PETER RAMOS

Louie Armstrong in Beirut

Around the turn of the last century, my great-grandfather climbed aboard a steamer in Beirut, Lebanon, carrying a giant bag of silks and nothing else. He was headed to Genoa, Italy, where ships bound for the New World docked, awaiting passengers. Once there, he knew only that the ship he then boarded was headed for South America. And so, arriving finally in Caracas, he debarked and walked over the green mountains of Venezuela to make a mercantile fortune. Having succeeded in business, the patriarch took ship back to Lebanon and brought back a wife. His son, my father’s father, a first-generation Venezuelan, followed his father’s lead and went to the homeland to marry and return. The son, my grandfather—whose first name is my middle name—gambled, drank, womanized and pissed away the fortune while my father was still in his teens. So the family moved to Lebanon, the wife and mother believing change of scenery would somehow correct her husband’s behavior. My father was a teenager. Born in Venezuela in 1937, he now had to learn and speak Arabic. He knew French because his mother and grandfather spoke it—like most colonized middle-class Lebanese Christians. My father once told me he’d seen Louie Armstrong perform in Beirut. I looked it up recently, and the old man was right: Armstrong and his band played at the UNESCO Theater in Beirut as part of a Middle Eastern tour, sent there by the US as a form of cultural diplomacy in 1959. But the story seems incredible: my father was in school, studying constantly. He couldn’t have had much spending money. And even so, how did he get into this diplomatic, cultural event?  

How my mother and brother and I would light up when my father finally got home from work, his tie loosened, his jacket folded over one arm. He’d scoop his children up. His unmistakable scent, the ghost of aftershave and sweat, the scrape of his five o’clock shadow as he kissed us—we drank it in. We’d all be in the small yellow kitchen. It was our first house, a rental in Catonsville, Maryland. He came home one night in high spirits (had he stopped with friends at a bar first?). This would have been 1973 or ’74, and he started singing Elton John’s “Benny and Jets,” except he sang it in an exaggerated American accent, extending the liquid, hissing “s” of “Jets.” My brother and I squealed. Incidents like this must have been rare, small gems in a dim past.   

Another memory of my father: he’s taking a shower in one of the houses where I grew up, a modest two-story on top of a steep hill. It’s summer, hot and humid even in the leafy green suburbs. Dad had purchased an early version of what we would later call a “boom box.” It played cassette tapes, and now it’s precariously plugged-in by the sink. I open the door to the bathroom and through the steam and translucent curtains, I see the old man singing, moving. The radio blares. It’s the strangest music I’d ever heard. Lebanese pop music from the early sixties, full of mysterious scales and voices that bend and loop with Arabic melodies and lyrics, probably a song by Fairuz, a famous Lebanese female vocalist. The old man turns off the faucet and pulls the curtain back. I’m astonished at how much hair covers him. I feel embarrassed. For years, my brother and I ridiculed that kind of music—like our father’s accent and much of his background. 

La Vie en Rose

He owned few artistic things, but he did possess a framed print of Bernard Buffett’s “Tête de Clown,” painted in 1955.  He must have bought it in Beirut in the early ‘60s before he came to the U.S.  I knew none of this back then—the name of the artist or the original painting, where and when he got it. They say the son becomes what the father secretly wishes to be. I have a son, and I give that prophesy its own room. A sad looking street clown, thin-faced with a long nose painted red and a square white splotch over his left eye, orange rectangle covering thin lips, a small triangular goatee of green paint and a dramatic black dash angled upward—a fat l’accent aigu over the right eye. You could see his stiff collar, the kind men wore in the early part of the last century, black coat, and thin yellow tie with small black brush-dabbed polka dots. Behind him, a blue background over which tiny thin black lines, thread-like, hardly visible, crisscross vertically and horizontally over themselves.  

Weekend late nights, in dad’s dark study—which also served as the TV and guestroom with a fold-out sofa—we’d watch scary movies with our friends in high school. The films flickered dim and bright against the print hanging behind us. Our vigilant French alcoholic clown: this is what my father chose, possibly the only print he ever owned. Our friends would spend the night in here, on the pull-out and the rug—all of us staying up with horror flicks. We were more terrified of the clown, with his deep blue background, blue-black, rainy midnight gelatin blue beyond the comforting lights of Paris. Turning off the set, I had to adjust my eyes, and if there were enough moon, I could still see the clown, his gaze meeting mine. Always the last thing to guard myself against before sleep.  

My father’s gone now, and the clown’s long lost it powers to terrify. Father, unknowable French clown, beyond the salons and cafés where prostitutes and artists and other drunks gather in the gaslighting’s green flare, the sad clown less visible now who never caught the artist’s eye. You were there, in your music—Edith Piaf, Jacques Brel—with your father—fathers and sons and grandfathers—all of us walking alone past the dark, rained-out cafés, frightened, pulled along by a busted heart. 

Moving Blanket

In four hours, I was back in Buffalo, in the Hospice building, sunny bright crisp October, the leaves on bloody fire. My brother, my mother, and our Venezuelan cousin, Felipe, who spent every summer of our childhood staying with us, were already there. Stephen had ordered food from a nearby Lebanese restaurant—pita wraps with chicken and hummus. They wouldn’t allow me to drink wine inside, so I moved my Bota box to the back of my car and went out again and again to fill up my plastic cup. 

When I got there, I went straight to my father. He was non-verbal at that point, lying on his side, unconscious and breathing heavy with his tongue hanging out grotesquely. I knelt and spoke close to his face. “I’m here, dad. We’re all here. You can let go. Go to Jesus now—walk into his arms.” I knew he believed so I said it. And then we waited. We cried and waited. At one point my mother got into his bed and lay beside him. In the private waiting room, I was so glad to see my cousin and brother. We laughed, ate and drank, and the more I went back to my car to refill, the giddier I felt. When the nurse came and told us he was near, we all jumped up and ran. I felt joy and relief; he was almost free. Someone official (a doctor, I think) was taking vitals and told us he was near, or had he already passed? I held him, my face close to his, and I could swear I felt and heard his last breath. But his body continued warm, and Stephen and I took turns rubbing his back and holding him, still dad in his flannel pajamas. Dad. We left the room and came back. They had positioned him on his back with arms and feet crossed. I walked out again.  

When I returned, the room seemed empty, just my father’s body on a gurney, all of it under a blue quilted blanket, the kind movers use on furniture. Two male nurses wheeled it out and we followed. Along the hall, in every open door, a nurse stood, respectfully, as my father’s body passed. When we finally stopped by the glass doors to the back maintenance parking lot, I saw the SUV he would travel in.  

PETER RAMOS is the author of two books of poetry, Lord Baltimore (Ravenna Press, 2020) and Please Do Not Feed the Ghost (BlazeVox Books, 2008), as well as three chapbooks: Television Snow (Back Pages Books 2015), Watching Late-Night Hitchcock & Other Poems (handwritten press 2004), and Short Waves (White Eagle Coffee Store Press 2003). A professor of English at Buffalo State University, Peter teaches courses in nineteenth- and twentieth-century American literature.