At the Apollo Theatre, St. Thomas, circa late-1950s
My father sexually misloved me growing up, but that’s another story. Or is it?
This is about Marko the Magnifiko who wore a turban and silky Turkish pants. No shirt. Gold necklaces encircled his neck. A red bauble dangled from an ear.
He rolled a mahogany barrel to the center of the stage in this movie theater where I usually saw films such as House of Wax. But Marko the Magnifiko was real, and live. He thumped the barrel to show the children its heft.
I knew, from the outset, I had to be chosen as his assistant, selected from all the kids in the audience.
And, sure enough, there I was on stage!
The barrel lay on its side, facing the audience. Marko the Magnifiko helped me on until I sat astride it, like riding a horse. He squatted behind it, his arms outstretched, his feet firmly planted. With his teeth (or was it a magic trick?), he lifted it. I heard him straining under the weight. He raised it higher. I felt as if I were levitating, the barrel perpendicular to his body, with me not moving a muscle, perfectly balanced.
I couldn’t see the audience, my sight blinded by the spotlight. I couldn’t see him, shadowed behind me.
Was this real?
Real or not, there I sat six feet in the air despite knowing Marko the Magnifiko’s teeth could at any moment pop out, sending me sprawling in splinters.
But his teeth didn’t snap. He didn’t drop me.
Did I think Marko the Magnifiko could abracadabra me—at the risk of crashing to the stage—into a little girl with a different father? No. But there was still magic in levitating, in being seen.
Remembrance of Things Past
I walked home from school in Glen Rock, New Jersey, in a wintry dusk. I clasped my homework and books, zippered in a leather case, to my chest, another layer of insulation. I wore a suede jacket trimmed with fake fur. Yet soft. Comforting around my face. My loafers tapped still-snowless suburban sidewalks. My knees were frigid above my socks. But with this solitary shock of cold, the rest of me warmed. The scent of fireplace smoke deepened the air.
I whispered lines to a poem I had to memorize, a school assignment.
Now, all these years later, I can’t recall the poem or the title.
Yet I remember timing my footfalls to match the syllables of the lines.
I remember, at some point along the two-mile walk, singing, although just in my head, the song “Crying” by Roy Orbison.
Despite the lyrics, I felt alone more than sad, a sense of solitude more than unhappiness.
I didn’t feel like crying.
I don’t feel like crying.
Venus hovered in the plum-colored sky. Nightfall was a path to follow across the universe as stars switched on one by one, like lamps inside the homes I passed.
I suppose I successfully memorized the assigned poem, only to ultimately forget it. Maybe it will come back to me to me one day, the way the feeling of that moment returns to me now, all those sensations.
How content I feel, my senses fully alive with that night—small, yet also vast—like a poem.
