Michael Lally

Almost Anything

I could pass for almost anything. I re-
member the first time I went to meet
with Harry Gittes in Hollywood. This
was in the 1980s. I was a single parent
of two teenagers and trying to make a
living as an actor or screenwriter. Gittes
was a movie producer and friend of Jack
Nicholson. Which is how the detective
Nicholson portrays in “Chinatown” got
the name Jake Gittes. The last name came
from Harry, who, when I met him, was
looking for a new movie project to produce.
And I had ideas for movies I was trying to
sell or get somebody to hire me to write.

 

I went to his production company’s office,
one of those little Hollywood bungalows,
where I told the receptionist/secretary I’m
here to see Harry Gittes. She got up and
went into his office and came out after a
few minutes and directed me to go in. When
I closed the door and walked over to Harry’s
desk to introduce myself, he said, “You scared
my secretary.” I asked, “How?” He said she
came into his office all shook up, asking if
he owed money to the mob. I was wearing
my three-quarter length leather and, you know,
had that voice that can sound sometimes like
Dirty Harry in Clint Eastwood movies.

 

A lot of people thought I was a tough guy.
Sometimes I did too. I even played tough guys
in films and on TV. But I also wore dresses
and clip-on earrings in public and passed for
feminine and engaged in what we called gen-
der bending in the 1970s, deliberately mixing
signs of gender to make people wonder where
we fit in the rigid categories of the time. For by
then I’d come to believe all humans contain the
infinite possibilities of the sexual/gender spec-
trum and either don’t know it or want to know
it, or are afraid of it, or don’t have access to it,
or a way to get access to it. But maybe I was
just rationalizing inexplicable changes in me.

 

Polenta

I’m staring into my dinner bowl
trying to remember the name of
the main ingredient, but can’t . . . .

 

I’m pretty sure it begins with a ‘p’
it’s mushy like most of my food
these days, chopped fine or pureed

 

to make it easier for my Parkinson’s
tightening jaw to chew, not pablum,
not porridge, I ate it last night too and

 

knew its name then, like I knew the
right answers on Jeopardy most of
the time till the last few years, and

 

suddenly I’m thinking of Iron Mike
my Irish immigrant grandfather
who lived down the street I was

 

on one day in the 1950s when my
cousin Mary Lynn who lived next
door unexpectedly ran out of our

 

grandparents house calling to me
to come in and see our grandpa
cause he was dying and I did and

 

he was as we watched him exhale
one last time with a gurgle sound
my aunt called the death rattle and

 

though she was the only Protestant
in our clan suggested we all kneel
and say the rosary, and we did, and

 

not many months later, our Irish
immigrant widowed grandma
took to her bed, now at her only

 

daughter’s home (her only other
daughter died as an infant in the
1918 so-called “Spanish flu” pan-

 

demic, the rest of her eight were
boys) and as I sat by her shriveled
body she told me she had to go

 

because she could hear her late
husband giving the angels hell
for not making his scrapple the

 

way he likes it, and I believed
she was telling the truth as I then
believed in an actual place called

 

heaven, and too after she passed
with me still wondering how did a
dish associated with the Pennsyl-

 

vania Dutch become an Irishman’s
favorite, and I’m finishing the last
of the p-word dish I still am literally

 

drawing a blank trying to remember
and spend the day frustratedly trying
to recall but can’t, and then eating

 

cereal the next morning it comes
to me, “polenta,” duh, how could
the memory that friends and clan

 

relied on before the internet for
the answers to questions bugging
them, like what was the name of . . .

 

whatever they couldn’t recall and
maybe now that it’s not needed
anymore the universe is allowing

 

it all to slowly slip away like my
Irish grandparents did so long
ago, have I told you this before?