noam hessler – two cars

Beautiful men want to drain me of my blood. Beautiful women too. Their eyes sparkle, they tell me I have good veins. I was meant to be pierced, they say, with their eyes, wet and rheumy or sharp, young, the eyes now of the sandyhaired man in the blue mask. This has happened on Tinder before, but now it’s happening at the blood drive. He is watching the needle in my arm that takes my blood, nervous, whites around his irises. He’s put it in wrong, but my face doesn’t show it, I set him at ease. I am a professional bleeder, I am meant to be incised, to be carved. Like Prometheus, perhaps. In my hand is a bicycle pump, I squeeze it, slow, steady, it eats the pain. Sups it with its unmouthlike mouth. I am a professional at squeezing the bicycle pump, at feeding pain to others clearbagged and red, making it out of vibrations from the air. A lightning rod. When they snap the bloodbag off you a little blood is left in a tube that looks like a glowstick. I would know this. I’m the best damn bleeder my town has ever seen. The sandyhaired man who drains my blood, who I put at ease with a patient smile, is telling me how he left Iowa, his podunk tiny town, to set out drawing blood from donors. We’re in a Unitarian church. He’s made a pilgrimage to me, I think. I am a titan, my veins pulse as I choose, the people love me. Once I was glowering outside a Mexican restaurant, missing my train. Lost my head at the busdriver before, so he let me off. Two women stopped their cars to complement my hair. I smiled, thanked them. This too was me bleeding.

/

I’m woozy in the parking lot outside, drunk on my own benevolence. I am going to go home and make dinner, and fall asleep to MSNBC. It’s all I watch. I am the eagle that eats my own liver, I am the apex lamb, I’m the font and the wine, I am the man stealing my car. I holler out to him, a friend I haven’t met yet. You meet men like this in parking lots, sometimes. The center of his forehead bulges, an immense globular egg, his hair strings yellow to the sides of it. His eyes are wild, his mouth recedes into his face. His teeth are yellow, a dog unfit for biting. I walk slowly towards him as he tries to jam something — a flat metal expanse, no crowbar, something worse than that — into the car door. His fingernails are red with my car’s paint, or red with something else; he’s been scratching at the door. He sees the blooddrive sticker on my shirt — a crown. He sees my wobbling gate, he looks at me, wide-eyed. Lips trembling. He’s going to bite me. “This is my car,” he says, and he believes it. “You stole it.” I am the rabid dog who tries to reclaim his car from that which stole it — also me. No bike pump in my hand, the car’s keys in my hand. “I’m sorry,” I say, charitable. It is hard sometimes to hold my head as professionally as I’d like to, lightheaded. He apologizes in turn, mumbles something. Not his car, or my car now. No bloodrush, on my part, my hands — cold. I am the car, its headlights, in paint red like my blood. I am awash in it. I’m in his wetwild eyes. I am a professional at getting into my own car and driving it home. Two months from now I will come back to the church to supplicate myself, to sacrifice, and they will thank me. This I see.

//

In that church years ago were portraits of goats. I met the goatpainter in the snow, in childhood, before I was so good at giving blood. He got it out of me on his knuckles, mean, like squeezing water from a stone. I must admit he was quite good at what he did. My veins are like rivers, generous, but he took it from my shoulders-neck-chest-face, which was more difficult. We were at his birthday party and we had been playing Skylanders on the TV and it’s not a competitive game, but I was doing better than he was. My mom peeled him off my curled body. I remember days when my skin was strong and I was vulnerable, and now I bleed freely and my will is iron. The goatpainter understood this, I think. The strength in weakness. He understood it in his art, the way he applied oils to the primed canvas, the way he pushed her car off the edge. Went crying to his mother after; she took him to Vegas. He’s on bail now. Didn’t know the girl, not my school, not my problem really. A story to tell. The best runner-off-the-road in this damn town. And a talented artist, really. Process oriented: first you take a photograph of the goat. We talked of this, in film club; we met after hours in the parking lot of the Unitarian church where I am now God, something easy to become since Unitarians don’t worship much of anything. He was past hurting me then, I had a few more years ‘til I could donate; gravid times, like the sound of air before it rains. Once you take the photograph of the goat you work on replicating its image on the campus in charcoal. Once you’ve pinned them to the ground you hit. Later you begin to evoke the goat, its exactitudes, in heavy black in white oils. Later you begin to excuse the action, find ambiguities, tell your innocence redknuckled. I’m sorry I’m getting clipped, in phrasing. I feel younger writing this. She lived, by the way. The girl. Her friend too, both were in the car; she was the goatpainter’s girlfriend, which sounds to me like it was exhausting.

/

In kindergarten I had to keep getting sent home because there was another little boy that would bite my neck. Suppose he was the first who figured out how good he was at bleeding. I remember him with bulging eyes and a big round head, sort of like a frog, but maybe I am remembering his photo and the photo was taken wrong, or I am remembering the cover of the book No, David! His name was Ethan. He sent me home bruised, and with little apology cards his mom bought him from CVS. Ethan was sweet. He was a good kid, you can’t really help the kinds of things he did. A boy or a girl, here a boy gets obsessed with a certain taste for violence — a boy gets addicted to bitterness and finds no one to stop — and will act it out until there is no one who will not stop him anymore. His mom and dad buy him cards from CVS, his mom buys him a plane ticket departing from Burlington that morning so pack everything, I love you, we’re gonna get out of here and everything’s gonna be alright. Ethan chewed on my neck, choked me sometimes, I think, I forget, but he did not leave my blood on the snow. My mom gave blood for the first time when she was fifteen and there wasn’t any pain, but the tube into the bag got caught on the nurse’s rolly chair — she was in a gymnasium. When they yank the blood bag out of your arm on accident a lot of blood is spraying around the room and the nurse sounds like a warbler or some other singing bird. A good story for your kids, a good reminder to keep giving blood, at the Red Cross or the gym or Unitarian church by Buddy’s Burgers or the fishpacking plant where you work long hours to get out of New York or the sex ed job where you talk to Wisconsin teenagers or the hospital where your child keeps you overtime because they’re small and they’re not coming out right. When I came out I was crying, which I don’t do anymore. The doctor said “that’s one loud baby.” He and my mom laughed. I was purple and miniature and wrinkled like a raisin and I was purple because of the lack of oxygen but also because of this; something up in the sky — an angel or G-d or a giant with a lion head and turkey legs and entrails growing from his shoulders, if I’m remembering the Mesopotamian right — saw that I was oh so full of blood to give, as I would be raised to be, as I’ll raise my kids to be.
	There are two cars in this story or maybe three if you count her car and there are two men in this story besides the blooddrawer and Ethan maybe now that he’s older and that is because, at the end of the day, there are so many ways you can try and hurt other people and so many ways that you couldn’t stop yourself and despite all that you come up short anyways.


NOAM HESSLER is a poet from New England. Hessler's work has been published in Apocalypse Confidential, BRUISER, and DON'T SUBMIT. They are currently a student at Vassar College, and can be found on twitter at @poetryaccnt1518. 


HOME