Reunion Friday night upstairs at MacGregor’s I become one
with my true self the moment Tom McCusker—
single, schnockered, father of a little boy—shoulders
from the sweaty grottos of Herman Melville’s dreams
through the Penfield High School Class of ‘91
to see if he still might have a chance with my wife
after twenty years. Platters of cherry tomatoes
and asparagus spears lie untouched on shellacked
pine tables. Beer mugs swing fistfuls of Spanish gold
over the trophy for Best Homecoming Float
and the glittery shrine for Eric (gunned down
in a drug deal) and Towanda (found on railroad tracks
six days after the ten-year). The conversation in the room
sounds like a passenger jet performing an engine test.
So when Tom McCusker, in skin-tight black T-shirt
and diamond crucifix, extends his hand, I hear only
what my wife said the week before our trip to New York:
Tom was from Glasgow and days before our flight
sent her a note, asking if she would have liked him
if she hadn’t liked her boyfriend, Chris. I have journeyed
thousands of miles to crush Tom’s grip and say,
We aren’t in high school anymore. People stopped leaving
the British Empire to seek fortune in the New World hundreds
of years ago. Instead, the history of conquest pulses
through our handclasp. The passing waitress transforms
us from rivals to twins separated at birth by shipwreck.
Out the window, Irondequoit Bay brews the red ale
of dusk. I want to tell Tom I remember when love
was a leaky sloop soldiering out of the Firth of Forth
and arriving every day in the same malarial swamp
of lies and loneliness. I came to stand under the thump
of the house PA and say, Tom McCusker, you are
the MC Hammer tunes nobody hears. Your life is the U.S.-Australia
softball game no one watches on the big screen TV. But I leave,
swearing to my long-lost blood brother I will give him
the deed to my sugar plantation, with my wife
and five children as slaves, and sail the globe in search
of the marooned mutineer I no longer recognize as myself.
