The complete and fully searchable archive of ZYZZYVA’s 26 years of fiction, nonfiction, poetry and art is coming soon. We’re working hard behind the scenes to make the entire archive available right here, free of charge. In the meantime, we hope you’ll enjoy browsing through these selections from our back issues.

Bile

by
Posted on January 30, 2012 in

When the Korean War ended in 1953, my father became restless. Korea lay in ruins, but there were no more enemy soldiers and no more bombs to flee. My father had become addicted to war. Without battles, he had no sense of urgency, no sense of drama. He had already survived, and like the rest of the country, he tried to pick up his life where he had left off. But he was not used to peace. He could make no sense of math equations as an engineering student; it all seemed trivial.

He made journeys into the countryside where he had grown up, hoping to reconnect himself. On one of his outings, he found a trapper gutting a bear. An idea came to him. He asked the hunter for the gall bladder of the bear.

My father put his tongue to the gall bladder. It tasted like the war. He smiled grimly. He could not fail. He could not turn back, because behind him were the Japanese army, the North Korean army, poverty, and abuse. He could not rest. This bile would be his medicine. He wrapped up the gall bladder and froze it. Whenever he felt he was getting too content, sleeping an hour too much, smiling a second too long, he would hunger for the taste of it, bitter, and clinging to his tongue.

As children, we learned that Daddy would have died if he had not had the bile: the bile reminded him of the misery and bitterness of suffering.

What I now realize is that the bitterness stayed inside him and traveled from his tongue, down into his belly, where it now churns.

 

Tradition runs strong in our family. We are Korean Americans, a strong line of warriors, descended from the Mongols. We are modern Genghis Khans, quick tempered but passionate, with chronicles of suffering living in our veins. We are nomadic, settling in a country that severed our mother country in half, with a tourniquet of barbed wire, swathed in khaki green.

Suffering is so much a part of the Korean psyche that we have given it a word, Han. It is a particular suffering, a sense of helplessness against overwhelming odds, a feeling of total abandonment. This word is part of what we call ourselves and our mother country, Hankook sahrahm, Hankook nahrah; Korean people, Korean land. This Han is silent and noble. It is our code and mantra.

 

On our Sunday hikes, my father brings up the rear. My brother Eugene, the Boy Scout, bounds up the hill on light bunny feet. Safe on the hiking trails of the San Gabriel Mountains, I try to enjoy the views beyond the silt of smog, but Father barks at us, that there is an army behind us. We quicken our pace. There are sharp-toothed men who want to kill us. They have shotguns, horsehair hats. They ride bareback, puff on long pipes, smoke opium, stab each other in the back.

Eugene runs up the hill out of earshot. Father, Mother, and I drip with effort, and we push ourselves to each crest out of this ancestral fear.

“Eugene! Wait for us!” I shout. I don’t see him anymore, and he doesn’t answer. The path bends mercilessly in the chaparral heat.

“Forget about him. He never wait. Stupid boy, never cares about us,” says Father.

Mother hits Father on the arm. “Leave him alone. You are bossy, maybe he’s running away from you.”

Father glares. Mother doubles her pace so that her shoes kick dust back at us over the switchback.

Up ahead, I imagine Eugene’s already arrived at the destination, a shady plateau of pine trees. He’s taking a long sip of water from the water fountain up there, and drinking in the views of Pasadena. He may even see us, a short and irritated snake making its way.

 

We gather in the kitchen to eat an early lunch. Our bodies, sweaty with the recent Sunday excursion, stick to the vinyl kitchen seats. Father looks straight at Eugene, points his finger and bellows, “You never wait for us!”

Eugene rolls his eyes and says, “Dad, you never give us a break.”

Father takes a breath and continues. “I am going to tell you about myself, your father. I had hard life, nothing to look forward to, just running away. Eugene, you run to something, like nothing pushing. We go hiking, you go away. You don’t wait for your own family? We have to enjoy together!”

Eugene replied, “You were just slow, and I waited for you at the top. What’s the big deal?” My brother kicks me in the leg.

I chime in. “Dad, please don’t worry so much. It’s not so complicated. Eugene just is in better shape. Don’t take it so seriously. We get it!” (Please, please do not tell the story again.)

“I gave up my dreams long ago and decided to have children instead. You don’t know your father, what I do for you! You know, I have to teach you good lesson, so you will never forget.” This sends my father into a synopsis of his life. We have it memorized.

“I don’t even know if my brother is alive. He fought against the Japanese, and they took everything, burned our house. I was five years old. But our family was a hero family, so our village supported us,” says Father. “Then the Korean War came, and my brother, he joined the Communists. Everyone hated us then. We had to burn his pictures. Still, we survived.”

So it was with my mother as well. “Your mommy, her family had to leave North Korea. They took only what they could carry. They put the money and gold and jewelry inside their clothes, inside the silk linings. Rich people became poor in one night!”

Then Mother adds, “But we were smart. Instead of eating only one bowl of rice a day, we mixed it with barley, so we ate a little more often. We always ate, even though sometimes we had to sell our clothes. Your grandma’s wedding dress, someone else owns it now.”

“Eugene, you are going to learn,” says Father. He nods at my mother, points at the refrigerator. My mother takes out a recycled plastic Safeway bag. We reuse plastic bags often, and it could contain anything, a box of ice cream or a package of dried seaweed. It does not send an alarm, but Eugene raises an eyebrow and I lean forward.

“We have something for you. It will help you like it helped your father.”

Eugene nods, distracted. “Enough with the story. I get it! I have heard it all before. You had a shitty childhood …”

“Don’t say shit! I don’t think you understand. I took the gall bladder of a bear and drank the bile! It reminded me of what I was working away from. I was working so I would have a better future. So I would have a better future than my past. My past is bile! You have to learn about your father. Who you are, you know?”

“You have to be tough, too,” comments Mother.

“You will learn, too,” says Father.

Mother hands the plastic bag to me, and goes to get a plate from the cupboard. The bag hisses open. Inside is a Ziploc bag, and inside it is a piece of flesh. It looks slimy like the innards of Foster Farm chickens. But this is larger than any chicken liver I’ve ever seen. It is pear-shaped and bruised in tones of blue and gray and brown. It is dying, deflating, defecating on itself. I fully expect it to pulse, but it lies still. It smells like a goat has parked itself in our kitchen.

Father gestures to me. “Open it! Take it out! Put it on the plate!” I take out the Ziploc bag and place it gingerly on the plate. Is this some kind of sick sushi?

“Open it!” snaps Mother.

I recoil. Mother and Father are on some screwed-up Old World kick, and I duck out of view.

“I won’t make you drink it like I did. You’re not like me. You will taste it, that’s all you need to do. But you will learn.”

I can only tell you the before and the after, because I did not watch them feed Eugene the bile.

I leave the room. I hear my mother unwrap the gall bladder and snag it with chopsticks. I hear Eugene’s footsteps, my father’s commands, the rush of water from the faucet. I imagine the bile as it fills Eugene’s body with poison and drains his face of all the pink flesh, leaving it pinched and brittle.

In the hallway outside the kitchen, I am surrounded by childhood awards and family pictures: Father smokes thin white cigarettes, leaning against a white tree trunk with dark gray leaves. He is wearing black pants and a white undershirt. He is lean and tanned. His shoulders are held back at attention, and his skin is taut, his eyes open wide. His gaze rests on something soft and gentle. He is at the point of remembering…

There’s a picture of me at Disneyland, holding an ice cream cone. My father has no pictures of himself as a child, and maybe that furthers the distance between us, because we have no proof that he was ever a child. He was born a jaw-clenching, wide-eyed man who drank bile.

Eugene brushes past me in the hall. “Move,” he says.

I move. “Hey.”

He looks up and past me.

“Never mind,” I say. There are no words of healing.

In this way, we inherit suffering. But the bile does not strengthen Eugene. It flows within him, as it did within my father, but it does not give him strength and resolve. Only resentment.

 

Long after the gallbladder has become a solid rock of ice next to the ice cream, Father asks me, “Should you taste the bile, too?”

I want to shout, “No!” but I don’t. I want to tell him that I think this is sick and perverted, but I don’t. I know what I have to say. Like my father, I know how to survive.

I know the answer to this. My father coached me a million times.

“I’m a Hankook sahrahm. I understand why I need this bile, because I already have this bile.”

Father nods. He walks out of the kitchen, his feet squeaking against the linoleum.

He leaves a wake of anger in his path, and my mother and I sponge it up. We don’t want him to return and refuel; it’s easier when he does not see what he does to us, even though I think he should. I sit on the stool and stare out the windows into the cul de sac.

Mother scurries around, washing dishes. “You know your father, he really lives just for you. He really loves you, but it comes out all wrong,” she apologizes. I stare at her Han figure.

I walk into the backyard and stare at the wall, covered in honeysuckle. The scent is sweet, and the drunken bees lumber slowly through the vines. The sun beats against me, and my plastic sandals mold against my feet and stick slightly to the concrete path as they make “smuck-smuck” sounds on the patio pavers.

I’ve walked into a fireplace and I just want a little relief. I wonder what would happen if I could disappear. I wonder how mad my father would be. The neighbors’ wall looms just ahead.

I drag one of the backyard benches over to the wall, and I sit in its shade. I cannot stay sitting for long. I stand on the bench to look over the wall into the neighbors’ backyard. The Andersons are away on vacation, and we are on neighborhood watch.

Inside the house, I hear my father yelling at Eugene. Doors slam. My mother makes kitchen noises, the clattering of dishes on countertop tile and porcelain sink. All this, amidst the bees and heat. I can either go inside the cool, poisonous house or melt outside.

My legs twitch. I’ve been standing still, stretched over the wall, and I ache. I have also been holding my breath. I let out a desperate exhalation. The Andersons’ lot is on a higher elevation than ours; it would not be a long fall from the wall. I climb the wall slowly, so as not to anger the venomous bees, but I’m stung before I swing my leg over the top and fall into the Andersons’ yard.

I limp to one of the lounge chairs and sit down. There’s a welt on my leg with a stinger pulsating in the middle of it. I pull it out, but the pain is still there. A dark part of me wells up and receives that pain. Out of my numbness arises the cathartic pain of a bee sting. It loosens the knot in my belly. I can breathe a little now. If I focus on the pain enough, the knot travels a little up my throat.

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The Three Sisters

by
Posted on November 23, 2011

The summer the boy turned nine, he would visit the three sisters at night. There was ivy growing up the wall of the middle sister’s bedroom, and he would climb it to her window. Her name was Marion. Her eyes were brown circled with red, and her hair was the same.

The boy would slip through the crack she left in the window, the sill pushing against his stomach like a cramp from swimming. He liked the pain. He would crawl on his belly to her bed and slip in, raising the sheets and watching her breathe.

Later in the night, Marion would wake up and watch the boy sleep. She would touch his arms and his legs and his behind. She would wake him and tell him her dream.

You were a pirate, and I was a pirate. Our ship sank, and the Octopus came up from the sea. His eyes were red and blind. He had a beak like a parrot. He ate us, and then I said, “I have to wake up.”

She would go to sleep then.

“Dream some more,” the boy would say.

 

On some days, that were not Wednesdays, the boy had many names. He was called the name of the day, and he was called Tree Leather because he rescued cats. He was called Bat, and he was called Bark when he swam and sounded like a seal. There were other names that he was called too: they were hurtful names given to him by other children, and they will not be mentioned in this story.

 

The names the three sisters used were all made up by Marion, except for the name “One,” which was the name Alice, the youngest, used with the boy. She called him “One” because he was the one who got her something to drink, the one who got her something to eat, the one who let her hit him. Early on in the summer the boy learned to avoid Alice as much as he could.

She terrified the boy, even though she was smaller and younger. She would take his hand and not let go. She would lead him into the bathroom and take off her clothes. They would get into the bath, and she would make him wash her hair. Her hair was blonde and as long as her body.

She would mix her hair up with his. The boy would imagine that his hair was an animal and that Alice’s hair was another animal. The two animals were fighting, and, in the end, the animal that was Alice’s hair would swallow his hair.

It was this about Alice that terrified him. She seemed ready to swallow all kinds of things, to take them into herself and destroy them. Many people said that Alice was the most beautiful of the three sisters, but he could not see it. She was too cruel. She would kill animals she found in the fields. She would cut herself and tell her mother that Roberta did it. She would throw steaks to the sea gulls so they would fight. For that much food the gulls would fight viciously, stabbing each other’s eyes.

 

Roberta was the oldest. Everything about her was big. Her shoulders were big, and her teeth were very large. She could break marbles with them; Marion stopped her from doing this because once she cut her tongue that way. She would lift other people up. The boy didn’t like that because it made him think that Roberta was stronger than him, but then her breasts would rub against his belly and he would forget about strength.

Roberta and the boy would climb the roofs of houses together; they would spy on adults sleeping after sex. When the boy asked Roberta to take off her shirt, she did. When he asked her if she could fly, she jumped off the roof and broke both her legs.

There were times when Roberta required stories. She would point to her teeth, which meant that the boy was supposed to tell a story.

The one tooth said to the other tooth, “What are we?”

The other tooth said, “I don’t know.”

The one tooth said, “I will tell you what we are. We are stuck in this pink cave. I don’t like it. We look like all the other teeth. When we are yellow, they are yellow. When we are white, they are white. Enough is enough.”

“What do you propose?”

“Let’s go to New York.”

They left Roberta in the night.

One of the teeth returned, but the other was gone forever. Roberta got a quarter for the tooth. All the other teeth missed the one tooth. They had sex, and soon there was another tooth growing in Roberta’s mouth.

Sometimes the three sisters would go to the old bridge where the creek flowed into the lagoon. Most of the year, the bridge was above water, but the ground was always wet and smelled. Parents told their children that The Strangler lived under the bridge. A girl’s body had been found there the year before. No one knew her name, or what she looked like, but her silhouette had been drawn on one of the pylons of the bridge; the only detail inside it was of her vulva.

The three sisters would go under the bridge at night to talk to the silhouette. They would ask it questions. Sometimes the boy would follow. He would sit on his haunches, not quite under the bridge, so he could still see the sky.

Sometimes Roberta would walk up and put her body into the drawing of The Strangler’s bride. She would open her mouth. She would pretend to sing.

One night when Roberta did this, Marion became angry. She tried to get Roberta to leave the drawing of the body, but Roberta would not.

It was a full moon night. There were egrets out on the lagoon. One of them had died and washed ashore. The boy went over and touched its body. It was incredibly soft, like Alice’s hair.

Behind him, the boy could hear Marion talking. Her voice was angry. The boy wrapped his hand around the dead egret’s neck and tossed it into the water.

“If you’d let a little bit of the dead girl in you,” Marion said to Roberta, “then maybe you could talk. Maybe some of her brain would go in you. Would you like that?” Marion asked.

What Marion said scared Roberta, and she tried to go deeper into the silhouette. She pressed into the pylon; the boy imagined he could feel the pylon shudder.

It was getting late. The boy was worried that his father would start looking for him. Alice walked deeper into the forest of pylons. The boy could not see her anymore, but he could hear her footsteps; she was stepping into the puddles.

She began to walk back. She was carrying an old coat that she had found. It had been filled with a soft stuffing that was now the color of rust and was slowly falling out.

“There are dead people here, Roberta. We have to go,” she said.

Marion began to sing. It was an apology song. Roberta listened. She thought she could feel the dead girl: the girl wanted her to stay with her, to marry her, so that Roberta would be the husband, instead of The Strangler. Marion walked up to her sister and put her hands up against Roberta’s ears.

“Listen to my hands,” she said.

Roberta listened and heard the air swirling about. It made her feel sleepy. She walked out of the drawing and went home with her sisters.

The boy followed them back to the road they all lived on. A bunch of high school boys on bicycles were trying to catch bats. They would throw their baseball gloves up into the air, and the bats would fly around them.

The boy watched the three sisters walk down the road to their house. The house was on a stretch of road that wasn’t even a road anymore. The sea and the rains had washed away the land underneath the asphalt. Soon the area was going to be developed into a marina. The three sisters’ mother was going to sell their house.

When the boy got home, his parents could tell that he had been under the bridge. His mother undressed him and washed the smell of the bridge off him. His father watched the washing, then he pushed his wife out of the bathroom and lifted the boy out of the bath and beat him.

At midnight, after praying that his father would die, the boy crawled out onto the roof of his house. He climbed to the balcony of the house next to his and jumped to the roof after that. It was cold; a storm was coming in. The boy went from roof to roof until the houses ended and there were only fields turning slowly into beach. The boy walked through the fields till he came to the house of the three sisters. He crawled up the ivy, pushing through the crack in the window, the sill hurting his stomach.

“I want him dead,” the boy whispered.

All over the boy’s body there was a sweat. It covered him with goose bumps. Marion was asleep. The boy watched her and shivered. Then he took off his clothes. The sweat and the shivering went away.

Marion woke up and looked at him.

“You’re naked,” she said.

“Is that O.K. ?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said, “but if you’re going to be naked, then I’ll be naked too.”

She took off her pajamas.

The boy crawled into bed with Marion. He began to think that he could hear Alice screaming, but it was only a sound in his head. He began to think he could hear the bats screaming, but that too was a sound in his head.

The boy took his finger and touched Marion’s chest. Marion took his finger and tugged on it.

“I dreamed about the Octopus again,” she said. “The Octopus was growing inside me the way the girl was growing inside Roberta. When it gets big enough, something will happen.”

“What?”

“I don’t know,” she said.

He scooted down under the covers and looked at Marion’s chest and stomach.

“Tell me more,” he said.

“Are you going to touch me some more?” she asked.

“Just talk. If you talk, then I won’t touch you.”

“But I like you touching me,” she said.

“Then I’ll touch you later, but talk now,” he said.

She talked.

She said that the Octopus grew on pain. She said it was blind from pain. That was why its eyes were red. They were always crying.

The boy touched Marion’s eyes. They were crying. He cried too. She said that there were invisible people. They thought in music. They had hearts of glass.

“I don’t want to be like that,” Marion said.

“You won’t be,” said the boy. He kissed her.

That night the boy dreamed: he was going to eat an apple.

“We’ll have a contest,” Alice said. “Whoever gives you the best thing, gets the apple.”

“O.K.,” the boy said.

Alice gave him a punch in the stomach.

Marion told him a secret.

Roberta gave him an apple.

It was days later, after the storm was over, that the boy remembered this dream. The storm had brought in animals from the bottom of the sea: sea hares and squids and blue jellyfish the size of quarters. The sea hares were all turning green as they died, and the jellyfish had lost their tentacles. All of the squids were already dead, killed by the storm. Their bodies were a dark pink covered in gashes, but their eyes still looked alive.

There were gulls everywhere, eating the dead animals. There was so much food on the beach they didn’t have to fight. The boy walked through the dead squids and sea hares looking for the three sisters.

He walked out into the water. There were sandbars going out a long way. The boy pretended they were islands, and he walked from island to island looking for the three sisters.

Finally he found them. They were standing in a circle looking at something. The boy could hear a flapping noise in the water.

Marion waved for him to come over.

When the boy joined their circle, he saw they were looking at a stingray that had gotten lost in the maze of the shallows. A spear was in its back, and it was dying.

The ray had been swimming for a long time, looking for a way to the deep water, but now it was too tired and too hurt to swim.

“What should we do?” Marion asked.

“It’s dying,” he said. “It’s suffering—we have to kill it.”

“We should burn it,” Alice said.

The boy grabbed the broken piece of spear and dragged the ray up onto one of the sandbars. He dug a grave and put the ray in it. The ray flapped around in the hole, trying to get out, but its wings were too weak to fly on land.

The boy imagined the ray feeling the sand falling on its back. He pretended he was the ray trying harder and harder to fly as it was being buried alive.

“It’s going to die slow in the sand,” he said to Marion.

Marion said nothing.

The boy dragged the ray back to one of the shallows. He pulled the spear out of its back. It swam in the water very quickly for a moment, as if everything were all right. Then it became tired again.

The boy picked up the spear and walked out into the water. He drove the spear into the ray’s back. Alice screamed. Roberta ran back towards the beach. Marion said nothing.

The boy could hear Alice screaming, and Roberta running, and Marion saying nothing; he tried to ignore them. He put himself into the killing—into bringing the spear down against the tough flesh of the ray again and again until it died.

Then he buried the dead ray.

Marion was standing on the island of sand looking at him. Alice had already run off after Roberta. The tide was coming in, and the island was slowly being eaten by the sea. The boy looked at Marion. She turned around and walked back to shore. They were very far out, and she was just a little dot by the time she reached the beach.

That was when the boy remembered the dream. He remembered the contest for the apple. He remembered the ache in his stomach, the taste of Roberta’s apple, the sensation of Marion’s breath in his ear as she told him a secret. She was always telling him secrets. She told him that breathing was reading the air, that dolphins have two souls, that eating flowers makes your breath taste good. She told him that children are the ideas of their parents, that you learn everything in sleep, that jellyfish sting each other when they have sex, that people die when you forget them.

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poem beginning in no and ending in yes

by
Posted on November 3, 2011

for hector peterson, aged 13 first child
killed in soweto riot   1976

no
light there was no light at first around the head
of the young boy   only the slim stirring of soweto
only the shadow of voices   students and soldiers
practicing their lessons   and one and one cannot be even
two in afrikaans   then before the final hush
in the schoolyard in soweto   there was the burning of his name
into the most amazing science   the most ancient prophecy
let there be light and there was light around the young
boy hector peterson dead in soweto and still among us
yes

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Editor’s Note #92

by
Posted on August 15, 2011

Dear Readers,

Welcome to the new ZYZZYVA. After 26 years we’ve given the journal a new look, even a new heft.

Over the past months we’ve worked on a redesign with Three Steps Ahead, the same California firm behind our new website. ZYZZYVA’s original print design, created with care by Thomas Ingalls & Associates in 1985, was elegant and restrained. We kept in mind the clarity and the spare beauty of their vision as we sought to add other elements speaking to the pleasures of print, to the craft of bookmaking, and to the stimulating quietude of reading. We considered paper weight and tone, typesetting and titles, mingled serifs with sans-serifs, discussed the old-fashioned whimsy of endpapers—always with a view toward presenting stories, poetry, and art in the best way possible.

Perhaps the most dramatic shift is in our cover design. This new presentation of cover art evokes how a work is thoughtfully displayed in a gallery or museum; the shadowing effect playfully reproduces the quality of a piece hanging on a wall. This nod to gallery exhibitions reflects our intent: to present the artwork we curate with the same attentiveness we bring to the literature we publish.

This issue features yet another vital development in our commitment to the visual arts: the journal’s first-ever full-color art spread. We are thrilled to inaugurate this new feature by showcasing stunning photographic portraits by Katy Grannan and striking paintings by Julio Cesar Morales.

Our primary focus is, as always, on publishing the highest quality art and literature; design is secondary, and must serve the content. But in this digitally driven age, it is incumbent on any publisher to consider all aspects of a print product, including the physicality of the object, and to answer fully a book reader’s implicit (sometimes explicit) query: why should I spend time with this journal?

Our implicit (now explicit) answer to you: because it offers a feast of contemporary poetry, prose and art. Because each issue seeks to be unexpected, fresh and affecting. Because your time is rewarded with our vigorous attention to every detail of the reading experience.

And not least of all: because this journal is also a beautiful object—one that, we hope, is pleasing to the eye, pleasing to the touch, and takes a place of pride and enjoyment in your home. We imagine ZYZZYVA on your coffee table, your bookshelf, your nightstand, there in a stack of other books by the bed or on the desk. And we hope that every time your gaze falls upon it you’re reminded anew of the sensory and cerebral pleasures of print.

L.

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Gin

by
Posted on August 10, 2011

The first time I drank gin
I thought it must be hair tonic.
My brother swiped the bottle
from a guy whose father owned
a drugstore that sold booze
in those ancient, honorable days
when we acknowledged the stuff
was a drug. Three of us passed
the bottle around, each tasting
with disbelief. People paid
for this? People had to have
it, the way we had to have
the women we never got near.
(Actually, they were girls, but
never mind, the important fact
was their impenetrability.)
Leo, the third foolish partner,
suggested my brother should have
swiped Canadian whiskey or brandy,
but Eddie defended his choice
on the grounds of the expressions
“gin house” and “gin lane,” both
of which indicated the pre-eminence
of gin in the world of drinking,
a world we were entering without
understanding how difficult
exit might be. Maybe the bliss
that came with drinking came
only after a certain period
of apprenticeship. Eddie likened
it to the holy man’s self-flagellation
to experience the fullness of faith.
(He was very well read for a kid
of fourteen in the public schools.)
So we dug in and passed the bottle
around a second time and then a third,
in silence each of us expecting
some transformation. “You get used
to it,” Leo said, “You don’t
like it but you get used to it.”
I know now that brain cells
were dying for no earthly purpose,
that three boys were becoming
increasingly despiritualized
even as they took into themselves
these spirits, but I thought then
I was at last sharing the world
with the movie stars, that before
long I would be shaving because
I needed to, that hair would
sprout across the flat prairie
of my chest and plunge even
to my groin, that first girls
and then women would be drawn
to my qualities. Amazingly, later
some of this took place, but
first the bottle had to be
emptied, and then the three boys
had to empty themselves of all
they had so painfully taken in
and by means even more painful
as they bowed by turns over
the eye of the toilet bowl
to discharge their shame. Ahead
lay cigarettes, the futility
of guaranteed programs of
exercise, the elaborate lies
of conquest no one believed,
forms of sexual torture and
rejection undreamed of. Ahead
lay our difficult fifteenth birthdays,
acne, deodorants, crabs, salves,
butch haircuts, draft registration,
the military and political victories
of Dwight Eisenhower, who brought us
Richard Nixon with wife and dog.
Any wonder we were trying gin.

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The Green Tunnel

by
Posted on July 13, 2011

The thing that struck me most about Bulow Hammock is the hardest to describe: the smell. Hammocks are woodlands (the name refers specifically to hardwood groves that punctuate the more open marshes and pine woods of Florida, and may derive from Indian words for “shady place,” “garden place,” or “floating plants”), but Bulow Hammock didn’t smell like any woodlands I knew. I was used to the brisk, humus-and-chlorophyll tang of New England woods with their associations of uplifting weekend hikes. The hammock was different.

I must have been about nine years old when I first encountered the hammock, so I didn’t articulate any of this. Yet I clearly remember my sensations on stepping out of my parents’ car into the shade of the magnolias and cabbage palmettoes. I was fascinated but daunted. The Connecticut woods I’d played in had been inviting, welcoming. The hammock was … seductive. It smelled sweet, a perfumy sweetness that reminded me of the hotel lobbies and cocktail lounges I’d occasionally been in with my parents.

Smells are hard to describe because we can’t really remember them as we do sights and sounds, only recognize them. Smells lie deeper than our remembering, thinking forebrains, in the olfactory lobe we inherited from the early vertebrates. Yet they are related to thought in profound ways because our nocturnal ancestors, the early mammals, lived by smell. The human ability to relate present to past and future may stem from this scent-tracking of food, an activity which takes place in time as well as space, unlike a hawk’s immediate striking on sight, and thus implies planning. The curious resonance smell has in memory, as when Proust conjured an epoch from a teacup, suggests that we have a great deal to learn from it.

Complex smells are the hardest to describe. Bulow Hammock smelled stranger than liquor and perfume. It smelled intricately spicy, with a sweetness not so much of flowers as of aromatic bark and leaves. There also was an air of decay in the sweetness, not the rich, sleepy, somewhat bitter decay of New England woods, more of a nervous, sour atmosphere. When I scraped my foot over fallen leaves on the ground, I didn’t uncover the soft brown dirt I was used to, but white sand and a network of fine, blackish roots like the hair of a buried animal. The sand was part of the smell too, a dusty, siliceous undertone to the spice and decay.

There was something dangerous about the smell, something inhibiting to my nine-year-old mind. I didn’t want to rush into the hammock as I’d have wanted to rush into an unfamiliar Connecticut woodland. It wasn’t that the hammock seemed ugly or repellent, on the contrary. The seductiveness was part of the inhibition. Perhaps it was just that the hammock was so unfamiliar. It’s easy to read things into childhood memories. But the smell was powerful.

Society is suspicious of wild places because it fears a turning away from human solidarity toward a spurious, sentimental freedom. It is interesting, in this regard, to recall how little of freedom there was in my first perception of Bulow Hammock, how little of the unfettered feeling I got in sand dunes, hill meadows, pine woods, or other open places that promised release from streets and classrooms. I wonder if the hammock inhibited me because there was more of humanity about it than a dune, meadow, or pine forest has; not of humanity in the sense of society and civilization, which (however irrationally, given the history of civilization) we associate with safety, but of animal humanity, of the walking primate that has spent most of its evolution in warm places like Florida, spicy, moldy, sandy places. Perhaps it wasn’t the strangeness of the hammock that made it seem dangerously seductive, but a certain familiarity. It is, after all, dangerous to be human.

We’d come to Florida to visit my father’s mother, who had a retirement cottage in Ormond-by-the-Sea, an early geriatric enclave complete with shuffleboard court (which, three decades later, has become somebody’s driveway). On the drive south, we’d passed another stretch of coastal hammock that was being burned and bulldozed during some kind of road construction involving sweaty convicts in gray twill. There’d been something very malignant-looking about that stretch of charred palmetto. Blackened fronds had thrust at the sky like fire-sharpened spears. As though to heighten the effect, someone had erected a doll’s head, also charred, on a crooked stick.

I couldn’t have looked at this scene for more than a few seconds, but it made a big impression. At nine, I had no very firm grasp of its rational implications, of the likelihood that the head had been stuck up there by some whimsically ghoulish convict who’d found it while grubbing in the brush. I must have been aware of that likelihood, but other things seemed possible: that it was a real head, a baby’s or a monkey’s; that it manifested an unknown savage world in the uncut hammock farther from the road, of which there was a lot more in Florida then. The southern landscape threw the human and wild together more than the northern. I remember a great loneliness in it, brown fields of broomsedge reaching almost to the horizon, and unpainted shacks against ragged woods over which circled vultures in numbers out of proportion to the vacancy beneath them. The blackwater swamps that the road periodically passed over seemed cheerful in comparison, albeit dangerous.

Of course, my response to the road construction-fire, sticks, head, uncut green wall in the distance-was an educated one, as was my response to Bulow Hammock’s smell. It would be banal to assert that the smell awakened atavistic race memories of life in the jungle. We’d been getting our first taste of human evolution in my fourth grade class, and I’d found that pretty spicy, all those skeletons and hairy people: Piltdown Man (we must have been the last class to get Piltdown Man, since the hoax was discovered around that year), Java man, Peking Man. A normally bloodthirsty fourth-grader, I’d thrilled to learn that Peking Man had scooped out and probably eaten the brains of other Peking men. I’d seen the “green hell” jungle movies of the early fifties: Charlton Heston in The Naked Jungle, Jeff Chandler in Green Fire. I had a whole set of cultural preconceptions ready for Bulow Hammock.

Yet banality is a kind of fossilized reality, the bones of insights buried in the silt of intellectual fashion. I wouldn’t dismiss my nine-year-old perceptions just because they were culturally conditioned. Classrooms and movie theaters teach little about smell, for one thing, and, sophisticated as they are, they still share with nine-year-olds a descent from spicy, moldy, sandy places. We don’t know enough about that descent to dismiss anything. Fire, sticks, head, and green wall have been at the center of things for most of human experience, and they still are, in a sense, although the green wall may have receded.

A green wall is what Bulow Hammock seemed as my father drove down the low sand road leading into it, or rather a green arch, a tunnel. Its surfaces seemed much solider than the crumbly coquina of the nineteenth-century sugar plantation ruins we had come to the hammock to see. The mill was roofless while the hammock enclosed us completely, from its ground-hugging coonties, dog hobble, and saw palmetto to its undergrowth of feral orange, bayberry, hornbeam, and dahoon to its canopy oflive oak, redbay, magnolia and cabbage palmetto. Glimpses of the hammock interior lacked perspective: they had the wavery, spotty aspect of underwater things. The plant forms were too eccentric for geometry — palm, spike, spray, corkscrew, club, plume, lace, spiral. It was beautiful, but the intricacy was like the complexity of smell. It inhibited. Its seductiveness was also a warning because it hinted at passionate entanglement more than freedom or tranquility.

 

I followed my parents around the sugar mill ruins like a good little boy. The Seminoles had burned the plantation in 1835: that was interesting. There were displays of implements found in the ruins, and a brochure about the plantation’s history. There wasn’t any explanation of the hammock. There may have been signs identifying birds or plants, but if there were, they did little to elucidate the fearful seductiveness of the place, a seductiveness to which the adult world seemed curiously immune. But then, children are used to being surrounded by powerful, unexplained seductions.

I never did venture into the hammock as a child, although I wandered miles through the Connecticut woods. I don’t recall going more than a few yards even into the barrier island scrub that grew behind my grandmother’s cottage in the fifties, before the Ormond Mall was built. The mailman had put his hand into a pile of leaves (trusting children, we didn’t ask why) and had withdrawn it with a coral snake attached to the skin between his fingers. Coral snakes, grandmother told my sister and me, had to hold and chew their victims to inject their almost invariably fatal poison.

Grandmother wasn’t a snake-hater: her deepest antipathies were for the British Royal Family (her father was Irish), J. Edgar Hoover (her former employer), and other select humans. She was more passionate in her opinions than most grandmothers, always applauding when Harry Truman appeared in movie newsreels, whether or not anybody else did. Perhaps because of this, her dictums had considerable authority, and we weren’t about to put our hands in any dead leaves, or our feet. There were poisonous copperheads in the Connecticut woods of course, but they didn’t chew on you. We contented ourselves with watching big toads eat little toads in her backyard.

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Chico

by ,
Posted on July 6, 2011

A woman was two months with child when her husband died. The woman herself died in childbirth, and her sister, who was unmarried and lived alone, took the baby in charge. She was well-to-do, and she lavished all her affection on the boy, so that he never lacked anything. At the same time, she did not send him to school because he did not want to study. Nor did she see that he learned a trade of some sort.

The boy’s name was Mokhtar, but no one ever called him anything but Chico. I first got to know him when he was fifteen. He had grown up healthy and handsome. His pockets were always stuffed with money, and that was what was special about him. His life consisted of sitting in cafes, day and night, and he learned to drink alcohol and to sleep with whores. He was generous and goodhearted, but if he got angry he could be dangerous, and he often got angry when he was drunk .

When Chico was seventeen his aunt died, leaving him her bank account, three houses and a bakery in the city, and a big farm out in the country. He began to give large parties, buying great quantities of food and drink for many friends, and spending even more on girls. Every day when his friends finished their work at the port or on the fishing boats, they called at his house before going home. There everything was ready for them. Each one would find his dinner and wine and a girl waiting for him to arrive. There were white girls, black girls, yellow girls, girls with cancer, girls with syphilis and leprosy. But they all sat together. One would have a guitar, one a darbouka, one a tambourine, and they would sing and dance as they got drunk.

In a short time Chico managed to use up all the money in his aunt’s bank account, as well as what he had got for selling the farm. Then he decided to sell the houses and the bakery, keeping only the house where he was living. One night when a great crowd of us was gathered there at his house, two girls were talking together in a corner. Why don’t we do it? said one. We could even get him sent to jail.

A third girl was listening. You couldn’t do a thing like that! You’re in his house every day, you eat his food and drink his wine. He paid for all the clothes you’ve got on. And you want to hurt him?

The two girls told her: If you don’t like what we’re saying, it’s not our business. Don’t listen to us .

The third girl went into another room and told Chico what she had heard. He did not pay much attention to her. Finally he went into the room where the girls were. The two had already begun to do their work, to poison the minds of the others, and he saw this. What have you got against me? he asked them. This is my house, and the money comes from me. You’ve got everything you want. I pay for it all. And you have something against me?

Chico was drunk. The girls protested.

We haven’t said anything, said one of them, and he slapped her.

Don’t hit me, you maricón! she screamed.

I’m a maricón?

And worse, she said. If you weren’t, you wouldn’t be paying people to come and sit with you.

You carrion! he shouted. I pay for my friends because most of them have no money. Money doesn’t mean anything. It has no importance.

What’s more important? she asked him .

The tongue is, he said, and the words it makes. If you’re careful with your tongue you’ll always be all right.

You’re never going to be all right, she told him.

He hit her in the mouth, and broke three of her front teeth. Everyone rushed in to see what was happening, and while they held on to Chico, the girl ran out.

Not twenty minutes later she came back with the police. They took Chico away with them. They gave him three months in Malabata, but it was not too bad for him because he always had many visitors. He had entrusted his money to one of the girls and asked her to keep it for him.

When he got out of prison and went home, he looked for the money, but was unable to find it. He called the girl and asked her where she had hidden it. She said she had spent it on food, and it was all gone. I bought a few gold bracelets, too, she told him. Chico looked at her. You’re not my wife, you know. I’m just doing you a favor, letting you stay here.

And I’m doing you a big favor, too, she said. I give it to you whenever you want it, don’t I?

The biggest favor you could have done for me would have been to hold on to my money, said Chico.

Well, it happened the way it happened, she said.

Then Chico told me he said to her: Pack up your things, will you? And get out.

Where am I supposed to go?

You go where you please. I want to be alone in the house.

I’m not going to leave here.

Chico got up, gathered together all her clothes, and packed them in a valise. Please, he said. Come on.

He opened the door. Go on. Out.

Don’t you touch me!

He pushed her and she spat in his face. Then he stood looking at her, and tears filled his eyes. He pushed her again, and she spat at him once more. He picked up a large glass and threw it at her. It hit her forehead and smashed, and the blood covered her face. Then he kicked her, and she fell. He dragged her out into the street. People came running up. One man started to fight with Chico, but Chico picked him up and hurled him onto the sidewalk, where he lay while Chico continued to hit him. Once again the police arrived, and drove off with Chico.

What’s the matter with you? they asked him. Do you take some kind of drugs?

I only got out of jail this morning, he told them.

And now you’re going back there.

I know, he said. But when a woman spits in a man’s face, what can that man do to her?

He’s got to get her out of the house without beating her, they told him.

At the comisaría the brigadier said to him: You think you’re strong, don’t you?

If I am, it’s Allah who made me strong.

You’re not worried about what we can do to you?

I’m afraid of Allah, Chico said. But for a person like me, what is there to be afraid of? Everything that’s alive has to defend itself.

Take him out, said the brigadier. And they took him and shut him into the cellar. Several days passed before his papers were ready, and then they called him before the tribunal. Many of his friends were there to hear the verdict. The qadi gave Chico six months, and they took him away.

I did not know about his latest trouble, until one day I was sitting in a cafe, when a man came up to me and said: Your friend Chico is in jail.

What for?

He told me the story. It’s too bad, I said. Chico ought not to be in jail. He’s a good man, but he’s had too much money and he’s never learned how to live. He’s too good-looking and too strong, and at the same time he’s a ruin. He doesn’t know what the world’s about. I’m going out to see him.

I bought some food and cigarettes to take to him. When they called him out, he kept looking at me. I think he was wondering why I had come. I was not one of his closest friends, and I had never gone to see him when he was in jail. I was wondering too why I had gone, but I wanted to help him.

What are you doing with yourself, Chico? I asked him.

Some friends and I are writing the words for a song, he said. We sit and smoke, and each one adds a line or two.

Is there anything else you need? Tell me and I’ll go and get it now.

I don’t need anything, thanks. I didn’t expect to see you.

How long have you been here? I asked him.

Four months now. I’ve got two left. The day I get out I want you to come to my house, and I’ll sing you the song.

Chico went back inside, and I returned to town. The day he was due to be released I went with a group of his friends and waited outside the wall. He came out and saw us, and we all went off together.

The first place he wanted to go was the hammam, and we went there. When he had bathed, he took us to his house, where he put on fresh clothes. Many friends arrived, and they all brought food with them: baked fish, chickens stuffed with almonds, and lamb with olives . The house had been cleaned beforehand, and everything was in its place. We sat and ate and drank and played music. Finally I said I had to go.

Some time passed, and I did not see Chico. Then I began to hear stories of how he had sold all the furnishings of his house, and then that he had sold the house itself, and no longer had a place to sleep. He was sleeping first at the house of one friend and then at the house of another. Then I heard a story of how he had gone with some others up to Xauen, and as they were walking through the town Chico caught sight of a girl and began to talk with her, and invited her to come back to Tangier with him. He did not think she would take him seriously, but when they got to the bus stop she was there with a valise, so she got in and went with them to Tangier. A friend told me that just as they came in sight of Tangier, Chico asked him: Where am I going to take her?

One of the group took Chico and the girl to his house to sleep. A few days later I heard knocking at my door. Chico and his girl stood there.

Come in.

The girl sat down in the sala, and I took Chico into another room.

Can you rent me one of your rooms? he said. As a great favor?

I stared at him. No, I said. I’m not going to rent you a room, but you can stay in one for a while if you want, until you find something else.

Thank you.

I gave him a good room, completely furnished with everything he needed. He stayed on there with me, and each day he went to the port looking for work.

He was not the same Chico as he had been before. He had changed, and he seemed more calm. When he sat talking with his girlfriend Habiba, they were like two pearls. I would look at him and her, and say to myself: I swear he’s more beautiful than she is.

My friends were of the quiet kind, the sort of men who were always on the side of poor people and who loved music. They would bring their instruments with them, so that in my sala I might have an orchestra with a lute and a kamenja and a tenibar and a guinbri and a darbouka and a tambourine. We began our evening with laughter and songs, and we ended them with songs and laughter.

On a certain Saturday evening we were all playing and singing. Some of the girls were dancing, but Chico seemed bored. About half past ten he turned to me and said: Why don’t we go out to a bar?

And leave my friends? That’s impossible. I’m having a good time sitting here at home, and you want me to go out to some bar and leave my friends alone? That’s why I have this house. So I’ll never go out to bars.

Good, he said. Then he looked at Habiba and said: Come on.

No, she said. I don’t want to.

He glared at her, jumped up, and went out, slamming the door. We continued with our music. About half past twelve someone began to knock on the door. I got up and opened it. A neighbor stood there. Come in, I said, and he came inside.

It’s Chico, he said. He pushed a glass into somebody’s face and the police took him.

Again? I cried. The others were looking at me, and I was thinking: If he’d only stayed with us nothing would have happened. But he wouldn’t listen, and bars at night are bad places to be. The neighbor went out, and the rest of us stayed on, talking, for a half hour or so. Then everyone left.

This time Chico was given only three months. I had a girl called Betsoul living with me, and I had to buy food for her and Habiba, as well as carrying it to the jail for Chico. When I went out I would leave money with Betsoul and tell her: if Habiba wants anything, get it for her. And take her out for a walk.

Each day I took Chico his food. He was in the Casbah prison, so it was not such a long way to go. Whenever friends came to spend a few hours in the house with me, Habiba stayed shut into her room with Betsoul. I wanted no trouble, no scandals.

For three months I lived this way. The day Chico came out of prison a crowd of us went to wait for him and greet him as he walked out. Then he and I set out for my house. I told the others to come later. We went in, and Chico greeted Habiba and Betsoul.

I’ll be right back, I told them. I have to go into the town for a minute.

I went around inviting more people to the party, bought some food, and returned to the house. As soon as I got in, I saw that Chico was getting drunk, and that he seemed very angry about something. Then I noticed his girl Habiba sobbing, and saw that Betsoul looked very sad.

What’s the matter? I asked the girls.

Nothing, Betsoul said.

Don’t tell me that. Chico is drinking like an elephant, Habiba’s crying, and you look as if you’re dying . And you say nothing’s wrong?

Habiba began to talk. When you went out, Chico and I went into the other room. We made love and he didn’t like it. Then he said I’d been sleeping with you all the time he was gone, I tried to tell him the truth, that I stopped having blood only yesterday, and he wouldn’t listen. He thinks we’ve been together the whole time.

You don’t believe that, I said to Chico. I’m telling you I’ve never touched her. And none of my friends even laid eyes on her. From the day you left, Habiba was always in her room with Betsoul. And she never went out alone. Betsoul went with her. But you’re a man with no faith. You’re always looking for the worst, and you’re going to fall into your own trap.

You’re garbage, he told me. You have to get into every girl you see, no matter who she is.

What’s wrong with you? I never laid a finger on her.

It’s too bad you’re not dead.

Yes, I said. They say whoever treats his friends well is going to have to pay for it later. You have a place to live and everything you need. I’ve seen a lot of things here, things I don’t like, and I’ve never said anything.

He jumped to his feet. Shut up or I’ll cut you in ribbons!

I started to say something to Betsoul. She screamed. When I turned my head the knife was in front of my eyes. I raised my arm to protect my face and grabbed the hand that held the knife. But he slashed my arm. I hit him with my other hand. He fell one way and the knife went in the other direction. When he tried to get up I hit him again, and he fell on top of the taifor.

He stayed there, and I leaned over him and let my blood drip over him.

I don’t want to say anything, I told him, because I’d like to have some respect for you, at least. When a man is angry he says whatever comes into his head. He’ll mix what’s true with what’s false, as long as it’s an insult. I don’t want to do that.

Go on. Say everything.

All right. I know you’re a zamel. You’ve slept with me, haven’t you? How many times have you let me do what I wanted with you?

I knew I should not have said that in front of all the others. Only he and I knew what we’d done. But it might make the others wonder. Then I added insults no one would believe.

You’re a coward and police informer, aren’t you? Is that what you want to hear? And finally you cut me with a knife. And you were aiming for my eyes.

I went out of the house and down to the Cruz Verde clinic on the Avenida de España and they put five stitches in my arm. Then I went home and began to drink. The other friends I had invited started to arrive. They saw my arm. What happened to you?

A little accident on the boat, I said.

Chico had taken Habiba into his room and shut the door. Finally he opened it and stood there, very drunk, holding on to Habiba, trying to force her to drink from his glass. Without greeting his friends, he sat down, and made Habiba sit beside him. When the others saw his face, they understood that the trouble had been between him and me, and not on a fishing boat. One eye was shut and his lips were swollen.

Everyone was enjoying himself except Chico. Soon he stood up and said to Habiba: Get up. Come on. We’re going out.

I can’t. I’m too tired.

He began to slap her face hard.

Chico, I said, if you want to go out, go out. Or better, go into your room and sleep . This party was for you, and everybody spent a lot of money on it. And we all want to enjoy it.

I got up and stood in front of him. In my house I don’t want people who aren’t happy.

He glared at me and went out. Then he opened the door again and came back in. He went into his room. I told Habiba: Go in there with him. I thought that might make him stay in.

She found Chico on his knees, searching under the mtarrbas for something, and she knew he was looking for the money he had left with her.

Here it is, she said.

Now put on your djellaba and come with me, he said. She was afraid of him and did as he told her. They went out into the street, and that was the last time I saw Chico alive. We thought it was too bad that Habiba had gone with him.

An hour later she pounded on the door. She was out of breath and she was crying and wailing. All we could get from her was that someone had killed Chico at the Puerta del Sol. I told Betsoul to take her into her room and stay with her. Then three of us went down to the Avenida de España to the bar. Chico had already been taken away. The men in the bar told us that he had smashed a bottle in the face of somebody who had looked at Habiba, and the man’s friend had stabbed him in the eye with such force that the point came out through the back of his neck.

The next morning I went with a group of friends to the morgue in Dar el Baroud and asked for Chico. I explained that he had no family and that no one else would be coming to claim him. We wanted Chico’s body, and they gave it to us.

We carried him to my house. I went out and bought all the things that were needed for washing him, and I asked the tolba to come with me. They washed him and put him in his kfin, and we carried him to the graveyard.

Chico could not live without getting into fights. It was only then that he believed he was really a man, and really alive. In that way he was crazy. No one could have saved Chico from that.

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Complicity

by
Posted on June 28, 2011

In Medias Res

After midnight in Lizzie’s Sonoma County studio apartment, a garage converted into a ski loft: beamed ceiling, redwood walls and funnel-shaped fireplace. On the radio, a phone-in psychologist. Lizzie nervously sets down her lemon grass tea, a fluted cup with roses, and calls. “I have this problem, you see, I uh shoplift. Compulsively.”

The radio psychologist tells Lizzie that stealing is a substitute for love.

Things Lizzie Has Stolen for Me

1. Two 100% cotton knit tops, multi-colored nubby boat neck and smooth cream scooped with large buttons down the front. The tiny curtained cubicle, I have tried on four things, the ones I want disappear down Lizzie’s tan pants. Then she switches the four-item tag with a two-item one that happens to be in her purse. Standing in the hall so the clerk is sure to hear, she yells, “Hurry up, I’ll meet you in the car.”

2. One facial mask, with Elastin, crushed almonds and thyme, a woman’s naked shoulder on the label. A health food store, in full view of the clerk, it falls into her pocket.

3. A purple sash, rayon from India. At Cost Plus nobody monitors the dressing rooms. Child’s play.

Lizzie fills her purse with socks and chemises and pepper mills. All she has to do is get some love and then she’ll stop.

4. Romika clogs, tan leather with low rubber heels, my Christmas present. While I ask the sales lady questions about jewelry, Lizzie is to my right stuffing them in her purse. “Those little cuffs there, how do you get them over your ears?”

Outside on Castro, walking swiftly (but not too fast), we make a great team like Robert Redford and Paul Newman. We could dye my hair brown to blend in.

5. One chocolate truffle, Amaretto creme. Lizzie pokes through the cellophane and pops it in my mouth.

The writing flows or gets stuck. Lizzie and 1 have never had sex, not even at the mud baths in Calistoga. We’ve slept together a few times out of necessity—her apartment is cold and there’s only one down comforter, it’s pale rose with tiny white petals or leaves. Once her hand went between my thighs, but she was sleeping.

True friendship is sharing the forbidden.

Each theft allowed Lizzie to breathe for a moment at the surface. The Sweat on her lip, the racing heart provoked a state akin to religious moods.

Five foot six, shoulder length black hair, size eight shoe and dress, Lizzie holds a tortoise-shell compact three inches from her face: brown liner, black lashes, dab of gray shadow. A warm creamy complexion inherited from her Mexican parents. No lipstick, she outlines her mouth with a brown pencil. Lizzie’s clothes: khaki, black, gray, beige, a rare blue or red.

The man I live with is in the shower, I shout through the curtain, “I know you don’t like it but I’ve got to put you in my piece. What name do you want?” “Fire Hose.” “Come on—how about Jorge?” “What’s this Jorge? I want Fire Hose.”

And then there was the time with Fire Hose. He and Lizzie were raised in the same Chicago neighborhood, the same high school, but met out here through me. A Dickens coincidence. Fire Hose calls her Lizard and squeezes her cheeks. She makes fun of his Spanish. “Do you know what Puerto Ricans call a bus? A wawa! For the dog on the side of a Greyhound, like bow wow, a wawa!” Fire Hose was driving his cab that night, Lizzie said, “Let’s get into bed and talk, it’s more comfortable.” Both of us in flannel nightgowns, we continue with the life of Edie Sedgewick. “Winnie, I’m going to sleep here, just ‘til Fire Hose comes home.” At six in the morning I tell her to move over. Three in a king-sized bed, it’s easy, both of them asleep and me in the middle: How far am I willing to share?

6. A can of Pure Maple Spread from Quebec. Safeway’s fisheye mirrors.

When Fire Hose and I got together he had moved back to the old neighborhood, so I spent a couple of months down the street from Lizzie’s birthplace. A year in San Francisco’s Mission District had not prepared me for this level of poverty, men sleeping in restaurant boiler rooms. My memory is full of dust and gravel, “Villa Lobos” scrawled everywhere.

Everything is bound to break wide open.

Lizzie calls her favorite method “exchanging.” Step 1: Buy the cheapest form of clothing available. Step 2: Hide the item on your person and return to the store. Step 3: Take five items into a dressing booth. Switch the item you really want with the hidden one. Step 4: Return five items to the attendant and walk out. Get caught? A race track driver could get killed, does that keep him off the track? A bank robbery at the movies, this masked James Dean holding the room on the tip of his rifle. Can you imagine a Chicana up there pocketing a jar of face cream at Merrill’s?

Bodega Bay, clam chowder and plate glass, we sit at a table watching sea gulls. Lizzie has a problem — she is content to hang around the house not doing anything in particular. Her response to my “What’s wrong with that?”: “You should talk, you with your writing and your intellectual friends.” I butter my sourdough. “Listen, writing alone won’t do it. Some of the unhappiest people I know are writers. And they don’t make that good of friends, not like you and Fire Hose. Did they really film The Birds here?”

Polk Street, a local schizophrenic, the kind you can smell half a block away, leaning over a trash can, shouting into the dark part, “You made a big mistake You make a big mistake You made a big mistake You make a big…”

The Strand, I pay as Lizzie sneaks through the turnstile. The teenage hitchhiker doesn’t have a goal either, a little blonde visiting this movie from Dallas. Then she’s moving to Los Angeles to study with a world-famous sculptor. She sticks her thumb out on the way to receive it all. Finally, the homicidal maniac I’ve been waiting for ever since the previews. She smashes him in the face with a piece of art, it is large and lumpy. The terrified murderer lets her out and screeches down the highway.

I could have stabbed him with my fountain pen.

Lizzie feels all extraordinary calm at the moment of theft. Outside a jeweler’s window, she doesn’t think she will steal. No sooner does she get inside than she’s sure she’ll come out with a jewel: a ring or handcuffs. This certainty is expressed by a long shudder which leaves her motionless.

Breaking her diet with a huge slice of German chocolate cake, Lizzie asks, “Doesn’t the word ‘complicity’ sound like a woman’s name.” I smile and steal a bite.

Catalogue of Ancestors

1969. The summer I graduated from high school. The Calumet Region, affectionately called “Da Region” in gangster movies, Al Capone was its most famous resident, my father’s hero. Officially Northern Indiana but really a blue-collar suburb of Chicago on the Kennedy, you can drive to the Loop in half an hour. 1969, the summer of Ralph.

Ralph had the same strawberry blonde hair, the same green eyes, pale rosy complexion. We were inseparable and everybody thought he was my brother.

I should say Ralph and Nance and I were inseparable. Nance, straight brown hair and wire rims, so skinny, lived down the street. She was my lover in high school and college. Really we’d been doing it since we were eleven, but it had only been a year since we quit pretending to be asleep.

7. The back of a director’s chair, brown. I lost mine when moving. Lizzie walks up to a display chair, wriggles off the back and opens her sweatered armpit.

Summer at home — sheer endurance, hanging around the house, sticky and irritable. Just breathing the air was equivalent to smoking seven cigarettes a day. Ralph and Nance and I together, not love, a matter of sanity.

From the beginning we pooled our resources. Nance and I fried hamburgers at minimum wage, she at Nifty Burgers and I at A&W. Ralph wrote bad checks, supplemented by shoplifting. We worked well together. Nance and I would pay for Ralph’s movie, afterward he’d write a check for pizza. Nance and I would buy a package of buns, Ralph stuck the ground beef down his pants.

Suddenly Kroger’s and Sears became exciting.

Lizzie went to high school on Chicago’s South Side during the Martin Luther King riots. Black girls carried scissors in their purses eager for a lock of blonde hair to show off, like a scalp. Every bathroom was a war zone. Lizzie smiles over her burrito, “That was one time I was glad to be brown.”

His mother was a breeder, Ralph had four sisters and a brother, all red heads. His older sister kept a list of the men she slept with, beside each name was a date and rating. Apparently this catalogue filled several pages. His parents were divorced, the m0ther an alcoholic who cussed in a Southern accent. She had sex on the living room couch, the same one the twins peed on.

Instead of lemonade, Lizzie and her sister sold used Mexican lottery cards for a penny a piece.

A year of college under his belt and therefore world-wise, Ralph was plotting our corruption. He majored in French, so we started with Genet and de Sade. The three of us in cut-offs, sweating like crazy despite the fan. Nance and I sprawled across the floral bedspread, Ralph at my French Provincial desk, Simon and Garfunkel above his head. He reads out loud:

Ah, dear Eugenie, did you but know how delicate is one’s enjoyment when a heavy prick fills the behind, when, driven to the balls, it flutters there, palpitating; and then, withdrawn to the foreskin, it hesitates, and returns, plunges in again, up to the hair! No, no, in the wide world there is no pleasure to rival this one: ‘tis the delight of philosophers, that of heroes, it would be that of the gods were not the parts used in this heavenly conjugation the only gods we on earth should reverence!

Ralph lays the book down and licks his lips, “Well what do you two think of that?” “Wow, Ralph, it’s really neat.”

8. One clear plastic purse studded with rhinestones. Courtesy of the toy department at Thrift Town. I keep my little plastic animals in it.

In grade school Lizzie and her sister would shine a flashlight on the wall, pretending they were at the drive-in. Then they’d put a plastic bag between their mouths and practice making out.

Needing petty cash, Ralph stole a can of Lemon Pledge from the corner Walgreen’s. Then he forged his mother’s signature to a note requesting a refund. Half an hour later his little sister was back with the money.

At the same Walgreen’s they posted a list of all the people who had written bad checks. When Ralph’s name appeared for all the neighbors to see, his mother nearly went insane with rage. Then she found the letter where he admitted being gay, he hadn’t even told his college girl friend yet, and his mother kicked him out. That’s how he started sleeping in Nance’s Hungarian grandmother’s basement for $25 a month.

Nance and I had never talked to a gay person before. Except the high-school teachers, but they were always pretending. I couldn’t deal with the women, the thought of growing up stiff and contained with a short ugly haircut was pure terror. Not for Nance, who fell in love with Judy Garland in kindergarten, she was looking forward to being a middle-aged dyke. She still is, except she teaches graduate school. It was easier with the men, I didn’t have to become one. Especially my senior English teacher, it was rumored that in college he got down on all fours and howled at the full moon. I liked that.

9. A green vinyl footstool, rectangular with four buttons on top. The landlord had stored it in Lizzie’s garage for a yard sale.

Ralph told us homosexuals wore mascara and picked each other up in cars. Then he described various sexual acts, using as many Latin names as possible. Nance and I had already tried a couple.

The further I progress, reducing to order what my past life suggests, and the more I persist in the rigor of composition the more do I feel myself hardening in my will to utilize, for virtuous ends, my former hardships. I feel their power.

When Lizzie was in the hospital, her sister slept with Lizzie’s boyfriend. Not buying, not receiving. Taking.

Sitting on the front porch petting the dachshund, Ralph said, “You’ve got to go to college, it’s your only way out.” He made it sound great — drugs and parties and cutting classes.

And it was great. For all those reasons. But what a waste, after four years I graduated with honors and no idea how to support myself. My mother paid for it with kitchen work, mopping floors.

Really it was no big deal. Nance and I had been having sex for seven years but technically we were virgins. Ralph was available. The day Nance’s parents left on vacation we got drunk on sloe gin, spilling it all over the new kitchen cabinets. Whenever I hear the Beatles’ White Album it all comes back. It was sickly sweet and red and sticky.

Climbing into Nance’s bed, Ralph gave a brief lecture on penis size, then demonstrated. What I remember most is laughter: we knew this was a ridiculous situation.

We never did it again, and communal living continued as usual.

Sears will replace your paint if it doesn’t cover. Lizzie and her sister want to do their bedroom, they buy half the amount needed, then take back the empty cans and complain about the pink showing through.

Ralph had been writing bad checks for two years, on three different accounts. He kept detailed records, could tell you to the penny how many thousands he owed. He seemed to actually enjoy reading all the threatening mail.

I stupidly told my mother about our financial arrangement. “How can you eat that pizza, knowing it was paid for with a bad check?” My mouth full of mushroom and pepperoni.

We knew we were perverts so we wallowed in it.

Ralph didn’t give us any warning. One day he gave the grandmother a rent check and disappeared. Nance and I were pissed. When it bounced, we received the full brunt of her Eastern European Immigrant fury.

The last I heard of Ralph he was living in Indianapolis and had changed his name to Lee.

Legendary Materials

My personal weakness is sales. That’s why I love Macys — you can live your whole life through sales. All it takes is patience and the Sunday paper. You can buy it or visit one of San Francisco’s many coffee houses Sunday afternoon. There is always a copy of Macys California lying around.

50% OFF CUBIC ZIRCONIUM — SWIVEL INTO G.E.’S 25” REMOTE COLOR CONSOLE AND SAVE — COSMIC HEART WITH PEARL, REG. 100.00, SALE 67.00 — YOUR CHOICE $12-25% OFF SELECTED LEOTARDS IN COMFY COTTON / SPANDEX BLEND

I had to wait three months for my red leather gloves, but it was worth it.

Every teak item is half price except the wine rack Lizzie wants, so she peels a $20 pink sticker off a cheese saver and puts it on a wine rack. After paying, she uses the same sticker to buy another. Later both are returned to the Macys in Sonoma at a $40 profit.

Fire Hose is sitting at the kitchen table when we get home, he doesn’t know about any of this. I say, “You should see the wine rack Lizzie just got, it was a real steal.” She squints her eyes and hits me.

I take Lizzie to Old Wives Tales, figuring feminist books can only do her good. She whispers, “Let’s get out of here, I can’t stand all these words.” “Lizzie, these books were written for you.” “No they weren’t, they make me feel stupid.” So we drive to Thrift Town instead.

10. One full slip, non-cling apricot with minimal lace. A pink $4.99 sticker superimposed over the $22 tag.

Adrian, a friend of mine from work, tall, blonde, well mannered, his father the vice president of a bank, far too antiseptic for my taste. Lizzie sees him at my kitchen table and is so attracted she runs into the bedroom. I follow. “What’s the matter?” “He’s so clean I feel like a cockroach.”

It’s the same with stealing — a touch of the magic wand and bam! she’s a cockroach from 18th and Blue Island.

Lizzie has never slept with a Latino man.

11. One blue rolling ball pen. When I find mine in her purse, she pockets me a new one.

SAVE $10 ON THE ROYAL WITH FAST ONE-STEP ERROR CORRECTION

Church Street Station, Dos Equis in the food section, Dan in his pale skin and weathered leather jacket that once was brown. He used to steal food and books. I ask, “Did you need those things?” “Of course.” “I mean, could you have gotten them otherwise?” “No.” I lean back, shake my head, “That’s not the same as doing it for sport.”

Dan won’t be that easily defeated. He pushes aside his glass and takes a drink from the bottle. He once knew a man who only wore white T-shirts. Whenever they got dirty, the man’d just go out and steal some more. That reminds me of Jerome, he does the same thing with thrift stores. Whenever his shirts get dirty, Jerome says, “It’s time to do the laundry,” and heads for the Salvation Army to buy a couple clean ones.

Dan is surprised, says he’s seen Jerome in some pretty nice shirts. But he’s holding his mouth that funny way, staring intently. This means Dan is thinking “Another Superficial Conversation.” Soon he’ll try to change the subject to something like structuralist literary theory. So I hold on to Jerome’s clothes, innocently ask, “Don’t you think that sometimes he could be a bit more choosey?”

A cockroach from 18th and Blue Island crawled out of Macys with a $20 pepper mill on her back.

Writing about his job as a sheet metal worker, Dan uses “synchronicity,” “semiotic,” “metaphorical level of exchange.” I say, “Why the big words? You trying to sound smart or something?” He looks down the subway stairs then back at me. “I want to use a vocabulary I’m not even supposed to own.”

PRO-MAGNALITE 11-pc. SET SALE $190 WITH BONUS

Taking out my Fast Pass I said, “ Dan, that’s a good story, I think I’ll put it in my piece.” He smiled, so I guess it’s okay. I wouldn’t want to be accused of stealing his life.

To me a friend is someone who raids my refrigerator without asking.

Imagine a roommate who marks an X on every egg.

Any tag with a green slash through it is half off. Lizzie immediately goes out and gets a matching green marker.

She finds a copy of Kafka’s Metamorphosis in my study, the light is on all night. Over coffee and scrambled eggs, a T-shirted Lizzie, no make-up: “Winnie, I am Gregor Samsa.”

Three of the men I know are reading Derrida but none of them understand him. They admit this to me, not one another. Each time I hear the story my response is the same, “Don’t you think that’s part of his appeal, that he’s incomprehensible?” Dan’s the only one who sees my point.

Knowledge — something to be locked up? The only way to get it is like Dan, to steal.

Gregor Samsa crawled out of Thrift Town with a clear plastic purse on his back, it was studded with rhinestones and sparkled.

Lizzie wants to write a piece on shoplifting, to get it out of her system. I volunteer to help, suggesting scattered paragraphs, each one small enough to fit in your pocket, and nobody sure where anything comes from:

If I am accused of using theatrical props as fun fairs, prisons, flowers, sacrilegious pickings, stations, frontiers, opium, sailors, harbors, urinals, funerals, cheap hotel rooms, of creating mediocre melodramas and confusing poetry with cheap local color, what can I answer?

How much are you willing to put out for this?

$22.50 RAVIOLI HEAD

Lizzie has never talked to Dan, but she saw him once at my reading last summer. Afterward, driving down Valencia, she exclaims, “How can you control yourself around him, he’s so attractive.” “You don’t know him, it’s easy.” Then I add, “He lived with a Mexican woman for eight years.” Lizzie switches on the turn signal and for a moment looks hopeful.

No work for over a month, I think twice about buying a burrito. Lizzie has gone back to Sonoma. After two days with her I could own anything. Old Wives Tales, a new book on female psychology, $16.95. They are so trusting here, so easy to slip it in my bag. How did this thought slip past my censor? Ripping off a feminist book store and me a woman writer, there could be nothing worse. I leave immediately, not trusting my hands, my mind.

FREE KNIFE SHARPENING

The atmosphere of the planet Uranus appears to be so heavy that the ferns there are creepers; the animals drag along, crushed by the weight of the gases. I want to mingle with these humiliated creatures which are always on their bellies. If metempsychosis should grant me a new dwelling place, I choose that forlorn plane, I inhabit it with the convicts of my race.

When I pay full price for something I feel defeated.

Lizzie gives her homeopath $80 for a kleptomania remedy. She just takes this white powder and avoids coffee and sugar for the next three months.

12. One Chemex coffee maker, four-cup capacity. This one’s disputable. A month ago in Cost Plus she remarked how easily it would fit into her purse. When I get it for my birthday I ask if she bought it. Lizzie turns her back to me and chops onions, “Yes.” “Come on, don’t lie to me.” “Winnie, leave me alone.”

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A New Ocean

by
Posted on June 21, 2011 in

At five in the afternoon one day in the fall of 1963 my “guide” took the sleep mask from my eyes and helped me to sit up on the deep couch on which I’d been lying since eight that morning. He told me that the mixture of LSD and mescaline that I’d been given had now passed through my system. How did I feel?

I could not answer him. The drugs had tilted my brain and breached a barrier, and visions from my subconscious had been pouring unstoppably into my conscious mind. Some had been literal, or had made me laugh — the desk I’d worked at in the Ivory Coast, a snapshot of a friend’s expanded waistline — but most had been so heavy with significance and reproach that they had squeezed my heart to groaning. My father’s wide eyes and yearning, boyish smile, shadowed by the brim of his fedora, had fixed me. At his death several years before, our difficulties had been unresolved.

A Chanel suit belonging to my separated wife hung flatly in a dim and empty closet. My four-year-old daughter’s thin legs and pretty shoes had skipped back and forth, back and forth. My hair behind the temples, and the cushion that had been under my head, were soaked with tears.

My guide led me to a chair before a window and drew its curtain wide. “How does it look to you?”

“Awful.” An asphalt parking lot stretched to a tree-lined street down which cars appeared to be moving at violent speed. Solitary people were squinting against the slanted autumn sunshine.

“Do you want to go out there?”

“No, I don’t.”

He wrapped a blanket around me, for I was shivering, and left the room. Beyond the closed door I heard the murmur of a consultation, and I could picture him with the blonde woman doctor who had checked me physically and had replaced him at my side when he needed relief, and with the wiry psychoanalyst who was the program’s Director. There were others of the staff, but I could not identify the voices.

Some of these others had medical or therapeutic credentials, some did not, but titles and qualifications seemed unimportant to them. They were of all ages and complexions. Something they believed could change the world had been discovered, and anyone of useful intelligence would probably have been welcomed by them. Not long before, John Kennedy had spoken about Space as “the new ocean,” saying that we must sail on it simply for that reason, because it was a new ocean, and this group shared that spirit. So far, they had every reason to be optimistic about these inner-space voyages.

The friend of mine who had proposed insistently that I take the drugs, who knew the extent of my depression since my separation from wife and child nearly a year before, had worn a most unexpected, beatific smile from the day of his session onward, and he was not exceptional. The short-term benefits to troubled lives had been excellent, and no one had broken down.

My guide came back into the room and said, “We’re going to give you something more. O.K.?” He was pale, and his dark stubble looked days old.

“Good.”

A vertical canister of C02 was wheeled in and a breathing mask attached over my face. A valve was turned and the sound of rushing air filled my mind. I breathed deeply and was suddenly weightless and flying, relieved of my body. Without friction, without any sense of speed, I shot straight up into the constellations, and there, in the star-dotted blackness, I arrived at peace. My heart was freed, and in a silence in which there was no temperature, no gravity, no wish or will or conflict, no need, I felt an overwhelming, blissful gratitude.

I rested there a while and then I started down. The Earth was far away, a speck and then a dime against the blackness, but it quickly grew. The continents and the oceans became distinct, the tan deserts, the ice at the poles, and the dark forests of Canada, Russia, and Africa. I began to see the conglomerations of towns and cities, and to sense the variety of people, especially those where I’d lived — New York, Paris, Abidjan, and San Francisco. Nearing the ground I recognized with starts of joy some faces in the crowds, and I saw with the force of revelation that my father and my wife, and others whose specters had distressed me, were the same size as the rest, as robust and as frail.

As I slipped into my body and the floor became real under my feet, I felt my essential sameness with all these thousands of beings around me who were speaking in hundreds of tongues. Their warmth invaded me, and when I opened my eyes I was shouting with excitement at joining the world of humans.

My guide greeted my arrival and others came into the room to pat my back. After a time, one of them took me out into an evening of commonplace miracles.

I watched the ash-yellow oatfields rippling in a windless sunset and found that I could see the sap moving in the branches of the liveoak trees, even in the capillaries of the leaves. After dark, the lighted bridges crossing San Francisco were bemusing, as were those wonders of human order, traffic lights. In many of the people we encountered I saw beauty of body or spirit, and everyone of them seemed a miracle of gathered energy. Now so would I be.

My friend of the beatific smile had talked about “psychoanalysis in a day,” but this was something much better, I thought. There was no need for “analysis.” I was free.

Next morning I learned from a waitress at the counter of a strangely quiet, twenty-four-hours-a-day restaurant that John Kennedy had been shot in Dallas. He had been taken to a hospital. That was what was known.

I had never seen such things as the scrambled eggs on the faintly patterned, brownish plate, or the nicks in the tines of the fork. Yet I ate. My mind attempted sporadically to interpret the news, and, at other moments, images from the day before took over. A man standing beside me spoke up in a loud voice, proposing a date to the waitress, and she turned pink and hurried away to the kitchen. This episode seemed no stranger than the food or the coffee.

The follow-up appointment with my guide was for eleven o’clock, still an hour away. I started walking without purpose and stopped outside a barber shop, for in it I could see a TV set turned on.

Both of the barbers were idle, one sitting in his chair, the other leaning against the back of his. Closest to the set was a black shoeshine man, an older man, sitting. Their concentration was such that I momentarily felt I should not disturb them, but I went in and was motioned to sit down.

The TV camera was at the hospital. Just after the barber had begun to snip my hair the announcement came that Kennedy had died.

The shine man pointed at my shoes, but I shook my head. He said, “They couldn’t let him live. Not after Bay of Pigs. Couldn’t let him live his life.”

The broadcast went back in time to Kennedy’s arrival at the Dallas airport with Jackie. Smiling officials greeted them. He was handsome and jaunty. Everyone was full of daylight.

“See him there?” the shine man said. “He’s too much for them. Too much. They can’t abide it.”

The broadcast showed pictures of the motorcade, of the cars coming into Dealey Plaza. Then it was broken into and a voice told us that a suspect had been arrested, and that his name was Lee Harvey Oswald.

“They get someone. Oh, yes.”

The images shifted to the hospital again, to Washington about the governmental consequences.

The shine man said, “He let them look real bad. CIA. Military, too.” He wiped his eyes with his knuckle. “Lee Harry Oswald, indeed.”

I paid the barber and walked to my appointment.

My guide had not yet come in and when he did, brisk and clean-shaven, he seemed too glad to see me. We sat at his desk and he asked some clinical questions. Had I slept? Had I dreamed? Was I experiencing flashbacks?

Then he dropped that manner. “Arc you really O.K.? I thought of you first thing after I took in the shock, whether or not you’d be all right.”

“I’m O.K.”

“I was afraid you might lose it, the good stuff you finally got yesterday. “

“I’ve got it still,” I told him.

“You were tough,” he said. “You wouldn’t let go. I tried what I could to help you though … Then the news. It’s your universe. And then.” His face showed pain, but a more superficial frustration as well. His treatment had been interfered with. He said, “Maybe you’ll want to take it again. Do some more exploring.” I was embarrassed to be talking about myself, my case. “Not tomorrow,” I said.

“Oh, no. Maybe months from now, certainly not tomorrow.” It was a strange handshake. The muscles of his hand and his skin were extraordinary vivid, although there was nothing unusual about them.

I spent most of the next few days alone in my San Francisco apartment, the TV showing me the aftermath, the official events, the caisson crossing the Potomac Bridge. Sometimes I felt I knew where he had gone, out there in the cosmos. I could feel its weightless silence. For me it had been paradisiacal, but for him the timing was all wrong.

My apartment off Buena Vista Park had a small balcony which looked out on a sweep of the city’s south side that included Twin Peaks, Diamond and Dolores Heights, and the bay toward San Leandro. Some of the Victorian houses facing me had been whimsically trimmed with bright paint. Wind chimes and bicycles hung on back stairway landings. I brooded on these clues to their inhabitants and on the backyard gardens below me, some neatly planted, others beaten down around a children’s swing, a kiln, a trampoline. Mad and dangerous though some of my neighbors no doubt were, I admired their putting the next meal on the table, doing what they had to, and getting on with it. I was of them as I had not been before.

Fifteen years afterward I decided to find out what I could about the people who had run the program and those who had passed through it. I knew it had been shut down when LSD had been declared an illegal drug not long after my session.

I called the woman doctor who had sat with me part of the day. She had become a psychiatrist with a practice in Menlo Park.

On the phone she sounded professional and guarded, but said she would be glad to talk. I asked her if she’d like to meet for lunch, or any other time that suited, but she said, “You can make an appointment, if you like. I’ll have to charge my fee.” I was mildly shocked, but accepted her terms.

Her office was near where the “Center” had been, and it seemed a standard therapist’s environment with comfortable dark chairs and a couch, and the curtains half-drawn. She was very much as I remembered her, a blonde woman, somewhat overweight, with a smile that at moments looked tentative, at others a touch cynical.

She told me that when they had had to stop the program there had been no money to follow up on those like me. She could not tell me anything about long-term results, except in isolated cases. “Now you’ll be one,” she said. “What’s happened to you?”

I told her that I’d remarried and had two younger children, and that I’d continued to teach and write. I’d published a novel and shorter pieces, and with another writer I’d started an annual writers’ conference. On the other hand, I felt I hadn’t been productive enough. I had had a drinking problem, but I had quit five or six years before. “What about you?” I asked.

“You can see,” she said, without much enthusiasm. She added wryly, “I still haven’t lost weight.”

There was not much news she could give me of the others who had been on the staff. So-and-so was still working at Syntex, another had taken a job in Los Angeles. In her responses there was a shade of tedium, but also sympathy.

I asked about the psychoanalyst-director.

“He’s at a Vets Administration hospital in Maryland. I have the feeling that he’s serving out his time.”

Did she remember that Kennedy had been killed the day after my session?

“Oh, yes. Yes. That day changed a lot of things for us. For everyone.”

“What changed?”

“You know as well as I do. Many things.”

“Things always change.”

Her mouth twitched impatiently, but she replied, “The mood. The feeling of the possible.”

We said goodbye and wished each other luck.

Outside the building’s sunny entrance I stopped to look at a liveoak tree, an old one with a great reach of gnarled branches and glistening dark leaves, which stood protected in the middle of a traffic island. I concentrated on it, and, after a bit, I saw the sap moving in its new, lighter limbs. The vision soon vanished and I could not revive it, although I was patient, blinking and staring intensely.

Then I let the effort go. Rather, it was swept aside by a rush of gratitude, part warm from memory, part fresh, a buoyant wave that lifted me from what had seemed a flat sea.

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Heroin

by
Posted on June 20, 2011 in

Do you like it? Like a crooner, don’t you think? That’s where I got my last name. “The Sands.’” A casino in Las Vegas. This old drunk fuck was telling me about it. “HEY, little pretty black boy, goddamn … I ain’t seen nothin’ like you since I left Detroit … ”

He couldn’t get over it, touched me when he got the chance. Did I have a daddy??? Shit, I laughed back at him, imitating his drawl: SHEEE-IT, man, I said. Mocking him. You must be kidding! Man, I don’t even have a mother. Laying it on real thick, so he’d feel sorry for me.

He started coming around “CocoRico” regularly. I’d be at the bar up front, checking things out. Actually, he wasn’t bad-looking. When he wasn’t drunk his face and eyes didn’t droop as much, and you’d notice his big body and muscular arms, pretty strong and firm for a man his age. I’d always act surprised to see him.

That was before disco, before I talked Andres into hiring me as a DJ for the back room. “What do I need you for?” Andres used to say, pointing to the jukebox. It seemed like forever until Andres let me give it a shot, and look at him now: he’s making money, the place is jammed until all hours of the night — even girls want to come here and dance, the music’s so good.

“You’re kind of young, aren’t you?” the American once said. But I could tell he was fascinated, just like all the rest of them. My head of tight, kinky curls, my pretty hazel eyes, my sleek brown skin. “Where’s the little G.I. baby?” he’d ask Andres. Andres would shrug, in that bored way of his. “He’ll be here any moment now, I’m sure.” The American would buy more drinks, sitting close by the door. Sometimes I’d get there, let him buy me dinner. Sometimes I’d just stay away.

“Call me Neil,” he said, his eyes fixed on me in that sad, funny way of his. It was one of his sober days. NEIL … What kind of name is that? I loved making fun of him. “Good sport,” he’d laugh with me, jabbing at his own chest with one of his large, rough hands. I spit on the floor in contempt. “Man, you don’t have to talk to me like I don’t know anything. Good sport,” I mimicked, rolling my eyes. “What do you think this is? The Lone Ranger & Tonto?” I sulk, look away from him. Scan the room for a pretty face. Make him feel real bad.

Embarrassed, he looks lost. “Joey, I’m sorry.” He means it. I like that best. I could make him do anything then.

I keep at it for just a little while longer. “Man, I’m no savage.” When he looks like he’s going to cry, I stop. Touch his leg under the table. Soothe him with my voice. “NEIL,” I tease, gently now. “Neil Sedaka — ahhh …” I knew how to make him laugh.

One time he asks me a favor. “For my homeboy …” Some younger guy named Phil. I didn’t like Phil as soon as I met him. “Phil wants to see a live show …” Phil is standing there, next to Neil. Staring at me and not saying anything.

“You mean a sex show?” I take my time drinking my beer, ignoring Phil’s anxious, piercing gaze.

“Yeah, that’s right. One of those …” Neil is uncomfortable. Andres stands behind the bar, within earshot. He seems absorbed by the magazine he’s reading, an article about his rich cousin Isabel, who’s married to Alacran. But I know Andres — one car’s cocked in our direction.

“You want boys, girls, or both?”

“How much?” It’s the first and only time Phil opens his mouth.

“Depends,” I say. I’ll negotiate with Uncle privately, take my cut.

“We have a car,” Neil says.

We drive down the boulevard slowly, looking for the street. It’s early, around eleven at night. I sit in the front seat with Neil, giving directions. Across the wide boulevard I can see the ocean, black and still. “Is that your ship?” I point to the carrier floating, not far away. The men don’t respond.

Uncle’s place is behind the abandoned “Lido Supper Club.” He’s the night watchman, hired by Congressman Abad to guard his property from looters and thieves. The club is a white building with fake marble columns on the outside. Statues of half-naked nymphs and satyrs hold unlit torches. Uncle ushers us in through the back door. It’s enormous inside, and eerie. Everything’s been left as it was. Dozens of little tables and chairs, some with stained white tablecloths still on them. Ashtrays filled with cigarette butts. Empty bottles of San Miguel beer. A dance floor tiled with blue and white mosaics. There is a thick coat of dust on everything we touch.

Uncle is looking for the main switch, stumbling and pointing his flashlight at the cobwebs on the walls. Finally he turns on the dim chandelier that hangs in the room. He motions to a table in the front row, facing a large stage. Not too long ago, Johnny Buenaventura and his Orchestra used to play “The Girl From Ipanema” here. Now a bare mattress lies dead center.

I leave the two Americans at the table, take Uncle aside and tell him what they want. He is gone approximately ten minutes. A skinny young girl enters, followed by a well-built young man, close to my age. She wears a flimsy, loose-fitting dress, her eyes lowered. She is barefoot, and I notice her meticulously manicured toenails, the black nail polish dotted with tiny crescent moons. The young man is also barefoot. He wears worn khaki pants, and his chest is bare. There are intricate tattoos of spiders and cobwebs up and down his lean, muscular arms. He is beautiful, in his way. The two Americans sit up in their chairs, attentive now. I stay in the back of the cavernous room, smoking my cigarettes in the shadows. This way, I can watch them all.

 

We were in a room at the Hilton. “You ought to sing,” Neil was saying. “You have an exquisite voice. Good way to make some money, even here in Manila.” I grunt in response. What does he know, I’ve heard all this before. I turn on the giant color TV.

I had just taken a bath and a shower. If the water stayed hot, I’d be in there all day. Afterward I stuff the plastic shower cap and slippers with the Manila Hilton insignia, complimentary robe and two bars of Cashmere Bouquet soap in one of Neil’s Sportex shopping bags. He hated when I did that. “You don’t have to take that cheap shit. I’ll buy you what you need …” He just didn’t understand. I love the newness and cleanness of my little souvenirs, the smell and touch of the glossy plastic. I would live in a hotel room forever, if I could.

“I’m hungry,” I say to him. “Call room service.” We are sprawled on the bed. It’s two in the afternoon. “Tawag Ng Tanghalan” is on. A young girl singing “Evergreen.” She is earnest and terrified, but her voice booms out in spite of her, from somewhere inside that frail body. Neil shakes his head slowly, in admiration. “Not bad. She’s not bad at all …”

The TV audience claps and whistles enthusiastically when she finishes the song. She blinks into the camera, startled. She is last week’s winner, and an audience favorite. She stands in front of the cheering crowd, fidgeting with her hands. I can’t bear to watch her, it’s too painful. Her awkwardness makes me angry. “Look at her — how stupid!”

“Poor thing,” Neil sighs. “She needs to be rescued, quick.” Impatient, I make a face. There he goes again, upset. He identifies with everyone and everything. I can’t be like that. If I were on TV, I’d be the coolest guy. Mr. Heartbreak, the one that got away. Cool, calm, collected.

Lopito appears on the TV screen, waving to the noisy audience. Before he can even thank her, the young girl rushes off the stage. He gestures towards her departing back. “OUR REIGNING CHAMPION! A BIG HAND FOR CONNIE LIM, THE BARBRA STREISAND OF THE PHILIPPINES!!!” He is making fun of her, sneering in front of the audience. They pick up on his cruelty, start tittering.

Before announcing the next contestant, Lopito rattles off the different prizes: a twelve-inch Motorola color television, a clock, a year’s supply of Magnolia Ice Cream. The big prize is a screen test and a chance to appear in Mabuhay Studios’ next musical, starring everyone’s favorite sweethearts, Nestor Noralez and Barbara Villanueva. Lopito reminds us, once again, that Nestor and Barbara were discovered on his show. “Why don’t you audition for this? You’d be great …” Neil says. He can’t be serious, so I give him one of my withering looks.

“Come on, Neil. Call room service. I’m starving to death …” The next contestant is a young guy named Romeo something. Pretty cute, but corny. “Not bad, huh, Neil?” I poke Neil in the ribs, playfully. “Look at those thighs, and those lips …” Neil ignores me. “What a hairdo!” I say.

“What do you want to eat?” Neil asks, getting up from the bed.

Romeo whoever-he-is starts belting out “Feelings,” except he sounds like he’s saying “Peelings.” He’s trying very hard, and he’s making me sick. No charisma, as Andres would say. I switch the channel. There’s an old black-and-white movie, with Leopoldo Salcedo fighting the Japanese.

I lean back against the pillows, my arms behind my head. My tight black curls are still wet, framing my face. Neil is looking at me, ready to dial room service. “WELL?” he says. I am still naked. We both pretend not to notice how hard I’m getting. “Cheeseburger de luxe,” I say, dreamily. “French fries with ketchup. Mango ice cream…and a Coke.”

 

When Neil got stationed back in the States, he sent me a postcard:

Joey Sands
c/ o Andres Amaya
CocoRico
4461 Balimbing Street
Mabini, Manila
Philippines

Joey:
I thought you’d appreciate this.
Wish you were here …

The postcard was from Las Vegas, a color photo of The Sands Casino, with Sammy Davis Jr.’s name in lights. NOW APPEARING.

“You got mail,” Andres said, handing me the postcard. “You’re lucky I didn’t throw it away — haven’t seen you in weeks.”

With that buddha face of his, Andres watched as I held the card in my hands, pretending I could read. “Let me,” he finally said, snatching the card out of my hands. When he finished reading aloud to me, I smiled. Put the card back in my jeans pocket. Carried it around for days after that, maybe months … I don’t remember now.

 

I ask Andres if he’d write a letter on my behalf, someday. I have Neil’s APO box number, whatever that means. I have to figure out what it is I want, before I can dictate my letter. It’s gonna be good. I know how to get to Neil. He’ll send for me: we can live in Vegas or L.A.

“Sure … why not?” Andres says, in that easy way of his. He looks past me at the door. A couple of Americans have walked in. Middle-aged, okay bodies. They’ve never been here before. They’re hesitant, they could turn around and leave and never come back. Andres can tell. They aren’t servicemen. They look classy, yet casual. What Andres calls “old money.” His favorite kind.

It’s early, “CocoRico” empty — except for me and a couple of other young guys. There won’t be a rush for another hour. “Good afternoon,” Andres says, his shrewd eyes on the Americans. I perk up. This is going to be interesting. I am tingling, the dope in my veins has run its course and settled peacefully.

The Americans are relieved. They smile and sit down at the bar, not far from me. Andres stands under a poster of a matador and a bull, brought to him all the way from Barcelona by one of his rich lovers. He is chatting amiably with the Americans, asking innocent little questions. Where are you from? Really? And how do you like Manila?

The Americans loosen up. One of them, the older one, eyes me boldly. I ignore him, smiling to myself. Listen to Andres go on and on, prying information out of them. Andres can be so cordial when he wants.

That’s what I like about him. He’s so slick.

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Piropo

by
Posted on May 26, 2011 in

They say that change in your life happens quickly, and maybe it’s true, because my life with Vicente and Joaquín changed in just days. I guess I’d had enough of watching over Joaquín like a child. You just can’t baby-sit a grown man. Sometimes at night he’d go out for a walk. I always wanted to go with him, but he told me he needed to be alone. Who knows what he was doing. Sometimes he’d be gone for hours. I never once followed him, but I could have. Maybe I was afraid of what I’d find. I felt him stray from me in every way. He wanted to blame it on my hair, on our not having relations.

All my life, I’ve fought like an animal to take care of my own—my child, my parents, my brothers, and now Joaquín. I’m tired. I think I lost that urge to fight. My father sometimes used to call me una fiera, una loba, words you shouldn’t use for your daughter. Yet I could tell he was proud of my fury. Other men think it’s bad. No one wants a wolf in his home. Only in the forest do men dare shape-shift and let their nahuales battle it out. Attacked beneath the trees, a man either roars or whimpers as he feels his life leaving him, his blood let. Does he love life enough?

But we are not in the wilds where a man might have to bare his teeth and give his life over to a nahual. We’re at the corner of Haste and Tehama.

 

So this one day, a green Expedition pulls up in front of us. Vicente was so tired of waiting for work he said we should take whatever the driver was offering. The man in the Expedition was playing the Carlos Santana CD all the teenagers liked, the one with a song from Maná. He lowered the volume.

“Buenos días. Necesito unos albañiles. Tengo un patio de ladrillo que necesito terminar.”

He wore a denim shirt that looked freshly ironed. Whatever patio he wanted fixing wasn’t one he’d started. His face didn’t show any wrinkles from outdoors work. He looked like an abogado or a professor with his round rim glasses, like the kind of man who takes hours to read his newspaper.

Vicente appreciated the man’s attempt in Spanish and took over where I usually ask some more questions. How many days of work? The man said, Two or three, max.

 

Vicente went to the driver’s window, got a figure for payment, and then motioned for us to get in. With three of us the job would be quick. I hoped it would be clean. I usually like laying brick.

In the car the man’s voice relaxed as we headed toward north Berkeley.

“Me llamo Connor Dougherty y aquí vivo cerca.”

“We understand English pretty good,” I told him, sitting between Joaquin and Vicente. “It’s just sometimes when reading contracts or signing for deliveries, I’m the one who takes care of it.” We were driving to a house on Santa Fe Street, off of Marin Avenue. “If there’s something complicated you can tell me, but we pretty much follow instructions, not a problem.”

“Oh, I see,” he said. “It’s a pleasure for me to speak Spanish, though. I worked at the Universidad Autónoma for two years. I’ve tried to keep it up since then.” They all try to keep it up. I let him talk about his work in Mexico.

As soon as we park in front of the cream-colored house with brown tejas, I know he’s one of those Hispano lovers. The entryway had blue and white Talavera tiles on the front part of the stairs. Big clay planters lined the walkway through the yard, and the bougainvillea climbed the pillars of the front porch. I was maybe even expecting his wife was a pocha, but no, his wrinkly thin señora came running out to meet us.

“Buenos días a todos. Bienvenidos.”

I moved behind Vicente and pulled my cap down. Sometimes other women could pick me out.

They led us around the side of the house and pointed out the half-finished patio job. I wasn’t sure about the two or three days. The patio seemed to connect to some forms where a foundation was waiting to be poured.

“And that?”

“That’d be great if you could handle the foundation work, too.”

“That depends. Are you working with an engineer?” This was a job to be inspected by the city.

“The design and calculations are already set. I just need to order a large quantity of concrete.”

That was my cue to not ask any more questions.

“I was really hoping to get it done soon, since we’re planning a party. My daughter graduates in a few weeks.”

“Well, it will take us a bit longer, even though you have already done the hardest part.”

Vicente picked up a level that was tossed with some of the other tools in a wheelbarrow. He placed it on the three meters or so of patio they’d already started. Vicente checked how they’d handled the first part. The remaining ground had been leveled off and prepared, so we just had to follow the pattern and set the brick. Mr. Dougherty spread out the plans and explained the design to Vicente. They had purchased some nice Moro and White Antique flats to make a pretty contrast. He wanted some sort of Mayan border to show in a pattern through the darker brick. It surprised me they would build that into their backyard. Some people with money have crazy ideas, but at least this was pretty nice.

Joaquín got started mixing cement in a corner of the yard, and I gathered the tools we’d need to get started. At around eleven, Mr. Dougherty left, but said his wife would bring us lunch. He was going out to order the cement delivery for the foundation.

 

What I love about laying brick is the balance of shapes, like a dance. I even dream of dancing and hear music in my head, no matter if the guys are loud and playing el Cucuy, who is so obnoxious, on their radio. I think of Manzanillo and working on my grandparents’ home when I was so young I could barely lift a brick. Even then my father let me drag the trowel across the bricks sandwiching wet concrete. The fonda across the street played danzones from morning until night. The old people sat and fanned themselves, drinking glasses of jamaica. Father would place the bricks, and I’d flatten and scrape. We’d trace over the lines with a little metal strip and shape any messy edges. The ends of the bricks always met exactly in the middle of the brick placed below them. The lines of gray cement stood out like squatting guerreros—a short body in the middle with arms stretched out, forearms raised at the elbow skyward. The perfect balance reminded me, too, of lovers dancing. The sharp lines were their arms in the hold of a danzon, stilled in a frame separate from their bodies, recto pero dulce. The trowel scrapes across the brick in just the time it takes for a woman to be spun and dipped.

“¿Te gusta un pan dulce o un café?” Mrs. Dougherty held out a tray of pastries.

“No thank you, señora.” I didn’t want to slow down to eat.

Joaquín took off his gloves and sat in a white, big-cushioned patio chair. He accepted some pastries and even had the nerve to ask for coffee. The lady came out with a second tray, one with coffee, cream, and a large glass of orange juice. Maybe I should’ve taken a break, after all.

Joaquín smacked his lips over the juice. Hey, I think this is fresh-squeezed. This juice tastes like honey.

Vicente shot me a look like Joaquín was crazy. Only he could spend fifteen minutes savoring orange juice and pan dulce while we worked like dogs to finish the damn patio. We were nowhere near done and still had to negociar details on that foundation. Vicente whistled at Joaquín. Joaquín got the hint and put the lady’s little cup and plates on the tray, then walked it over to the house. I watched him stare into the patio screen for a little minute, then slide it open without even knocking. He entered that lady’s kitchen like a thief.

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Everything That Happens Can Be Called Aging

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Posted on May 24, 2011 in

I have more love than ever.
Our kids have kids soon to have kids.
I need them. I need everyone
to come over to the house,
sleep on the floor, the couch
in the front room. I need noise,
love, the noise of love,
too many people in too small a place.
I need dancing, the spilling
of drinks, loud pronouncements
over music, verbal sparring,
broken dishes and wealth.
I need it all flying apart.
My friends to slam against me,
to hold me, to say they love me.
I need mornings to ask for favors
and forgiveness. I need to give,
have all my emotions rattled,
my family to be greedy,
to keep coming, to keep asking
and taking. I need no resolution,
just the constant turmoil of living.
Give me the bottom of the river,
all the unadorned, unfinished,
unpraised moments, one
good turn on the luxuriant wheel.

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