From: Jimmy Kurk
Sorry Paul: Lurch was a good guy, he was on our side. Let me know about the service in OC. I'd want to see Helen and pay her my deepest condolences and so forth. Jimmy
“Cheap Linoleum Floor”
Three nights before my father died, we were all sitting in the living room, a Friday, November 21, 1993, at about 7 o'clock. A freezing night, me and my brother decided to build a fire in the fireplace. While I was out scrounging for deadwood for kindling, my father, who had been asleep, had risen on his own and come out to sit with the rest of the family. I was happy in a strange way to see he'd come out of the room in which he had chosen to spend the last days of his life. He weighed less than the load of wood I was carrying. And earlier that day, after I had bathed him, I counted 18 tumors on his back.
We had him on morphine. For some odd reason, somebody brought up the poet, Alan Ginsberg. "You mean I hafta come out heah and tawk about 'Alan fucking Ginnnnnsboig?'" he said in his best Brooklyn accent and everyone laughed. Even he laughed and I knew how it hurt him to laugh. I tore up some newspaper in long thin strips and unloaded the kindling onto them between the andirons and tore up some more strips of newspaper and lit a match to it. I'm not very good at many things. But when it comes to making a decent fire, I have no superior and this fire was no exception. It blazed immediately.
It only took a few seconds before the smoke began filling the room, billowing out from the hearth because I had forgotten to open the flue. I usually know better but I had been drinking. Maybe that was it. I don't know. I got the flue open immediately and there was a rush of bodies running to windows to throw them open. I turned on the air conditioner. On the coldest night of the year I turned on the air conditioner.
But the smoke had done it's damage and when it had cleared a bit I saw my father stretched stiff in the chair having a seizure. I don't know why I touched him but when I did he screamed out as if in great pain and I recoiled and stood beside, watching.
Suddenly, he began to repeat very clearly and excitedly, eyes in the throes of Rem, head turned chin to shoulder and slightly gesticulating, "Pop, Pop, O Niner 4 Niner, coming in, coming in over target, Pop, Pop, do you read? come in O niner 4 niner, Porto Civitanova, Flak at 8 o'clock, Flak, Flak, O Niner 4 niner, flaps down, flaps down." It was like hearing someone speaking in tongues, someone who wasn't really there, someone who was somewhere else in time and place, in another universe, talking to god.
7 years later, I went to have dinner with my sister in Millville, a pitiful city. When I got there I found a note on the door that there had been an emergency and to come in and wait. I don't like being alone in other people's house, not even a sister's. I always feel like a burglar and that I will be blamed for anything that has turned up missing. So, with an hour or so on my hands, I drove out to the Air Base where they have a little WWII museum outside of town I’d heard about. Everything was disheveled inside, out of its case from behind its clean museum glass, helmets in boxes, uniforms on hangers. And there was a huge propeller in the middle of the room that had been removed from the wall. For all rites, it looked just like the arms of a giant clock pointed at 6 and 12. The curator told me they had just gotten a grant and were completely remodeling.
"What did your father do in the war?" the guy asked me. "B-17, togglier, 15th, North Africa and Italy." "Have I got a treat for you!" he said. I followed him into a small room where a large instrument was sitting up on a little make shift scaffold. "What the hell's that?" I asked. "Boy, that's a Norden, a bomb sight out of a 17, just got her in the mail." Go ahead and have a look. I squinted one eye and looked down into the eyepiece. But this is what I saw.
I reeled back and broke into tears. "it's all right," the man said, "it happens."
My eyeball saw the floor, cheap mauve and white marbled linoleum, circa 1950. But my mind's eyeball saw this picture: an aerial bombardment shot taken from the Berkeley Sal, my old man's B-17, on a raid over Porto Civitanova, Italy on January 21st, 1944. 6 of the 10 crew members didn’t come back. They were after Airfields, a Marshaling Yard and that bridge to the north. If you look closely, you will see my father's bombs dropping like fat cigars over the city. They gave him the DFC for navigating the Sal back to Foggia, the entire crew dead or wounded. On an old 3 by 5 note card is written the following in my father’s hand: “And it makes me wonder what they would think of the way some of us use the one thing they don’t have: LIFE.”
Love,
Jim
Attached picture of Bombs dropping
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