Rider: ["The boy's name was Warren. He was an…

But you had the sense that he was always competing with your father for your affection.

Not only my father. He didn’t understand my need to develop ties in these new worlds. He tried to legislate over my feelings. He was subject to extraordinarily inappropriate fits of jealousy.

How are you the judge of that?

Many small incidents.

Such as…

The boy’s name was Warren. He was an orphan.

As we pulled into the weed lot of the camp

in the uncertain March air and patented silence,

I could see him peeking down at us

from a second story dormer window,

like someone who had been dreaming of escape

from the run-down resort: torn up turf; dirt

basketball court, net hanging for its life by one

thin strand of rope; horseshoes, shuffle board;

musty, mildewed cabins with wet bedding;

the stars pressing too hard against our faces

in the catastrophic silence of the nights…

I’d never been left so happily alone,

alone, that is, in Warren’s wonderful company.

His talk mimicked the cadence of the stones he kicked.

Warren showed me the mica glow in the arrowheads

and quartz-tipped spears he'd unearthed.

Warren's cigar box overflowed with other people's

souvenirs, miniature monuments, key chains, lighters,

and initialed items like cuff links and bracelets.

He scoured the corners of the rooms of the departed

while his “mother,” slip of the tongue there, vacuumed.

“People always leave something behind,” he said.

I knew what he meant: taking their clothes

on and off so many times something

had to go. I wanted an initial bracelet

even with someone else’s initials.

The kids at summer camp in the Poconos all had

initialed bracelets, except for me,

but who among them had been west

of the Mississippi?

Warren wanted a home. I didn’t know what I wanted.

I asked to bring Warren home and give him a home.

“That’s ridiculous, he has a home here.

Besides, you only just met.”

My mother lamented his stick-thin, soot-blackened frame,

the smell he gave off and his yellow teeth,

his urchin eating with his hands,

his short and choppy hair,

his blousy shirt and baggy fatigues

that gave him a bulk, a volume,

he didn’t otherwise possess.

What about his fits of giddy delight?

As the days passed I forgot myself.

I became more and more like Warren.

I would brook no insults about my brother.

It would no longer be me, but me and Warren.

I’d share my meals with Warren, and my desk at school.

Warren could stay and I would just—slip away.

Next to Warren, I felt like I was on a clipper ship

lifted out of the water by the powerful wind-breath

of my two distant coastal families; my warring

mother and “blood” father, her lovely

companionable family in Los Angeles and Manhattan;

his friendly, compliant relations in Manhattan and Bensonhurst…

I dreamt both families were jammed on the deck

of the ship, waving, gesticulating, shouting,

and that I clung to a raft’s rope as a great

wave flung me back and back, but the truth

was I wasn’t sure I wanted to be near.

I wanted to fly apart—in the nowhere—.

When our two-door Chrysler Windsor

edged off the gravel onto the highway

I thrust my head right where the plush fabric

of the front seat parted like the Red Sea,

and said to my new dad. “You know what.

I love Warren more than I love you.”

“You don’t know what you’re saying,” he snapped.

“He’s just a little putz, and I can get

rid of him with a snap

of my fingers. Presto. See. Now—where is he?”

The seat beside me was empty. I was empty.

And my heart pounded in wild longing for its fullness lost.

I should have kept my mouth shut

but I thought my heart would burst

with that secret locked in it: why doesn’t he

understand? It wasn’t that I loved him less than I had

but that I loved Warren more. He had the same reaction

several years later, in Chicago, when I announced

my love for Carol, a round-faced, soft spoken blond girl

I’d brought home to play with my electric trains and drink

hot chocolate one brutal winter afternoon. I loved her and

I kissed her in the elevator on the way up.

I wanted him to say: I’m so happy for you,

let’s put on some 45’s and dance.

He said, “You don't know what love is.”

And for the first time slapped me in the face.

I wrote my “blood” father of my love and he wrote back

he was glad I was “making friends out there.”

Why didn’t these men understand, I know what words mean,

by love I meant love, however transitory.

One word, two fathers, two red stone faces,

unblinking, dismayed.

Copyright Credit: Mark Rudman, "from Rider ["The boy's name was Warren. He was an orphan."] from Rider © 1994 by Mark Rudman. Published by Wesleyan University Press. Used by permission. www.wesleyan.edu/wespress