free entertainment.  If wisdom was mine back then at thirteen years old, I would’ve praised Joe, thanked him for his military sacrifices at Normandy Beach.  Certainly I would not have been party to the verbal abuse...

        "Cigarettes"  by Anna Cervova (Public Domain Photo)   I was twenty-one when I started smoking. Prior to that I had considered it somebody else’s nasty habit and that I, a wise, independent kind of fellow, would never fall prey to puffing myself to an early grave. Then one afternoon my new brother-in-law offered me a Lucky Strike, explained how it was something men did, and I took it because I was not so wise after all. Those lectures about the evils of nicotine, about that first cigarette being all  it took to enslave us for life––I watched a lot of good common-sense advice fly like smoke out the window. So that same day, back in 1962, I bought my first pack of cigarettes: unfiltered Lucky Strike, of course; after all, was I any less a man than my sister’s new husband? Puff! Puff! Puff that cigarette! The surgeon-general’s warnings notwithstanding, I continued to smoke, though I was not one of those fancy brand-loyal folks. No, no, not I! I switched from one brand to another as though I were looking for the one with the winning number stamped inside the foil that would award me cigarettes for life. One day I tried Camels; the next day I’d see a Marlborough ad of that tall rugged cowboy puffing rings into the big sky as his horse held its breath, and I’d go buy me a pack of Marlboros so I could blow into the big sky too....

                          A BOWL OF PLUMS             Painting by Jean-Baptiste Simeon Chardin, 1728;                    Poem by Salvatore Buttaci, 1994     Clarisse was not at the market this morning. What made me think she would be? How many mornings have I walked the dog, battled with him at the leash  because it was not his usual route, a neighborhood so unfamiliar as to frighten him?   Like the dog we are all habit's creatures: we do what we know how, what we've done, what we expect of ourselves, don't we? It is when we find ourselves stranded from our routines, in unfamiliar neighborhoods, that we become fearful, our neat lives disheveled, the schedule we follow suddenly failing us.   Clarisse was not at the market again this morning. Pulling on his leash as if I had unintentionally strayed, Roi strained his terrier head in the direction of home, but I ignore him. Instead, I look from merchant to merchant: the flower stand where you would bring home  magenta freesias or pink canterbury bells  so the flowers, you said, would have a good home;   the fish peddler, the wine dealer, the dairyman-- I cannot find Clarisse anywhere. Still, each morning now for weeks, I return here, afraid to lose hope, a slave to the old life.    One day she disappeared. I repeat those words like...