Greenwich Village

When I got sick of my folks we got in Dan's car and drove all over the place. Dan had this real bad acne. Sometimes he put vaseline on it so the zits would ripen up, and then he'd squeeze them. He was a real good guy.

We drove all the way up to Ohio once. We had a girl with us and she wanted to see the water that went out to the sky. I'm sick of the fuckin' quarry. She had a cigarette that she kept bringing to her mouth between her thumb and her forefinger. She wore a striped shirt, and I could see her nipples rippling in the irregular cotton like the jiggling navels of water balloons. She was beautiful. She made me want to eat glass and rip baby ducks apart. We were taking some pills that Dan had stolen from his mother. When we passed the square, he laughed maniacally and wouldn't turn, even when the girl yanked on his collar and yipped loud with her mouth pressed up to his hair. We drove through the night and when we reached the lakes she was asleep, curled up like a dog on the carpet behind the passenger side with her head propped on the bucket seat. Her hair was splayed out like a fan. I remember that dyed-blond color. It had a brass to it that shone like copper in the dawn. It was nice.

We hitchhiked to New York. We got into Greenwich Village and this head trucked up to us. C'mere. He gave us a joint and walked us through street after street. I had on my army jacket and my filthy denim johns. I'd patched them up. An archway rose before us, stark and tan, birdshit coming off it like icicles. We stepped through the stones into the jangling purse of a war rally. I had a little leather gris-gris bag around my neck with some money in it, and a gold watch I'd found on the ground. The head snapped it from my neck and leapt into the spitting banks of crowd with a stag grace at just the same moment that a tear gas bomb tinked the wall and hissed it breath against the stone just by my ear. The crowd drew from me like I've seen paint draw from salt. I remember the still faces of the hippies. They looked like a river right after a car gets in it.

Zeitoun

I have to admit, I'm totally jealous of Dave Eggers.

Which is why I bought Zeitoun.

I hoped I would hate it. Because seriously—what is Dave Eggers’ problem? Normal people start one world-changing nonprofit organization, publish one groundbreaking literary magazine, write one New York Times bestseller, and are, thenceforth, satisfied.

Not Dave Eggers, as he proves with Zeitoun. The mind behind A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, 826 National, McSweeney’s, and a whole grip of other awesome literary miscellany, had written a novel that combined Hurricane Katrina, the Muslim American experience, really hip cover art, and the twee appeal of boating.

He was really beginning to annoy me.

So I bought Zeitoun, and I read it, hoping to be vindicated.

The first few chapters satisfied my desire for disappointment to the utmost. They were dry and wordy, distant and slow. “Ha!” I thought. “It’s bad!” I put it back on my bookshelf. A couple of weeks later, I started reading it again—to put myself to sleep.

But much to my chagrin, the book had a slow burn. Before I knew it, I was staying up until odd hours of the night, lured deeper and deeper into the story of Abdulrahman Zeitoun—Syrian immigrant, New Orleans building contractor, and devout Muslim—who stays behind after Hurricane Katrina to paddle around his flooded, semi-post-apocalyptic city in a second-hand aluminum canoe. The journalistic chill in Dave Eggers' narrative adapts itself well to his stalwart, level-headed protagonist, who takes the reader into dangerous situations in a way that allows us to sight-see without getting too worried.

In fact, the book is a lot about sight-seeing: through the calm eyes of Zeitoun, we are allowed to be voyeurs into the tragedy of Katrina without feeling, well, tragic. His wife, Kathy, a Midwest Baptist who converted to Islam against her family's wishes, creates a comfortable window into scenes of the everyday discrimination faced by Muslim Americans. As Zeitoun stands on the steps of his house and momentarily admires the beauty of his living room filling up with water, we are allowed a truly, sinfully postmodern moment of thoughtless appreciation, like that guy in American Beauty who takes videos of dancing plastic bags. Even when Zeitoun gets threatened by a band of armed looters, all that we feel is a twinge of ethnographic interest for the young men in the baggy pants. It's like the rest of the postmodern world: you're high on Xanax, and the experience of life is never so tough that you feel you need to look away. 
 
Dave Eggers, you've foiled me again. I'm not entirely convinced of your greatness. I'm not about to join a fan club. But I'd recommend your book to a friend. 
 
And not to help with falling asleep.

Spaces

It was not, I tell you, until quite suddenly last night when I woke up that I noticed the spaces. The spaces is what I have called them. But how could I describe them? They are not really there. When my mind tries to find their beginnings it seizes a row of disjointed images as it always has about anything consequential. I cannot alight on one.

I suppose it began one day when I was reading a report Su Pin had sent me. My mind was wandering a little, as it always does, but I had my coffee and all was fine. John Wayne on the cup spoke with his sad sympathetic face about all a man has to do. I was a man, and I was certainly all right. Only when I looked at the small black letters of Su Pin's report I found that my eyes slipped from them as a greased spoon from a metal rack. I simply could not take meaning from them. No, that was not quite it—that makes it sound as though I could not read. My faculties were not diminished. As I said, I was quite normal. But the white of the spaces held me, snapping my eyes to them with the same significance as a pale naked body, irresistible. I sat this way for an hour or more with no one noticing that I was acting so oddly, my coffee cooling. 

Another instance that I remember was an obsession with girl's hair. The first was a rather frail brunette. Her hair was in a whorl above her head, pinned down in a graceful and unintentional sort of round. The movement of this hair was so entrancing to me that I quietly took a small picture of her with my phone from across the cafe where I sat, and when I went back to work I told C.J. I was going on a coffee break and spent quite a bit of time in the bathroom sitting innocently on the toilet and looking at it. This entrancement continued with another girl I spied on a dating service who had a picture in which she sprawled on a bed. Her face was obscured and her hair lay in a majestic fall holding the light like a glass vase in a painting. At this fall of light I stared for many hours. I knew that if anyone were to find her picture on my computer they would think that I had used this picture as pornography, which was embarassing to me. I wondered if I was developing a fetish, if I would soon request that whores lie obscured on a bed and let me look at their hair, blonde, brown, black and red, so much more interesting to me than their body. Such a thing, although unnatural, was still as natural as a man wanting to look at a woman. But the fixation with the hair passed, and I was left, again, with the untethered pauses disconnected from an image.

I am an engineer. I have always been an engineer, by trade and by inclination. I built tree houses when I was a boy in the woods behind my house and spent many hours creating with my mouth the kinds of noises that an airborne war would make were I to be in the middle of it, a defender in a lone and fallowed outpost, and many hours laying in the tops of the scaffolding that I had wedged into the arms of the trees and staring up at their branches waving on the grey sky. I think the spaces have been with me always.

But it was not until this morning, early this morning which most people would call the middle of the night, that they appeared to be inside of me. And now I don't know what I can any longer do. And now I don't know how I can speak, or be, or look out of these eyes.

Why Forever 21 Is More Human Than Upright Walking--My Thesis of Life, Backed By Science

The preview for Werner Herzog's Cave of Forgotten Dreams has had me thinking a lot about Lascaux.

Humans have been anatomically modern--i.e., normal-looking--for 200,000 years. That is a reeeeaalllly long time.

5,000 years ago, the oldest known pyramids were just a twinkle in some pharaoh's eye. People didn't even know how to domesticate plants until 10,000 years ago. 200,000 years is enough time for life as we know it to come and go twenty times over.

For some reason, humans existed for nearly their whole evolutionary lifespan as anatomically modern without being what we call behaviorally modern. Until around 40,000 years ago, there was no drawing, there was no painting. There was no jewelry. There were no tiny antelopes carved into the handles of hunting tools. There was no material representation of imaginary things. As far as we can tell, there was no form of abstract thought whatsoever.

The latest theory about why humans started doing stuff like having funerals, making elaborate necklaces, and getting tattoos has a lot to do with what happened when a group of H. sapiens migrated from Africa to Europe, and encountered the H. neanderthalensis populations who had already been there for a hella long time. Science had no clue until recently what these two populations did when they met--did they fight each other, did they eat each other, what?

Now, it's genetically evident that they made babies together (if you're not African, you're part Neanderthal--sorry, white supremacists!), and archaeologically evident that they engaged in a whole lot of trade together, too. Neanderthal remains start showing up BEDECKED with H. sapiens-style gewgaws. Both populations' material technology--their stuff--starts to get way more complex, at a way more rapid pace. There's even evidence that this is when spoken language starts to really blow up. In other words, when these two populations encounter each other, they quickly become far more human.

It's here that we start to see places like Lascaux. Cave paintings. Symbolic expressions of human thoughts. A dog can't look at a bunch of lines on a flat surface and see a cow. A human can. A chimpanzee won't bury its mother facing east. A human will. Because of the continuously belittled human abilities of socialization and material attachment, humans became more human than they had been for 160,000 years.

Humans will glorify anatomical details which are not particularly exclusive to us, such as the thumb. But we will marginalize our human obsession with adornment and symbolic materials, even though the presence of these obsessions is actually how we define modern humans as different from humans who were merely anatomically modern.

My conclusion: Forever 21 is more human than upright walking.

Secondary conclusion: I'm going shopping.

The Mollusk

It was not until three years into her marriage that Rachel began to think of her husband as The Mollusk, to say fuck you quietly when she hung up the phone. He was a twat, a jerk, an imperturbable jackass. More than anything, she told herself, she hated the situation. She didn't hate him. This was her fault. His barely redeemable human flesh, his inadequacies, his paleness and stark exhaustion. There was something she was doing. She didn't seem to have an appetite for anything anymore. She was like a keeper of needs. Earlier, in her twenties, maybe, she had been pliable, more relenting. Now she was a portrait-eater, a harpy. She had become some cold Attila. He was not the sealed grave. She was the hunk of bone.

And yet, she wondered, what was it that called her to him, that made her take comfort in him? He was like a magic box that held her former life. When she looked at him, she became infuriated at the lostnesses that had all gotten into him somehow, and then been locked away. She wanted to break him, but she knew that this was illogical. She improved her diet and hoped that it would go away. Fuck you, she said into the air above the dining table, after she had thrown the phone not so hard as she had wanted. Fuck you, fuck you, you closed-lip hunk of junk.

Do You Know the Church Hymn?

There was a little brown pony once, but I didn't know what to name it. That was one of the things that Mother had bought us before she died. The pony was not really a pony, of course, but a full-sized gelding boy horse, but we got him when he was a colt and tussled up by birth so that the nap of his hair was funny--too much on the sides, furred on the top. He was so frail.

Her handkerchief would flutter out the window on a breeze and at the end of it, her hand, looking like to flutter as well. And she would cry: Howard! You are a loved, loved boy! And my legs were like to young trees rooting in the dirt.

I remember when she died there was a little, little teacup balanced on her chest, yellow, with beads of bright gold paint, so little that you wondered if you'd better move it, in case she breathed and then it toppled. But it didn't. She looked at me with her black head there on that pillow and that teacup balanced on her chest atop the crinny gown which was so thin. She closed her eyes and she knotted her hands below the teacup, and she said My son, do you know the church hymn? And she began to hum it, me watching that cup that brittly resting on her sternum like a conch. And I thought to fill it with tea, for it was so still.

How Dark the Sky

Maude slapped the dough with the flat of her palm, picked up a bit more flour, dusted the air, grasped the fleshy greyness and dropped it onto the counter. Then she put her hands on her hips and looked out the kitchen window. Why I have to do everything myself, I do not know, she said under her breath as if the house had not been empty of men since morning. It was four o'clock now. Four o'clock and she was only kneading the bread. Four o'clock, and no tidy motor buzzing cutting the lawn with her husband sitting atop of it like any God-fearing country man. How was she going to cook the dinner? Maude dusted off her hands, shaking her head and pulling at her eyebrows. She gave the dough a tidy slap and walked across the kitchen, drawing off her apron to hang on the wood peg by the door. She grasped the chipped banister and walked up her hallway stairs slapping her palms against each other. Maude was not some nagging cow, and if her husband brought her home a bundle of field mint, as he always did when he had been shirking, well, he could just set it on the porch and have it with his dinner. She raised the wooden sash.

Henryyyyy, she shouted. Her voice pealed over the shushing yellow wheat fields. Henryyyyy. Wiiiiilt! With her head out in the sky she could feel the gathering evening on the sides of her neck and the backs of her hands. The air felt wet, and the flat gold land seemed to cut the distance into two shifting bolts of cloth, bright yellow and shining, murkish grey. A bullfrog chirruped down at the creek, under the stand of crack willows and osiers, and then another bullfrog, and then all of the bullfrogs chimed roundly together. Maude kept her head out of the window, feeling the plangent weight and moisture like palms on her cheeks. Heyy-en! The bullfrogs clangored. She picked her palms up off the sill and looked at them. They were caked with chips of white paint. 

 

Maude pulled her head in the window and looked at her bedroom. She had made the bed, and she had dusted and straightened all of the picture frames that day before she went to go get the new auracana's eggs from the coop. The doily made for her by her mother was resting on the back of the yellow chair that she sat in when she had some time to read. Her husband's fancy boots were propped up on the hope chest, where she had set them. He would be wearing his gaiters today, and his overalls. His flannel would be red. Or was it the blue one? She couldn't recall. I can't recall, she said, although I dressed the man, and she faced again to the window.

Maude leaned with her arms preceding her over the sill, slapping off the flecks of paint. They stuck to her skin stubbornly. With her head and shoulders pressing toward the sky, Maude felt like she was leaning into the bottom of a lake. The air hung like a mud veil over the fields, and though she strained her eyes for a grain of color that would mean a tractor or a hired boy from town, she could see nothing. She brought her head back into the room, then turned her body away from the window without shifting her gaze. She pulled her hands in from the thick air and put them in her pockets. Then she turned her head and strode back into the hall.

She reached up with both hands to the china bead on the end of the string to the attic stair, and pulled it. The stair unfolded like an accordion, and she used one hand to pick up the hem of her skirt and the other to steady herself on the upper steps as she climbed. The steps groaned with her weight, the bottom board striking the wood of the hallway floor with a clud. Maude hunched through the four-foot door that her father had put into the attic wall in case of floods and stepped onto the rooftop.

Her house looked small from here, the guttered borders of the roof not seeming to stretch more than ten feet in any direction. The wheat fields spread all around, magnificently yellow, and the sky lowered beyond, surrounding and dim. Which wall was her bedroom window? She craned her neck over the gutters and could not place herself among the distant spaces of her home. The ringing of the bullfrogs gained in pitch and the rushing of the crack willows joined that of the crops under a wind that lifted Maude's skirt and made her bend to press it to her knees. The shingles of the roof radiated heat that warmed her legs. In the distance, she saw the sheets of yellow and grey blur as the sky fell to water and the water fell to the field. It is about to rain and I am on the damn rooftop looking for you, Henry, she said. 

 

She turned back to the roof door and a red speck in the distance caught her eye, moving towards the house under the blackness of the falling sky. The bead of color gained in size and she stepped unsteadily over the shingles, straining to see it more clearly. It had a white head, and hands, and then it was her son, bounding over the wheat field where he was never supposed to go, wearing her husband's red flannel and his own green rubber galoshes. Ma! he shouted as he ran. Ma! Ma! Ma! The ringing of the bullfrogs drowned his voice. 

Wilt! Maude shouted. You stop running!, but he kept bounding through the high sheaves, a path of broken stalks flattening behind him like a road. She saw his face now, strained, white, shining with sweat. His eyes jittered wildly, like the eyes of a colt that she had once seen whose mother had been shot for a lame leg right in front of him, the farmer an ignorant man who had only dealt before with stupid cows. She put her hand to her heart and clutched the fabric there.  

Wilt! she cried again, and he heard her this time and stopped dead at the border of the field and the green lawn and looked up at her, his white chest heaving and slick under her husband's shirt, his face stricken and blank, and the rain reaching the boundaries of the house hushed the bullfrogs and the noise of the trees as she fell to her knees at the edge of the roof.

The Mailman

      “What the fuck, dude. What the fuck, dude.”

       The mailman's hand hung off the back of the chair, fat and papery like a wadded slice of bread. Robby, twisted against the wall, was mouthing the inside of his wrist, his eyes wet and wide.

       I watched Carl take the edge of the kitchen curtain between his thumb and forefinger. He brought it to his face, rubbing the fabric with his hand as if testing the feel of a shirt, then turned it over and sniffed it. The curtain was yellow, plaid with green swirls like bloated teardrops at the corners. It was brown on the side hanging over the sink. The counter was piled with garbage. The place smelled like banana peels. Glossy white kitchen paint met that of the brown living room wall in a precise line. 

       “What'd you do, Carl?” Carl dropped the curtain and squatted on the carpet where the linoleum ended, combing the pile with his fingers stiff. His hand made a tearing sound as it passed. Chunks of lint collected like filthy cotton at his feet. 

       Robby took his hand from his mouth and pushed himself up, staring at Carl as he dragged the lint from the ground. Rob's face looked swollen and pink, like when we were all kids and he was being a wimp on a sleepover. He swallowed a couple of times before he spoke. “Yeah. What the—what the fuck, dude? What the fuck d'you do that for?” Carl's eyes rose from the carpet and trained themselves on Robby, his hand trolling the ground rhythmically. His face was slack.

       “Carl. Where'd you get him?” I took a step toward him and he looked up at me. His teeth glinted like gristle in the dark of his mouth. A shaft of sunlight from the window hit his eye and made it gleam yellow, like the wing of a butterfly. I could see his throat working under the soft, ridged pink skin.

       He coughed. “What?” he said, and smiled, blinking. 

       “Aw, fuck.” Robby moaned in the corner.

       I walked to the mailman and looked at him. He was older than he'd looked from the door. His face was chalky, his cheeks crossed with red capillaries and the pig-bristle of a day-old beard. His eyelids were shut and satiny. The wool of his pants was frayed at the seams; there was a hole in the place where the zipper met the crotch. He wore black cotton gloves. One of his knee socks was drooping on his white calf, and underneath it was an industrial-looking black garter. I put my finger underneath his nose. I felt a wet draft like someone blowing through a straw and I pulled my hand away, wiping it on my pants. “He's not dead.” I said.

       “Oh, thank Christ! Then we can leave him be and get the fuck out of here!” yelled Robby, climbing to his feet. I looked out the kitchen window. The mailman's truck sat in his driveway, cheerful and white. A fat woman in a pink housedress was standing on the sidewalk with her hands on her hips, watching her terrier take a shit on the mailman's front lawn.

       “Robby,” I muttered, “Shut the fuck up or we're all going to jail.” Robby put one hand back over his eyes and with the other smacked the wall, sinking towards it and whimpering curses.

       “We'll put him in that torn up old mattress,” Carl said quietly. He was staring at the pile of fluff he'd made. He flicked the wads with the tips of his fingers. “Just slit it open and put him right inside.”

       “He's not dead,” I repeated. “He's still breathing.” I looked out the window again. “Somebody might come home soon.”

       “Nobody's coming home,” said Carl, and rubbed his eyes. He looked at me. “Are you blind? He lives alone.” His eyes in the gold of his face glowed surreally, the color of dust motes. In the dark room he looked like a lit match, like some wild and glowing animal. He brushed the fluff at his feet into a neat mound, then stood up. His body left the ray of sunlight, darkened. “We'll kill him.”

       Robby's face screwed up. His hand waved in the air in front of him feebly, his other hand pawing at his hair, his eyes, his mouth. “Oh, come on, Carl. I don't want to.” He put his face against the wall. He turned to me suddenly, his hands out, palms up at me. “Danny, I don't want to. Do you want to? I don't want to, man. You can't let him make me. Don't let him—” 

       I popped Robby one before I even knew what I was doing. I felt the heavy hand descend, the iron fist of concrete and white marble, the dense, clamping hand, crimping my eyes, filling the spaces under my jaw, pressing my shoulders down and then exploding up, through my bones, through my fist, and when I hit Robby's face I felt no impact, just watched his head whip back and hit the wall with a smack. An instant later his hands flew up and hid his mouth, his skin white against the red blear spreading from his nose. He held his face and looked at me silently. I turned back to Carl. 

       “How'd you get him out?”

       “I used a rag.”

       “Where is it?”

       He laughed and pulled a wrinkled white rag out of his shirt pocket, waving it around like a hanky, his brows raised. I smelled the refrigerant smell of the chloroform.

       “Were you wearing gloves?”

       “Of course. This shit gives you sores.” He leaned against the kitchen sink, tilting his head back as he folded the rag in a square and tucked it back inside his pocket. 

       “Where'd you put them?”

       He smiled with one corner of his mouth at me and leaned back on his arms, tapping the tiles of the counter with his fingernails. “It doesn't matter. They don't have any of our fingerprints.”

       “He works for the government.” 

       “He's a mailman, Daniel.”

       “You guys can't kill a person. We've never killed a person before,” said Robby from the wall.

       “That's why we're not going to get caught.” Carl kept his eyes on me. I realized I was picking at my fingernails and put my hands in my pockets.

       The mailman snorted and we all jumped. He huffed once or twice, jewels of sweat quaking on the stubble of his upper lip. The hand hanging off the chair jerked itself up and clutched spasmodically at the motheaten crotch. The dark twill chest started heaving in and out like a bellows. A sound came from him like cardboard ripping. He was snoring.

       Carl sighed and looked at his watch. “Let's have a look around,” he said.

       “Carl, man, Carl—”

       “Shut the fuck up, Robby.” He raised his eyebrows at me briskly and strolled to the hall at the back of the living room. “Do what you want, you two little whores.” He cornered the bend into the hall. Robby and I looked at each other.

       “Come on, Robbo. Be a little man.” I walked to him and put my arm over his back. 

       The hall jogged right after the first few steps and it became too dark to see. Robby and I stumbled down the dark passage, groping with our hands out. Carl appeared in a tall blade of light that opened to our left, black against the blue-white radiance of a room. “This way, ladies,” he said smoothly, and disappeared. 

       The whiteness of the room blotted all sight for a moment, and then we were in a bedroom. A peach bedspread loomed in quilted ridges across a four-poster bedframe made of scrolled metal painted white. The headboard rolled in curlicues like a pale gothic mansegate, and the posts were twisted like barber poles. On the wall facing the bed there was a window, and over this was a luminous stained glass picture of a beach scene with a massive gilded frame. Rolling turquoise waves glowed obscenely, and in the upper left corner, a brilliant red sun squatted, top-wide and fat. Black seagulls crawled flylike across a pork-pale, iridescent sky. Through the whole thing you could see faintly the stubbled brown backyard, a rusted swingset, and the clouding top of a brackish arborvitae studded with crows.

       The bathroom was pink, with double sinks shaped like seashells. Vanity lights ringed the mirror, splattered with the foggy skeletons of water droplets and black hairs like little fleas. The floor was strewn with empty toilet rolls and scummy towels. A gold ring was in the wall above each sink, and in both of these a plush, peach hand towel hung folded neatly. On the counter were mounds of tissues, thumbed and brown.
       "Can you believe that good people die while this sack of shit just lives?" I looked at Carl. His face was still impassive, but his hands were clenched. I felt a stinging pain in my own hand and looked down. My thumb was bleeding. I had torn the nail down to its root without noticing. I stuffed my hands into my pockets again.

       “Carl,” I said. “This is nothing like a dog.”

       “I know,” he said. “Dogs have dignity.”

       “No. That's not what I mean.”

       He turned and came very near me. He had a sweet smell, like laundry or Coke. He brought his mouth close to my face so that I felt his breath as he spoke. He looked me in the eyes.

       “No, Dan,” he said, “this is not like killing a dog.” Something sweet but unbearably clean. “But it will be easy.” I could see again behind the pearly mouth the white gleam of his teeth, the bubbles of saliva glittering the edge his tongue. “Daniel,” he said. He put his hand on my cheek. “You're right.” He turned away from me and passed through the smudged door frame into the black hall without a word. 

       Robby looked at me in the mirror.

       “Are we really going to do it, Danny?”

       I looked away from him. In the mirror, my own eyes were absurd, pale and round, ridiculously large and unprotected. My hands stuffing my pockets looked like hobo's purses, my wrists above them hairy and white. I was a small, dark goblin, a monster. 

       “For chrissakes, Robby.” I yanked my hands to my eyes and turned from the mirror. I felt as though a wave of sound were coming over me; there was a rushing in my ears that was palpable, like they were being pressed open with cotton. I pressed my palms to my forehead and saw Robby's t-shirt, the red fabric covering the soft flesh of his belly. At his sides, his hands hung like white rags; the pink swells of his fingers bloomed chubby and limp. He was so goddamn helpless. I thought about my dad, how his hands had looked clenching around his face the day my mom died, veined and reddened, like they were carved of something that had been burned by acid, irrevocably damaged. The world was so fucked up. I could feel my face twisting around it. Heat stabbed my eyes. Robby's white hands lifted, floated towards me.

     “Dan—” he said. I snatched at his elbows, strained the hands out of reach. I could feel the weight, something cold, unbearably heavy. It was pressing down on me; I wanted to shake it off, but there was nowhere to go.

Super Mario Brothers

From time to time my brother would get me to play video games. But I was a terrible partner. I flew the battleship through halls of stars while my brothers shrieked help from Star Fox, Star Fox; in Selenitic there was a bookcase, filled with squares of cracked vellum, green leather, each rowed with black hieroglyphs like Hebrew on a corpse's arm. How could one resist such richness, how could one look away? I slumped through ivory patios and wanted to see. My favorite was a room above the crested mud gateway to the hall of Princess Peach. The black walls were noiseless and veloursome; it was an error of code, the material bounding the room jangling with emptiness. My steps clipped delicately and deadened on the lighted picture window, an inverse, rose-soft image of the Peach; there were only twenty paces wall to wall. The Princess held a rose. The noise of the game came in from a great distance. Other people were eating mushrooms, other people were leaping three hundred feet in the air. No one else could enter. I sat under the diffuse blush of the window. The sun came from far off.

Slapstick in Swiss Cheese: This Month's "There Comes A Time" Time; or, Mr. Donuthead, Who's Trying To Kill You?

I got up at 4:30 this morning. Not because I wanted to, or even because I had to. I did it for one reason. One mean old reason, the reason for the season, a reasonless reason, the reason to end all reasons: my back hurt. My goddamn back hurt.

That old waitress war wound, like every fake smile I ever gave turned on its side and stabbing me in the spleen. My back hurt. Like a cracked rib, like a dead dog, like an ice sculpture, like a fishing creel reeling me in. My back hurt. That old lady refrain pressing me tight as an iron maiden. My goddamn back hurt, so I woke up at 4:30. And I went to work.

Christ, you must be saying. Author. Jacqui. Is this going to be one of those complaining blogs? Like the cameraman in that pivotal moment in Wayne's World, you are walking away. Wait! Okay, okay, come on back, I say. Come on back. Things aren't as bad as they seem! I'm sorry. I didn't mean to dump on you. I'll figure something out. Okay? I tuck my hair behind my ears. I smile.


Some days the end of the world is burning a swiss cheese sandwich. This is one of those days. One of those "There Comes A Time" times. There comes a time, I'll say, when your rotten teeth and waitress wound and poor-me-Sally-ness and inability to make grilled cheese all catches up with you. These days you feel melancholy as a bear at the blind edge of winter and you want to dig a hole in the snow because the days are short and dark and full of hunger and it seems about that time. But you're not a bear. You're a human. A gol-darned lily-livered spume of a human, and singing in the shower, although fun, fails to change that peculiar predicament which you find yourself affixed to like a patch on the ass of a bum. You try to find the thread of where things went wrong, but it isn't there. It's all wrong. It's just you.

These are the days for harelip prayers.

I tuck my hair behind my ears. I smile.

Come on back.

Maiden Names

Oh mother, when I stand above the water,

On my white face I see your printed cheek.

I smell the betel shell of every daughter,

The currency of newness, rare as teak,

I see the teeth your mother used to crack you,

Whose mouth made holds that bellied you and blacked you,

Whose words were traders' tins to weigh you weak.

Why is my mother's maiden name forgotten?

Who tore your scrivened name to pieces, mother?

When did you take your fingers from the typewriter

and knot them in your lap to bloat and blubber,

to wend and bludgeon fatly through the water,

as, on the mudded bank, your only daughter

burning for an image, gasps and smothers?

The woman part of me was never named

Nor was the woman part of you. We are

Dumb sons without a provenance to claim,

Meek, muted by the keeper's clink and screw.

We cannot write in ink, we cannot mark

The places we have stood, submerged in dark.

How can I know my name, my nameless mother?

How can I be but some bright mirror's shadow?

A hold made sole for likeness, loyalty,

Blind darkness, corded to the absent shoulder

Of any captain, shunted sea to sea,

though rough, the waters hide my own clean cheek?

Daughter, will I brand you so I can speak?

Will rough reels buy my passage, weigh you weak?

Completely Unprepared for Jaguars and Gorillas, Our Intrepid Traveler Forges On; or, Not Enough Bell Peppers To Go Around; or, Eek Ik! An Anthropologist's Nightmares Explained.

There are many fives in my life. Five a.m. alarm clock. Five hours of sleep. Five bus trips daily. Teacher, grade five. At approximately Ray Bradbury's death hour this morning I scrawled five hieroglyphic phrases on the lined paper next to my bed. Kegan. Jaguar. Tried to warn. Didn't listen. Got me. Later, there was a gorilla I couldn't feed: I tried to scrounge for tossed-out vegetables, as one would give a rabbit, but this rabbit was a thousand pound living bludgeon and all I could find was one tray of discarded red and green bell peppers--hardly enough for a jungle animal that, in dire straits, will eat young gazelle. As if bloodthirsty silverbacks were not enough to drive the psychic message home, for some reason the gorilla attracted to him a throng of uncommonly loyal, dumb and adorable dogs who were depending on me utmostly to also sate their carnivore's diet of ground beef and kibble. Awoke in a sweat--five sweats, to be precise.

Spent all day yesterday reading about the Ik. Colin Turnbull's other ethnography that I've read was about the BaMbuti, a Congolese pygmy tribe who act and look like tiny, dark-skinned Groucho Marxes. It was called The Forest People. In it, the tribe sings songs about the goodness of the forest, likes to laugh, and has a taste for the hilarious and slapstick. The Ik are not the BaMbuti. Their book is called The Mountain People. An excerpt:

When the mother finds a spot in which to gather, she loosens the sling and lets the baby to the ground....Then she goes about her business, leaving the child there, almost hoping that some predator will come along and carry it off. This happened once while I was there--once that I know of, anyway--and the mother was delighted. She was rid of the child and no longer had to carry it about and feed it, and still further this meant that a leopard was in the vicinity and would be sleeping the child off and thus be an easy kill. The men set off and found the leopard, which had consumed all of the child except part of the skull; they killed the leopard and cooked it and ate it, child and all.

It's like some bizarre Lewis Carroll rabbit-hole where everything is reversed. The Ik are starving. Uganda and Kenya have made them settle in what used to be their spring lands, and forbidden them from hunting in the surrounding "state parks". Their familial allegiances used to be dictated by traveling groups and gathering groups, rather than by biological nuclear families. Now there's no traveling, and there's no gathering. So there are no allegiances. Since there's not enough food to go around, either, there's absolutely no incentive to do something like nurse your infant, or shelter your elderly mother. The most depressing thing is Turnbull's anthropological conclusion that biological family ties are not part of human nature, since the Ik are human and family seems to mean zilch to them. I might argue that analogs of this same behavior can be seen in any situation of acute stress to the survival of the group, like war. Regardless of theory, I'm dreaming of jaguars eating my skull, starving bloodthirsty gorillas, and generally of being put into situations of great responsibility without the resources to handle them.

There's no suitable pun on which to end this post. Pray for me, readers: the jungle approacheth. And it's five a.m., and time to wake up.

Ruby Crenshaw

Missouri was hot as a bitch's fiddle, was what Father Crenshaw said, and without further ado they got Brotherville behind them. They went to California. They went by Greyhound bus, and most people thought that they were Mennonites, and Father Crenshaw made them sing at the pit stops and his old greasy wife bobbled at his side inanely gazing at her scuffed-up sneakers, and sometimes people threw dimes at their feet, but mostly people ignored them. Melton thought that they would probably stop in Hollywood, but Father Crenshaw made it known that he intended different. They'd go all the way to God's great blue sea, he roared as they wobbled into Ventura in the yellowing dawn, slumbering passengers slitting their eyes or dragging sweatshirts over their muttering faces, all the way to that sparkling blue sapphire of a sea that God created only for His chosen people to lay eyes upon and relish in and cleanse themselves inside, they would go to the shore as did Jesus, the Christ, when He was a fisher of men. And when Ruby woke up once more the bus had stopped and the family was singing again and Melton was pinching her shoulder, and they had come all the way to some town which she could see by a sign on the front of a donut shop was called Santa Monica.

Wonderland, Part Two: Mount Olympus and The Foibles of Zeus

Just as I was falling hopelessly and eternally in love with baby dragons, the Wonderland Avenue curriculum moved on to Greek myth. My bus, traversing the moneyed community of Laurel Hills, passed by a set of golden gates every morning, as tall as houses and ostentatiously bedecked with a glittering chrome sign reading "Mount Olympus" in scripty lettering. Naturally, I was happy to learn that I lived right near the famous Mount Olympus, and I yearned to go there. I was confused when my friend Lindsay told me that all that lay inside were big mansions for rich people. "You mean mortals?" I asked. "Well, I think so," she said, suddenly unsure.

Somehow, none of the parents were fussy enough to censor the parts about Zeus impregnating different ladies while dressed up as different barn animals. Thank the Gods for that, because these parts of the story caused me no end of mind-expanding consternation. Why would the ladies want to go anywhere with some strange cow, even if it was white as snow? What were they doing over there? Did cows do that with ladies? Could they? And, most importantly, why were the babies that resulted from whatever the heck they were doing half-God, and not half-cow? I mean, we were second-graders, not total idiots. We knew how DNA worked, roughly. Brown-haired parents made brown-haired children. Cows made cow babies. It didn't matter if the cow was Zeus or Captain Kangaroo. It was totally simple, and a matter of science.

Wonderland, Part One: Pillow Talk of the Round Table

I started attendance at Wonderland Avenue Magnet School in the second grade, thanks to my mom's dogged and somewhat dishonest insistence that I be tested again and again until it was scientifically proven that I was a genius. At my last school, the only slightly-less-fun-sounding Dixie Canyon Elementary, my first-grade teacher was one crotchety and terrifying Mrs. Ishihara. Whereas Miss Chan, who I'd had the year before, had liked to do things such as make stone soup and paint our faces with butterflies, Mrs. Ishihara had a more stoic, spartan, old-fashioned sort of teacher-sense. Her most confounding punishments would be doled out to students for a crime dubbed “getting ahead of the rest of the class"--which she seemed to define, mysteriously, as being already good at something that she was attempting to teach. For such an egregious offense the smarter, i.e., the hopelessly disobedient, children would be taken by the shoulders, gripped firmly, and shaken until they cried in bewilderment--or once, to Mrs. I's increased frustration, puked all over the place. Others, like me, who were merely insolent but not yet insufferable know-it-alls, would be sent to the corner routinely, to muse silently and privately about things that were invariably more interesting than whatever we were "learning" that day.

Wonderland Avenue was not like this. At Wonderland, the first thing we did was read a book about King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. Garb, I whispered to myself, devouring with my eyes the armored knights in velvet tunics, the ladies in gleaming, mossy silk, the gold circlets on the wizened foreheads of the grey and reclusive wizards. Scabbard. Merlin. Excalibuuuur. We went to the Medieval Times tournament in Buena Park, where a stadium full of other eight-year-olds with their teachers chomped on roast turkey legs without benefit of utensils and gulped juice served in goblets “fashioned”(molded) by “alchemists”(factory drudges) from “sacred pewter”(glittery grey plastic). We goggled and allowed tired-looking, yet lively actors to feint and charge at one another on modern-bridled horses, swing broadswords made of the same counterfeit material as our cups, and roar "thee" to everything and everyone, although even we, second-graders on a field trip, knew that Medieval people never said "thee" to common friends or enemies, but pretty much only to their sworn leige the King, or when they were pillow-talking.

Pappy, for Now and Ever

I have a picture of my father when he was seven or so. Here he is: my Dad, my Daddy-o, my one and only ever-lovin' Pap, in a tweedy striped blazer two sizes too huge on him, gigantic, patterned satin tie knotted a little askew, looking like an old man that's been shrunken down to child-size and doesn't know it yet.

His face looks different than it did by the time I knew him. He hasn't yet been bitten by the neighbor's trusted Rottweiler after he got curious about its eyes, hopped the fence in the middle of the night, put his hands on his knees and stared, as if to kiss it, full in the face. It hasn't yet happened that he was just sitting in a diner, having coffee, minding his own business, and a cherry red Mustang shiny and well-tended as Heaven itself came barreling through the wall-sized picture window, sending a constellation of jagged glass stars sinking into the skin of his cheek. He doesn't have an inkling idea yet about the love beads, the David Bowie haircut, the hours and hours of bleeding fingers hammering out melodies from a guitar, the fact that in a handful of years he will run away from home and stay gone so long his parents will move and leave no forwarding address. He doesn't yet know about my mother, and he sure as heck doesn't know anything about me.

He's got the unrumpled face of a child, complacent and curious, not yet confused or scared but still waiting for the rather interesting story he seems to be stuck in to unfold a little more. In his face are none of the chickenpox scars, none of the lines from smiling or from smoking that he had by the time that I was born and looked up at him and knew that he was mine, mine without end. But he's the same. He looks like my brother; he made my brother, and one day I'll probably be the mother of a little kid who'll look just like him. When I look at my seven-year-old dad, I miss him like a spurned lover, because I can't pick that adorable little boy up in my arms and hold him, tell him he's the cutest thing I ever saw and that I'll love him forever. I can't because he's long gone—he's grown into a man, and then turned into my dad. All that I've got of him is a picture.

I'll be surprised when I get to heaven if we aren't all born at the same time, and get to be together for our whole lives, from beginning to end. I can't think of any other way to finally know the entirety of it all at last; I can't think of any other way not to love people so much that you grit your teeth when you look at them and miss them tragically even when they're right there, still alive.

Staying At Mom's, or, Adult Orphanism, or, The Welled-Up Woes of a Washed-Out Waitress

Once I was a waitress, and I lost my job. I was not laid off from my job. I was fired, and I deserved it.

Waitressing had given me a mysterious shoulder injury that meant that I couldn't hold a tray or do much of anything without looking like there was a wooden nail buried in my arm, which was what it felt like. I had worked in restaurants for eight years, and suddenly at twenty-five I realized that I was no longer just messing around: my job had given me a disabling injury, it had become a part of me, and soon I would be thirty and have nothing going for me but the ability to act sweet for five seconds at a time to people who I'd rather eat nails than ever actually talk to. I wanted to go to college but couldn't figure a surefire way to eat if I quit, and so I just got surlier with every fruitless, hopeless, waitress day that passed. I was fired for this: for being a surly waitress, a mean waitress, a waitress with a sneer on her lips and a jeer on her tongue, a waitress who grimaced like roadkill every time she lifted up your drink, a waitress who wanted to be a respected author/scientist instead of a waitress, a waitress who was certainly not on the fucking dessert menu, a waitress who hated her life, hated herself, and hated everybody else for looking at her and thinking, "waitress".

I made my prayers by way of snippy comments and desperate feelings. But still, my prayers were answered. Verily, the message from God could not have been clearer if a white bull with golden horns had appeared to me in the salsa freezer, and yet, because I am a human, this divine routing of my plans made me madder than hell. I was like a monkey backed into a corner. The busted shoulder meant that another waitressing job was out. The way the management had wangled my hours down to nonexistence before I was booted meant that unemployment was also a no-go. The only other thing I knew how to do was go to school, although being forced to do so had not necessarily been in the plans. So, with the kind of terror that makes you grin like the aforementioned cornered animal, I took out $11,000 worth of student loans, let go of my apartment, and realized that I'd gotten what I'd wanted. More or less. Which brings me back to the point: Staying at Mom's.

I Stay at Mom's because I have no home of my own. My things stay here--the tables, sofas, and other accoutrement of adult life--and periodically, when my boyfriend, who I generally stay with, goes out of town, I join the things. I sleep on one of the sofas, actually. I like to think of this situation romantically as a variation on Adult Orphanism; although I have two parents, both of them quite nice, sleeping on a couch in a cat-infested loft at the age of twenty-six becomes more bearable when I imagine myself as some glamorous Oliver, perhaps in a rhinestone-lapeled trenchcoat, singing for my meals and scrapping to get ahead. More cats live here than do humans, and there's cat hair, cat toys and cat food on every available space where one would wish to place one's human paw. Dogs have died in this home. Teenagers have turned into college students and left most of their things behind, cramming the closets. Adult Orphans have returned home, bringing with them sofas; they have left again, leaving sofas; they have returned to sleep on those sofas once more amongst the dander and felt mice and squeezy toys and actual cats. They return to sleep now. They are going to have strange dreams.

The Big Shebang, or, The Author Gives a Semi-Explanation, or, A Possibly Illuminating Untroduction of the New Blog, "Harelip Prayers"

It's finally occurred to me that what the whole point of achieving something fabulous and earth-stopping has always been was to stop the earth—that is, to stop the flow of time. Somehow I thought that if I could do something awesome enough, I would not fall victim to those things that define me as a mortal. I could become, actually, immortal; though the delusion's never stretched far enough to blot out certain death at the end of the line, it did drop a comforting veil over a lot of other shitty certainties about living. I thought that time would stop for me, if only I could pull hard enough to get ahead of it.

This has been articulated many times, by many people who are much smarter than me. Maybe it's the kind of thing you have to see to believe. After so many years in a weird gritty torpedo implosion, though, one might realize that the center is oneself. Whether or not it sounds like bullshit when one writes it as one's first entry in one's anonymous online journal, which one has chosen not to preface with any kind of face-saving disclaimer.

Alternate entry titles:
Why I Kind of Actually Want a Farm and Seven Adopted Laotian Kids
Boringly Famous or Famously Boring
Household Drudging: Doing and Liking It
Non Is Not Under (Achievement) (No seriously!)
The Opposite of the Opposite of The Ten Thousand Things

The point is, although it's blasphemy in an American society to say that a plurality of experience is not the only way to be happy, I've begun to suspect that:

1. since there's no way to stop time, and life happens anyway,
2. and therefore the choices that you don't make affect the course of things as profoundly as the choices that you do make,
3. and eventually you just die, THEN the only choice you have is to
4. fumble around like a blind fool wearing a clownsuit, and
5. possibly tell stories (for myriad purposes), knowing
6. that things will "end up", albeit maybe not “like they should”, and that
7. someone ought to be keeping track of the marvelous patterns things tend to create when left to their own blind-fool-in-a-clownsuit type devices.

The final moral of the big shebang being: I want to be a writer, and publishing "works" on a blog, even an anonymous blog, makes me feel like a bumbling, stumbling, fumbling, silly blind fool in a clownsuit. But man, I am bout to give out if I do not. And I have a tug, a sort of obligation, that I don't know the source of, that says to watch and see what designs my stumble-bumbling might draw up. So watch out, Horatio Alger. These are my harelip prayers.