10th Street….
“Hurry, get Frank! She’s waving a pistol on some lady’s porch!”
“Where is he?”
“Just find him!’
“Honey, what’s wrong? Put the gun down and tell me?”
“Your son beat my boy and took his twenty dollars. I want it back.”
“Here, take my twenty dollars. I just want to squash this.”
“NO, I want his!”
“He’s not here.”
She starts wailing and swinging the gun around the lady’s front porch.
Grady Avenue…
“Sounds like someone’s shooting off some fireworks,” she smiles.
“You’re an ex Marine?”
“There’s no such thing as an EX Marine! How old are you?”
“19.”
“My son is 21. I’ll tell the truth to save the devil. We were the first to go in, last to get out. I’m trained, fine, for death. I’m invincible, but a teardrop can kill me. You don’t know. You’re just a baby. How old are you?’
“19, sir.”
“My son is 21.”
i.
I went to the Haiti hotel where Graham Greene used to go all the time. There were these great murals. They had buckled but had not fallen in the quake.
We decided to grab lunch. A guy who knew the spot well told us all that the avocado clubs were the best.
I wanted a hamburger. I had been thinking about it all day– a big juicy one…with a lot of bacon.
I was there with about forty Americans sitting roughly in the middle of the temporarily joined tables.
One by one they ordered avocado club sandwiches.
Around the tenth person with their stupid avocado club, my inner monologue fraught with insecurity and heightened by my temporary famine starts wondering.
Do they know something I don’t know?
My mind skips to the murals. What would Diego Rivera do? What type of lunch would “the people” want me to devour?
Solidarity or personal desire?
My mind jerks to how cows buckle and fall when shot with air darts before slaughter.
Why was the life of the cow more poignant to people than the life of the avocado?
The waiter looks at me; I open my mouth and stutter my choice.
The American next to me orders the hamburger.
ii.
as i grasp my huge lunch and shove it into me,
and the quiet american eats his tiny slider,
i realize avocado greene is people.
may you buckle but not fall.
“They hang out at the less hoighty toighty ski resorts, the ones with cross-country granola skiers instead of the women in three hundred dollar ski goggles. The gypsies just grab their chainsaws and carve these bears and sell them for a few hundred dollars and live off the money off season. They had a big fire. I was cold and wet, so I went up to them and said, ‘Won’t be buying a bear today, but would love to talk to you.’ I really wanted their story.”
I remember my bear. Her name was Fitzpatrick. Every day, they would line us up in alphabetical order. Fitzpatrick was always called at least three times. He was either sick, on restriction, or unable to hear his name over the cacaphony in his unquieted mind. So, every day, I stood there looking at a picture of this bear with her (?) cubs on the hallway wall waiting for Fitzpatrick to get his shit together.
I stared at Fitzpatrick, the bear not the man behind me, and wondered about something capable of so much rage and comfort. I wondered if I only noticed this duality, because I like Fitzpatrick, the man behind me not the bear, was grappling with my own in the form of bipolar disorder in a mental institution in Staunton, Virginia.
“I don’t think my parents would ever let me do that!” prattled my caseworker.
“Buy a bear?”
“Be a gypsy.”
Sigh.
“Yes, a gypsy life is not for everyone.”
God, how mundane medicated normalcy has become.
Won’t be buying a bear today.
I am your tabula rasa.
You imprint your sterling rose on my right solar plexis.
“She’s too young for silver elegance. Make her red or yellow. Let her brightness be primary.”
“Mamma, it’s not silver, it’s grey. It’s protection from the evil eye and forgetting. I can’t let her forget me.”
“A woman of twenty with such silly fears. She cannot lose you any more than she can lose herself.”
“Mamma, people, especially little girls, lose their way every-”
“Do not try to advise me, dear one. If you believe you are lost, trust your guide and open yourself to a new compass.”
I am your tabula rasa.
“That’s fantastic. That’s magnificent,” he exclaims as he fingers the cobalt blue medicine box she has handed him.
Fantastic? Magnificent?
Has he never seen a double rainbow?
Has he never seen a baby smile for the first time?
Has he never seen a sunrise after a dark night of the soul?
Well, these phenomena are just gas based illusions.
His medicines may make him solid.
I try to remove my look of disdain. It’s down to my left pinky nail as he finishes effusively thanking the box and looks at me.
I wonder if the medicine makes him see or see right through me.
“Gas dreams and x-ray vision… A nurse shouldn’t think such things,” she admonishes herself gently putting the rest of the pill boxes away.
“The bar has been closed for some time now, the neon lights serve as a reminder that the place exists and I should come back in the daylight. I don’t think so. I have spent my hours this evening on a bar stool at another bar a few miles away. Seems like the flashing neon is a sign to the dark city that it’s time to wash away the troubles of today as a new morn is approaching..this is good news for me..as…..”
(http://yankeeexposure.blogspot.com/2012/04/little-noir-writing-contestall-are.html)
she enters the room. My eyes go up from the run in her hose to the grit in her eyes. I knew that look of hunger, lost pride, hope’s glimmer. There was a she before her who taught me the pain of approaching a flame that blinds such as love at first sight. The memory makes me shiver on the mid-June Casablanca night. I pretend to look at the broken clock above her head and turn away. Remembering.
according to an elder i met in new mexico,
eden’s serpent was cotton-mouthed.
the hooked-tooth fish-eater came to the garden
drawn by her sea scent and his dry speech drew the dewy doe.
satan shared sere spills of softly spoken superstitions.
he took the knowledge as cider soothing his burning tongue.
she took the knowledge as nakedness and fear burning all.
death came to my door early one morning.
grouchy, curious, and barely dressed, i greeted her
taking in her new gucci scarlet shrouds.
she kissed me full on the mouth.
she pressed hard and forced my lip’s cavern.
she inhaled my white gardenia deeply.
confused, i scratched my head.
i smiled, the movement disengaging.
i pulled away and explained her mistake.
“i keep my hair short, so my wigs fit better.”
“I wonder what it’s like to be a big fish in a little pond… One of the last things my mother said to me…We were listening to the song, ‘She’s So High Above Me.” Ever hear it?”
He slowly nods no.
“The chorus goes…like Cleopatra, Joan of Arc, and some other grand woman. I sighed and told her I just wanted some guy to think that about me once. She told me that it would happen, ’cause I was already all of those women. She believed, so I believed. She died about a week later. I’m not so sure any more.”
“There are many people who have respect for you.”
“Sometimes, it’s hard for me to remember that. Think I would have better memory if I was a big fish?”
“You’re a beautiful fish.”
veehaunanifitzhugh 