I was missing English one day, American, really,
with its pill-popping Hungarian goulash of everything
from Anglo-Saxon to Zulu, because British English
is not the same, if the paperback dictionary
I bought at Brentano’s on the Avenue de l’Opéra
is any indication, too cultured by half. Oh, the English
know their delphiniums, but what about doowop, donuts,
Dick Tracy, Tricky Dick? With their elegant Oxfordian
accents, how could they understand my yearning for the hotrod,
hotdog, hot flash vocabulary of the U. S of A.,
the fragmented fandango of Dagwood’s everyday flattening
of Mr. Beasley on the sidewalk, fetuses floating
on billboards, drive-by monster hip-hop stereos shaking
the windows of my dining room like a 7.5 earthquake,
Ebonics, Spanglish, “you know” used as comma and period,
the inability of 90% of the population to get the present perfect:
I have went, I have saw, I have tooken Jesus into my heart,
the battlecry of the Bible Belt, but no one uses
the King James anymore, only plain-speak versions,
in which Jesus, raising Lazarus from the dead, says,
“Dude, wake up,” and the L-man bolts up like a B-movie
mummy. “Whoa, I was toasted.” Yes, ma’am,
I miss the mongrel plenitude of American English, its fall-guy,
rat-terrier, dog-pound neologisms, the bomb of it all,
the rushing River Jordan backwoods mutability of it, the low-rider,
boom-box cruise of it, from New Joisey to Ha-wah-ya
with its sly dog, malasada-scarfing beach blanket lingo
to the ubiquitous Valley Girl’s like-like stuttering,
shopaholic rant. I miss its quotidian beauty, its querulous
back-biting righteous indignation, its preening rotgut
flag-waving cowardice. Suffering Succotash, sputters
Sylvester the Cat; sine die, say the pork-bellied legislators
of the swamps and plains. I miss all those guys,
their Tweety-bird resilience, their Doris Day optimism,
the candid unguent of utter unhappiness on every channel,
the midnight televangelist euphoric stew, the junk mail-voice mail
vernacular. On every boulevard and rue I miss
the Tarzan cry of Johnny Weismueller, Johnny Cash, Johnny B.
Goode, and all the smart-talking, gum-snapping
hard-girl dialogue, finger-popping x-rated street talk, sports
babble, Cheetoes, Cheerios, chili dog diatribes. Yeah,
I miss them all, sitting here on my sidewalk throne sipping
champagne verses lined up like hearses, metaphors juking,
nouns zipping in my head like Corvettes on Dexedrine, French verbs
slitting my throat, yearning for James Dean to jump my curb.
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