Free She Took My Arm As If She Loved Me by Herbert Gold

playing airplane during the child dining procedure is part of the great chain of being. Sneakily I hoped Priscilla noticed that father and son were essential to her housekeeping arrangements.
    â€œJeff,” said Priscilla, “now why don’t you give your father an airplane ride?”—getting it wrong deliberately—and he extended the dripping spoon and I ended with a face of Pablum.
    The Kasdan Family, Open for Business. This firm under new management, Jeff’s mom and Jeff’s dad accepting clerical and cleanup duties as experienced, sleep-deprived partners in the merged enterprise. Jeff busy eating, drinking, shitting, and sleeping on a twenty-four-hour schedule, not excluding Sundays and holidays. The new CEO, Mr. Jeff, doesn’t bother to wonder how he got into this. The father accepts conditions he had not anticipated. The unearned perfect intimacy of family, like sunlight, doesn’t need discussion. Pride happens. Contentment happens. The years happen. The mother begins to wonder if this is what her life was supposed to be.
    *   *   *
    And here is what I feel now: Love, love, love, horrible desolation and regret, love.
    We make love and say to each other, “Yes … Yes … Oh yes … Yes,” and then the baby is crying when we get out of the bath together.
    â€œYes, yes, yes,” she says to Jeff as she picks him up, holds him to her breast, and he subsides into happy feeding sucks. I lie near the other breast, dozing, loving the Chinese on the bus, loving the bus driver, loving Jeff, loving Priscilla. Even daring to say yes to myself as I pick up clothes blown hurricane-style around the bedroom, one of my socks miraculously planted inside one of the legs of her silken panties. Pale sweet silk, smelling of her sweet strong stride. Yes for sure, forever and ever.
    So much affirmation to come to naught in its doomed due course.
    And here is what I feel now: Love, love, love, horrible desolation and regret, love.
    Yes anyway, yes, because it was.

Chapter 8
    We painted our walls white, did it ourselves because Priscilla liked climbing on ladders, wielding rollers, dripping thick paint on drop cloths, then breaking to go at turkey sandwiches on sourdough bread held in speckled hands. We hung Fillmore Auditorium posters, psychedelic works by Mouse, Rick Griffin, Moscoso, Wilfred Satty, gazing at them with fond irony, and then we suspended stained-glass mandalas and zodiac images from the vendors on Haight Street to improve the Aquarian Age sunlight through our windows. In the bathroom we mounted a sepia-tinted photograh entitled “Chocolate George’s Funeral,” which showed the memorial motorcycle cortège of Hell’s Angels commemorating the life and tragic end of a colleague who had collided with a black-and-white van full of pigs at an intersection where the right-of-way belonged to the survivors. Priscilla had once joined me in a summit conference I scheduled with George, who got his name from lounging about with a trademark container of chocolate milk propped against the hairy gap in his jeans. I needed to ask about a meth factory allegedly run by an alleged chief of a motorcycle sport club. We met at the corner of Page and Ashbury, near the detox unit of the Free Clinic. George graciously offered Priscilla a swig of his well-browned, well-muzzled milk; she, of course, accepted the Chocolate Milk of Peace. About the methedrine sulphate factory, whatever that might be, C. George declared he didn’t know nothing, but he sure thought the world of my old lady. “She’s a mama I could even have a go at myself,” he roguishly hinted. So the sepia commemoration print was meaningful to us.
    Around this time the Native American separatist movement launched its war canoes to occupy Alcatraz Island, first installment on the rest of Amerikkka—important to include all those k s—and Alfonso suggested I put up a