Ken's Photos...

Photos

By Ken Bruen

 

One of my favourite photos . . . a long shot.

  The tide is out on Grattan beach, a long way out. The sun is bouncing off the barely visible sea. You can see two stick figures, clearly dancing.

  Like Zorba.

  The figures appear equidistant from the water and the photographer. My wife took that snap.

  We were happy then.

  Grace and I danced on the beach like seals. My daughter was six then and I can hear her laughter still.

  One of my perennial books is Hemingway’s, A Movable Feast.

  The Paris days.

  He writes how happy he and Mary were and he wrote, there was wood all around them and he never knocked on it, for luck.

  I’m sure there was lots of driftwood on the beach that day but it never occurred to me to touch it.

  I have a magnificent shot of my close friend, a poet, perched on a Harley Davidson in The Grand Canyon. He looks free, as if the good times were hovering all around him.

  Before the poems darkened and before the funerals.

  Another photo of Grace and I, looks like we’re wearing identical sweatshirts and it seems almost sepia in tone, we’re staring off to the right, in wonderment, as if something magical was at hand.

  Most of my friends remark on the spirituality of the picture and ask what on earth we were watching.

  Sesame Street.

  I have a photo of my Dad when he was in his thirties, it hangs above my desk, he looks nothing like me and I don’t know now how I feel about that. His suit is circa George Raft and he had the mandatory cigarette of the times, his hair is black and shiny and what I love most is the expression in his eyes, reads,

  “Take your best shot.”

  When I visit his grave, and realise yet again that he is truly gone, I whisper,

  “You were able for the best.’

  He was.

  That Noel, my beloved brother, and my mother, lie each side of him is mixed comfort.

  Photos, all I know of heaven and hell.

  Somedays, I derive scant comfort therein, and others, I can't look at them at all.

  I carry a photo in my wallet that I never . . . ever look at, it’s there, I know but I’m adept at using my wallet frequently without ever seeing it. She is smiling in the picture and I must have been too though I forget now but I know she has an expression of such longing, such . . . yearning in her eyes and I still wonder for what?

  Now of course, I’ll never know.

  I should have asked.

  You think?

  In my files the other day, a snap fell out of an old notebook, in the days when I thought I might be a poet, god bless my ignorance and it shows me on top of the Twin Towers, dressed in my security uniform, I had a job minding the North tower, I was nineteen and could barely mind myself and they thought I could mind The Towers. I don’t recognise that person, I know it’s me but it’s not anyone I know, not any more. That person has a face full of such hope and anticipation, and almost, happiness.

  God in heaven, if only that poor soul had any notion what was coming down the pike, he might well have jumped, sometimes I wish he did, jump that is.

  When my beloved brother Noel died, a vagrant alcoholic in the Australian Outback, we received his body home in a sealed casket.

  The night before the funeral mass, as the coffin lay in the church, I placed a large framed photo of Noel on the coffin, when he was in his prime, his smiling face fills the whole space.

  A week after the funeral, I ran into a friend of mine who asked,

  “Why did you use two photos of Noel?’

  “What?’

  “On the Sunday, we thought it was great that your dad was standing behind Noel in the photo and then on Monday, at the mass, it was just Noel alone.”

  I swore it was the one picture, I hadn’t touched it or used any other. He gave me an odd look and moved on.

  My Dad, in one of those awful ironies, had died a little over four weeks before Noel.

  Photos never lie.

  Do they?

© Ken Bruen 2007 All Rights Reserved

:: Photos is an EXCLUSIVE extract from Ken Bruen's Benign Thug, a memoir due to be published by the Busted Flush Press of Texas.