How I Lost my Vanilla Ice T-shirt
It was April
1991
and I was cool
because I loved Vanilla Ice.
And so what if I was in Model UN
and liked speech & debate
and was more interested in dinosaurs
than dating?
I liked Vanilla Ice—
to the extreme.
So that night
I was going to the dance,
and my mom was coming with me
to chaperone.
Because I was cool—
cool as Ice.
Now let’s remember,
I was cool.
And anybody who’s cool knows
you have to be careful
when going with your parent
to a school function.
So I was happy
when my mom
asked to borrow my t-shirt,
and I could see
Vanilla Ice
glowering in a tough guy stance
from the front of her chest—
Vanilla Ice, Ice Baby.
And so
that night
while the Beach Boys
were Surfin’ USA,
and my mom was dancing on the floor
with the teachers she could coax out,
she leaned to me and said,
“I’m going to get a drink of water.”
And then she fell.
I was on the stairs by the stage
in the school gymnasium
and she was on the floor—
brown slacks
Vanilla Ice T-shirt
and the strangest stare on her face
as she looked straight at the ceiling,
one leg stiff.
When they wheeled the gurney
from the gym,
Becky said, “Everything will be alright.”
But I knew better
because I got an “A” in Health class,
and so I remembered
that you never do CPR
on someone who’s alive
I got to make the call
to tell my grandma that my mother had fallen down.
And then I made the call
to my father to say, “She fell.”
And then we went to the ER
where they have the tiny room—
the room away from the waiting room.
We waited.
And when the staff came in
it was like choreography—
like a dance—
the way they each zeroed in
on their charge.
And Cory’s mom
(who wasn’t at the dance
because she was on duty)
told me she was sorry.
And I could hear my grandma crying.
And later
when I was on the phone
in one of the empty rooms,
telling Mr. Francey from Guidance
that I could get a job,
that I could cook the meals,
that I could shop for groceries on weekends,
I saw my dad walk down the hall.
Years later he told me
what she looked like on the table:
blue
dead
blue
opened
blue
covered.
But not my mom.
They had cut open her chest
and tried to massage her heart,
tried to make it work again.
But it had made the decision to stop
and it was firm in that decision.
That’s how I lost my Vanilla Ice t-shirt.
Myth of Letters
I dream
that you and I
have learned how to communicate
through automatic writing
on cheap notebook paper.
I write you a message,
and then,
moments later,
your response comes through—
the handwriting not my own,
smaller,
neater,
more controlled.
You tell me
you have a new boyfriend
named Ernesto,
and that doctors
have found a way
to force you
to experience his dreams.
They connect your brainwaves
while you sleep.
He is restless,
tosses and turns at night,
and even though you’re in another room
you have trouble sleeping.
My words
come out wrong.
I write,
“I don’t think I can survive
Without you,”
and it changes to
“I cannot perceive
this loss,”
followed by numbers and zeroes.
I wake
with a destructive need
to tell you
how bad losing you feels
Carlton D. Fisher is an Instructor in the English department at SUNY Jefferson and a doctoral student in SUNY Binghamton's Creative Writing program. A life long native of Northern New York where the summers are short and the winters are inhumane, he has previously published work in Assaracus, The Black River Review, and The Paterson Literary Review, and has work forthcoming in Lips and Out of Sequence.