Grace

We emerged together
Leaving blood on our mother's legs
You came out first - purple and screaming
I followed you - I was the same
We learned to love our new world and our new bodies
The sweet air we breathed, the colours and the lights
The cream, the sugar, and all the delights

What did you do it? Why were you so alone?
Why are you here when your sister has gone home?

I was stirring the nectar with a cinnomon stick
When I heard you left.

Eyeliner tubes and silver shoes
Water to honey to curdled gloom
I was waiting for your tantrum to end
But not this way.

Where are your clenched fists and dark irises now?
Who cleaned your closet/paid your bills
Made the calls/tried to make good of this ill willed autumn?

A memorial in the park
A memorial for a friend
A farewell for a woman who chose the sea
Who chose to flee to be found
And didn't find
Or maybe found too much.

On a warm September day a girl was laid to rest
In state she'd never lived in
And a state she was bound to return to
Michigan and Grace.

Charleston

Charleston, Illinois is full of hippy huts. They are run down rickety old wooden houses with decaying porches and Indian tapestries hanging in the windows. The less ornate hippy huts have bed sheets dangling from the curtain rods. One might see a chia pet or plastic cups from last weekend’s keg party on the porch. I always enjoyed the town in the autumn, when it was overcast and rainy. The gray weather seemed to make the poverty that results in cracked sidewalks, run down houses, and overgrown lawns seem somehow romantic. Of course, this was romantic to the students like me. We were not poor, we were Bohemian. We could still go back.

My fondest memories of Charleston are of the house I lived in during 1998 and 1999 with my boyfriend and three other friends. The carpet in the living room permanently smelled of beer and cigarettes from the parties we would have. Like all college houses, our furniture consisted of items that we were given, bought at the thrift store, or simply found. Our couch was a formerly bright orange, now dingy, piece from the seventies that my boyfriend had rescued from his parent’s attic. The house we rented did have a garage, but the two roommates that had cars just parked in the driveway. We used the garage for recreation.

There was a period of that year when swing music was really popular. It was around the time when that Brian Setzer Orchestra album came out and you could hear “Zoot Suit Riot” by the Cherry Poppin’ Daddies on the radio. Suddenly every bar, even the white trash dive bars in my college town, had a swing dancing and martini night. My housemate, Chris, had bought a bunch of Lounge and Swing CDs. Amidst all of this we christened our garage The Swantkatorium. The last tenants had left two couches, a stand up bar, and carpeting in the The Swankatorium. Then we added our own touches. We hung strings of Christmas lights and brought an old stereo out. The room was for talking, listening to music, playing guitar, drinking, and hanging out with friends. One night a strip poker game took place there. That was the last place I lived in Charleston. I only keep in touch with one of my housemates. She is married, has been to every continent with the exception of Antarctica, and has Masters Degree now. I broke up with my boyfriend, Phil, shortly after I graduated. Seven years later, he is still with the girlfriend he met a few months later. I know that Mike, like myself, moved back to the Chicago area. I saw him once about a year later. We didn’t have much in common anymore. The last I heard about Chris is that he got into some pretty seedy legal trouble and dropped out of school. I don’t want to go into great detail. I really liked him.

The town felt the saddest to me in the summertime. I stayed twice for summer school. There were far less students in the summer and the town felt more impoverished than Bohemian. The summers in Illinois are humid and hot with little rain, often leaving the grass scorched and yellow by July. The second summer I stayed, I subletted a room in a house close to downtown Charleston. When I think of that summer Neil Young is the soundtrack. The smell that comes to mind is the earth skunk aroma of pot. I remember constantly getting flat tires on the bike I used to ride to campus everyday and an overwhelming sense of lonliness. The summertime was when one really felt the hostility the locals had toward all the students living off their parent’s cash, who were just there to go to school for a few years. They were an ever revolving cast of characters in hipper clothes with hipper attitudes. Most of them would go back up north when they were finished, like I did.

I returned to Charleston two times after I graduated. The first time was on the way back to Chicago after a roadtrip to New Orleans. I was with my friend Ana, who I had gone to school with. Neither of us had been back there in years. We walked around campus in the snow and went to the library, which had been completely renovated. There were not many students since it was winter break. We drove to the town square, which seemed to have completely new stores every two years due to the evil big box store on the outskirts of town. One of the businesses that was always there was the pawnshop (good thing Wal-Mart does not have a pawn section). I bought a copy of REM's Out of Time on CD, as the original copy I bought in high school was on cassette tape and needed to be replaced.

The next time I returned was on a spring day a bit over a year later. I had drove down from Chicago to play a show at a coffee house downtown that had not been there when I was a student. I got there a few hours before the show, so I walked around the campus. This time school was in session. Even when I went there it always made me sad how many people stayed in their dorm rooms and watched TV instead of going outside. I went to the garden outside of the Life Sciences building and played guitar for awhile. Once again, I went to the library. As fond as the memories of my Bohemian life in Charleston are, I was reminded that it really is a conservative school. On the bulletin boards there were as many signs for ROTC recruitment and the bible study at the Baptist church as there were for POWER (People Organized For Women's Rights and Equality), or the weekly poetry slam at the coffee house. In retrospect I appreciate that I went to a school where if you were a freak - you really were a freak.

Before the show I went to one of my old bars. I always hung out at the bars in the downtown area. The three bars downtown were filled with townies, professors, and the punk and hippy crowds from the University. The bars closer to campus attracted more of a frat boy crowd. It was early and there were not many people there. The bartender and most of the people there were too old to be students, but too young to be professors. They seemed like the type of people who moved to Charleston to go to school and then never left. I wondered what my life would be like if I had stayed in Charleston.

That night, after the show, the barista who had booked the show let me sleep on the couch in his hippy hut. The was a nice hippy hut - the curtains were Indian tapestries. The bathroom walls were essentially a shrine to the household's hatred of George W. Bush. I wondered what it was like to go to to college during a war time. I realized that I was in a different generation than the inhabitants of this house, despite being only six or seven years older. My formative years had been the nineties.

Part of me will always live in a hippy hut in Charleston, with a chia pet on the front porch, and beer cups from last night's keg party in the yard. Some of it's windows are draped with Indian tapestries, and a few are adorned with old bedsheets. Part of me will always sleep on a futon mattress on the floor. In a world were it gets more and more difficult to feel a sense of place, part of me still lives in this small Central Illinois town, and this part of me curious, haunted, mesmerized, and optimitic about the future.

Her Majesty

It is Tuesday and Abbey Road is the only thing keeping me from a total melt down at work. Why can’t I be happy having a mundane and unfulfilling job if it keeps me housed and fed. Everyone else seems to be. No, that is not what I want. So I let myself feel the angst of a corporate day job while one the greatest albums of all time reminded me that the world is indeed a beautiful place, but I was not ready for the last song on the album, Her Majesty.

Her majesty’s a pretty nice girl but she doesn’t have much to say,
Her majesty’s a pretty nice girl but she changes from day to day,
I want to tell her that I love her a lot but I’ve got to get a belly full of wine,
Her majesty’s a pretty nice girl,
Someday I’m gonna make her mine,
Someday I’m gonna make her mine…….
Benjamin sent me those lyrics in an email when I was eighteen. It was pretty fitting. At the time I didn’t have much to say and I didn’t say what I did have to say. He wanted to make me his, but I wasn’t his to be had. I had too much exploring I needed to do on my own. It ended badly and he got really into drugs and dropped out of college. He stuck around our college town though. Sometimes I would go see his band play or ask people who knew him how he was. I was a psycho stalker even back then. When I was 22 I ran into a guy that had lived in the room next to his freshman year and ended up managing his band. He told me that Benjamin had recently mysteriously disappeared and no one knew where he went. I graduated and moved out of our college town and got on with my life, but I always wondered what happened to him. I imagined that he might have died. Maybe he commited suicide or overdosed. Back in college I had heard rumors that he had gotten married, but I didn’t believe them. For years I found myself googling his name, but he has a common last name and it was useless. I never found anything until last year, ten years after our relationship had begun and ended. I found his blog and then I started reading it everyday. It did not have a lot of information about his personal life, but I was able to conclude that he had gotten married, and he did get married when he was only 20. His blog was pretty much his commentary on politics and pop culture.  His pop culture commentary often revolved around the same geek boy things he was into in college – Bat Man, Star Trek. (Even hard drug using rocker guys can never escape their inner geek.) He appears to be happily married and still living in Central Illinois.

He was the man that made me break on through to the other side, so to speak, in so many ways. From reading his blog it seemed liked I ended up going even further than he did. I left the town, and then the state. I’ve had many relationships since him and he married his second girlfriend. What does that say about either of us? I really don’t know. When I first found the blog I was sad because a part of me will always love him and I couldn’t help but think that if we met now it would work out great. As much as I do not believe in souls mates, I always thought of him as my soul mate because he was my first love. A substantial amount of people end up with their first love, never exploring the possibility that there could be others. Never exploring the possibility that being alone is healthy and normal. We loved in a fierce, needy, desperate, and generally fucked up way, but as much as I denied it then, I now acknowledge that needy, desperate, fucked up love is still love, even if it is not the kind of love I seek. That is why I broke up with him eleven years ago and that is why I am single now.

He really did regard me as being his majesty though, and I’d like to think that I’m still a pretty nice girl despite all the additional layers of personality I’ve acquired.

Jackson Square (part 5 of a larger work)

Memory: We are driving through Alabama at night. Susana thinks it would be fun to drive topless. She takes her shirt and bra off and then holds the steering wheel while I do the same. Two exits later she declares that she has to go to the bathroom and asks if we can get off at the next exit.

In my memory the sky is full of stars. I don't know if the sky was full of stars for real.

The truth is that I had stopped missing her by the time she died.            I remember riding the bus to work that day after I’d gotten that disturbing email from D.J. I knew something terribly bad had happened. I couldn’t believe someone had actually done it. All my friends are depressed. I am depressed. But no one ever does it. We all just channel our despair into art. We drown it in a cheap bottle of wine with a pretty label and smother it the thrill of a new lover. We feel guilty for feeling terrible despite the fact that we are fed, housed, and physically healthy. We feel confused that we’ve become successful at crafts that seem to be fueled by this despair. And we feel despair over that fact that becoming happy will make us less creative and shatter our entire sense of identity. Maybe I am really just referring to myself. I am selfish like that.

     

I was sitting in one of the seats that faces sideways, watching Chicago Avenue pass by. I knew it was true. I started crying, but looking back I do not know why. Who was I crying for? Me? Her? The world? I had written D.J. back and told him to call me after 9PM – Central Time. I needed to be at home and alone for whatever was coming. I thought of that morning I’d spent with her in New Orleans.

We had gotten up early on New Year's Eve and went to get some breakfast at Jackson Square. On the way to the restaurant we passed a palm reader who said he was giving an early bird special - two for one. He said he'd give us a comparative reading, where he compared both of our hands. He was not as new agey as other readers I'd been to in that he constantly referred to the scientific reasons for the development of certain lines. For example, he said that having deep life line was the result of having had clenched fists while in utero. He said that babies with a strong will to live clench their fists, even before they are born. Throughout the rest of life passionate people continue to do this as a physical sign of desire and distress, causing a deep, long crease to develop. He looked at both of our life lines and told us that I would live longer. He also compared our hands and said that I would have many lovers and significant relationships. Susana, however, would only have one true love. When it was all over there would only be one man that really mattered. After we left Susana told me that she always knew she would die at a young age. I really didn't think much of it at the time. I tend to think that people put way too much emphasis on the quantity of their lives, rather that the quality. Having a life of adventure and then leaving behind a pretty corpse did not seem like a terrible plan at the time. Wasting one’s youth working at a mundane job and then dying in a sterile room with tubes and ventilators seemed far worse, like a living death.

Should I have been alarmed by what she said? Back then time moved slowly. I was 25 and she was only 23. We still had a long time to me young. Time does not move that slowly anymore.

John the Doctor (part 3 of a larger work)

Thursday night: Susana puts on a little red dress. We are going out to the martini bar with John the doctor. He is some guy she was having sex with before she took off for the West Coast. He is not really a doctor, just a medical student. He will be driving three hours to see her. “Jennifer, I don’t know if you will like him. He is totally not your type. He’s a really cheesy romantic guy – he opens car doors for me and gives me ridiculous complements….but he’s such a good lover”. I am listening to her, trying not to be judgmental. She has a boyfriend back in Portland, but supposedly it’s an open relationship, open on her end at least. “He fucks me just right. It’s like he’s really forceful and just takes charge but he’s really gentle too. It’s the best.” There was some silence as I basked in my slight jealousy. “He’s a total yuppie – you won’t like him”.

John the doctor shows up with heart shaped boxes of chocolates – for both of us. Susana was right in her description of him, but he brought us chocolate and I can appreciate that. We go to the martini bar and drink $7.00 cocktails with ridiculous names while we wait for my date to arrive. We are drinking, smoking, seeing people and being seen. The marginally employed musician I am dating shows up and orders a beer and a tequila. I’m sure our brief relationship will fizzle out by the end of the month, but it is nice to have a date for Valentine’s Day. It is nice to compete with Susana.

When we get back to the apartment I go to bed and let Susana and John the doctor do whatever they need to do in the living room. In the morning he is gone.

Friday: During the day we took red line to China Town. We see a beautiful young Chinese woman standing outside a building. She is wearing one of those tight shiny dresses with a mandarin collar. One tear streams down her cheek; the whole scene is totally surreal. It is as if we are watching a movie. Three Navy guys wearing those silly crackerjack uniforms leave the building. We realize that we are in front of a brothel.

That evening Nick comes over. He has driven two hours to see her before she leaves town. He is very nice. Too nice for her. Susana had told me the story of how they met. Susana had been living in his college town the summer before last. She went to a bar with the intention of finding someone to have sex with. She liked to have “goals” when she went out. She said it was an exercise in exploring feminism. It was probably more an exercise in exploring her perimeters, her ability the shut off her emotions, and a good practice session in becoming the femme fatale she eventually turned into. Nick was sitting alone at the bar. The interaction is hard for me to imagine, but according to Susana, she simply sat down next to him and said “will you have sex with me”. He nervously responded, “Okay”, and they went back to her apartment. It turned out he was a virgin.

I first became aware of the frightening power Susana had over men that weekend. I knew that Nick was totally devoted to Susana, so was John the doctor, so was her boyfriend. She knew no devotion. She wanted someone to worship her and look good on her arm. Everything else she could get from her female friends or herself. Sometimes I think she did not like men at all.

Before she left her and John the doctor met for one last good fuck. I realized that I barely knew her. I wanted to get know better. And I would.

Three Love Poems

I. Fish

Your hands and feet are pinned down

I will split you open with my sterile tools

It won’t hurt at all

You smell like vinegar and formaldehyde

You are perfectly preserved.

I will make my incisions clean and straight

I will not leave jagged edges

I will take out your stomach and then cut it open

To see what is inside

Baby Fish!

It looks like you swallowed them whole

What a hungry boy you are!

They are perfectly preserved

Except for the eyes.

Before the bell rings

I will gently pick up your organs with tweezers

And put them back in place

I am careful to cover you up with plastic

Now that you have been cut open you will surely start to stink.

II. Twenty-five minutes in the South

Close your eyes to twenty-five minutes in the South

It is night

It is hot

There are corn fields on both sides

Your insides are liquid

You are drunk on love

And sick on love’s sickness

You will heave any moment

Pass out in a sweet delirium

And wake up in a crusty hung over mess

No longer South

Did you find what you were looking for?

In your day dream journey?

You went to bed heavy

And woke up light of head and still heavy of body

It rained molasses and moonshine in our spring

And when the rain stopped

The sun backed us into brittle gingerbread children

Now it is summer

My secret drawer is full of snapped gingerbread parts

Arms that couldn’t reach and feet that couldn’t move

And heads that popped off

The heart goes last

Useless in it’s immobility

III. Sleeping Gypsy

My sleeping gypsy has a flask in his hip pocket

He does not rhyme

He does not cry

More Fonze than Buddha

He hated his hands

He could always touch but could never feel

He liked to put back a six pack before he saw his shrink

I watched you doze-sleepy eyes and twinkle toes

I took off your glasses and gently rolled you

I thought – this is what I want

You are full of fermented corn

Conspiracies are your brain porn

You sleeping body is warm and I don’t want to leave

I remember many hung over omelets sitting across from you

My head pounding – the gears cranking, grinding

Your excesses make me rust

I want to drown with you, but I still swim to well to follow you into the blue

My skinny land legs have many tales to tell

Of wading on your shore

Smelling the salt in your air

Smelling the rot that proceeds life that proceeds death that proceeds life.

We can sever each other’s limbs

Because we know we will regenerate

We are prickly and made of brilliant colored spines

We are decorative but not edible

Children don’t even know we’re alive

I let a sleeping gypsy into my bed

But I made sure to leave before he woke

He probably would have stayed

I’ll never know

Veronica and the Starling - Part I

One there was a little girl named Veronica. Everyday a beautiful black starling would tap on her window pain three times. The bird would sing her sweet songs and keep her company while she played with her dolls and did crossword puzzles (this Veronica was a smart one). One day Starling did not come to her window. He did not return the next day either. On the third day Veronica stuck her head out the window and yelled "Starling, oh starling, where are you???" The starling did not reply, but a new visitor did arrive. It was a fat black cat. "I am Fat Black Cat and I eat all things black; I have baked a pie full of starlings and eaten them all. HA HA HA!" Then Fat Black Cat scurried away.

Veronica went down to the breakfast nook to tell her mother. "Veronica honey, you know that starlings and fat black cats do not talk. And anyway, fat black cats do not have the motor skills to make a pie," mother replied as she unwrapped some frozen microwavable quiche, "one would need opposable thumbs to do that." Veronica's mother was clearly a woman of science. Veronica ran up to her room crying. She heard hear mother yell, "Honey, frozen quiche in 10 minutes! Don't be late for breakfast!" Veronica sat on her pink bed in despair. Fat Black Cat had eaten her best friend. What would she do?

Veronica thought the situation over. First, there was the possibility that Starling was still alive in Fat Black Cat’s stomach. She quickly ruled out that possibility. A bird could certainly survive being eaten by a whale. A whale has a huge cavernous body that a bird could live in for days. On top of that, the mild body chemistry of the plankton eating whale would not be so harmful to a strong bird like Starling. Sadly, Veronica knew that Starling could not survive being eaten by Fat Black Cat. Apart from the fact that his body was too small to give Starling adequate space and air, the stomach of the carnivorous cat is full of potent acid. Then there was the issue that, while a whale could swallow a bird whole, a cat would have to do some chewing. At least Starling had gone before she arrived in that volcano lava stomach.

The next issue was the choice between revenge and forgiveness. Certainly there was no point in just a nasty revenge. The karma would surely come back to her the future, maybe in seventh or eight grade. Experts say that the junior high years are some of the most important years developmentally. She did not want to deal with the bad karma of being a cat murderer, even if she was avenging the death of a friend. After all, just like that shirt at the mall said “An eye for an eye makes the work go blind.”

What about forgiveness? She could forgive Fat Black Cat, but then that nasty cat would never learn. The purpose of a penal system is not retribution; it is to reform the criminal so that he or she can go back to becoming a productive member of society. If she simply forgave Fat Black Cat he would certainly go on to gobble of other girl’s friends. This could not happen. Veronica knew she needed to devise a plan that would teach Fat Black Cat a lesson.

All day Veronica thought it over. By dinner she knew what she would do. Veronica finally left her room and went to the kitchen after mother called her for dinner. Dinner that night was canned peaches and chicken Kiev that was warm on the outside, but very cold on the inside. Why was all the food mother cooked hot on the outside and cold on the inside? When ever she stayed at friend’s houses for dinner the food was not like this. Certainly Starling’s mother had not fed him worms that were frozen in the center. She did not understand this. She would have to investigate further.

The next morning Veronica started her plan. She knew she had only 5 days to do it since it was late August and fourth grade would be starting next week. The first step was to capture Fat Black Cat. Since Fat Black Cat ate all things black she needed to gather up some black food to catch that hungry cat, but what was black anyway? Wasn’t black just other colors in a darker shade – so dark that the illusion of having no color is created? Veronica looked up black in Dictionary.com and found thirty definitions! They are as follows:

Adjective-

1. lacking in hue and brightness; absorbing light without reflecting any of the rays and composing it.

2. characterized by the absence of light; enveloped in darkness (ex- a black night)

3. (sometimes with a capitol letter) a. pertaining or belonging to any of the various populations characterized by dark skin pigmentation, specifically the dark-skinned peoples of Africa, Oceania, and Australia. b. African American

4. soiled or stained with dirt

5. gloomy: pessimistic; dismal (ex- a black outlook.)

6. deliberately; harmful; inexcusable (ex – a black lie)

7. boding ill; sullen or hostile; threatening (ex- black words; black looks)

8. (of coffee of tea) without milk or cream.

9. without any moral quality or goodness; evil; wicked. (ex – His black heart has concocted another black deed.)

10. indicating censure, disgrace, or a liability to punishment (ex – a black mark on one’s record)

11. marked by disaster or misfortune (ex- Black Friday)

12. wearing black or dark clothing or armor (ex – the black prince)

13. based on the grotesque, morbid, or unpleasant aspects of life (ex – black comedy, black humor)

14. (of a check mark, flag, ect) done or written in black to indicate, as on a list, that which is undesirable, sub-standard, potentially dangerous, etc.: Pilots put a black flag next to the ten most dangerous airports.

15. Illegal or underground.

16. showing a profit; not showing any losses: the first black quarter in two years

17. deliberately false or intentionally misleading: black propaganda

18. British. boycotted, as certain goods or products by a trade union

19. (of steel) in the form in which it comes from the rolling mill or forge; unfinished

noun-

20. the color at one extreme end of the scale of grays, opposite to white, absorbing all light incident upon it. Compare white (def. 19).

21. (sometimes initial capital letter) a. a member of any of various dark-skinned peoples, esp. those of Africa, Oceania, and Australia. b. African American

22. black clothing, esp. as a sign of mourning: He wore black at the funeral

23. Chess, Checkers. the dark-colored men or pieces or squares

24. black pigment: lamp black

25. Slang. black beauty.

26. a horse or animal that is entirely black

verb (used with object)-

27. to make black; put black on; blacken

28. British. to boycott or ban

29. to polish (shoes, boots, etc.) with blacking

verb (used without object)-

30. to polish (shoes, boots, etc.) with blacking

adverb

31. (of coffee or tea) served without milk or cream.

This was going to be a bigger job than she had expected. Thirty definitions and four parts of speech. Veronica decided to focus on the nouns first. After all, it is easier to eat an object than an action or an abstract idea. Upon looking over the noun definitions she found that this may not have been the best idea. The first noun definition was the color black itself, which can not be eaten. She looked at number two. There was only one African American girl at her school. She was very nice. Even if she was not nice, however, Veronica had no intention of asking her to wait to be eaten by a hungry mean cat. Finding a black horse was not an option either. The remaining three definitions did work, however. Veronica found a black checker piece, one of her dad’s black socks, and a black pen that she would be draining the ink out of when the time was right. Three food choices were just not enough though. It was clearly impossible to eat an action, but some of the adjective definitions may work. Obviously she could just feed the cat black colored food, what about all of these other meanings of black. Who knew what Fat Black Cat meant when he said “I eat all things black.” Cats are complex creatures.

Veronica decided to go over to her friend Fawn’s house. Fawn and her mom and six cats. On top of that Fawn’s mom was a college professor and was very smart. When Fawn opened the door it looked as if she had been dusting the book shelves. “My mom said that if I dust all the book cases I can watch one whole hour of television tonight! Maybe you can come over.” Veronica knew from past visits that the Fawn’s television was permanently set on that channel that always has the pledge drives. Ms. Morgan said that they lost the remote. “Fawn, your mom knows a lot about words and cats, right?” “Oh yeah, mom’s vocabulary is huge! Do you want to talk to her”? “Yes, I have a few questions.”

Ms. Morgan was in her office with the blinds drawn. “Ms. Morgan, can you eat an abstract idea”. “Well Veronica", she replied as she pushed up her glasses, "to quote Tom Robbins: 'To an artist a metaphor is as real as a dollar'. I would say that to the thinking woman or man an abstract idea is as real as any tangible object. One can certainly eat an abstract idea in a figurative sense.” “What about cats? Can cats eat abstract ideas in a figurative sense?” Ms. Morgan thought for a while. “Cats – yes. Dogs – no.”

Terra Materna

“What kind of loaded fucking comment is that?” he said. “What kind of a shitty loaded comment is that?”

I do not like this man. I do not like his chubby gut and I do not like the patch of black hair on his back. I do not like his smelly cigarettes and I do not like his scummy thrift store comforter on his scummy twin bed. It is pink and white striped with gray filth fuzzies. I do not like that he is constantly trying to pry my legs apart. I secretly hate myself for wanting him to pry my legs apart. I hate that he takes forever to cum and I hate that I can not wait for him to finish.

I had spent the prior evening listening to Marco and Paul verbally masturbate. They are both apparently experts on everything. Paul likes to impress guests with the exotic goods he brings back from his travels. He brandishes a bottle of absinthe along with the story of how he smuggled it out of the Czech Republic. Tomorrow he will make us French press coffee with the finest coffee beans from Vietnam. They were roasted by the acid in a weasel’s stomach and then regurgitated back up. When leave I will not have eaten solid food in a long time.

After drinking this weasel coffee on an empty stomach I ask Marco to drive us to the mountains. I will only be in New Mexico for three days and I want to go to the mountains, just to feel like I am somewhere beside the Midwest. It starts to snow as we drive and the snow gets heavier and heavier as we drive further up. We will not make it to the top. At one point we pull over and look over the cliff. The snow is pretty. We watch the snow fall, holding hands. I am trying to feel romantic, but I just don’t. All I feel is hungry. He is the type of guy you want to fuck but don’t really want to kiss or hold hands with. This is too intimate. After we get back from the mountain I take a hot shower. I am very cold and very hungry. He does not have his heat on. Poverty is not fun, but apparently he would rather freeze, starve, and mooch than be a whore like me and get a day job. I get out of the shower and lay down on his bed. I don’t know why. I always lay down on my bed naked or wearing just a towel after I get out of the shower at home. He is touching me and I do not like it. Why don’t I like it? Why can I never act or react the way I am supposed too. I do not want him on me. I was clean and now I am dirty again. He asks me what is wrong and I tell him. Never before has a comment I made been scrutinized so much.

What I had said was “Sometimes I feel like I am very fuckable, but not very likeable or loveable.” I had been oozing with fake sentiment since I walked off that plane Friday night. Fake impressed at weasel vomit coffee. Fake romantic at falling snow on the mountain top. This was the most honest I’d ever been with him and he was not taking well to my honesty.

He wants to know if I was molested as a child. He wants to know what my post feminist agenda is. The truth is that I am just finding his body to be grotesque. It is an assault to all of my senses. He is substance with no style. He does not smell good or taste good or feel good and I am sick of hearing him talk. I am sick of him trying to psychoanalyze me in hopes of finding some grim childhood trauma. I will never be romantic again. A one night stand should just stay a one night stand. Venus is going home.

In retrospect it is hard to honestly state how I felt about Marco when we first met, as every event is colored by what happened before and after that event. I met him while I was traveling. I had quit my job and let my moved out of my apartment. All of my earthly possessions were being stored in various places around Chicago. I had decided to travel for a solid month. My first destination was Tucson, Arizona. I stayed with my Uncle and his wife, two people that are very dear to me. I did not know them very well and was exited when they invited me to come visit them. I had never been to the Southwest before and I found the landscape to be breathtaking. I could see why my uncle had migrated there back in the seventies. All the colors where warm. Saguaro cacti stood erect against the brilliant desert sky, and the scents of tortillas and tamales seemed to hang like a vapor in the air. After spending a few days at their house my uncle let me drive his car to Albuquerque.

I was mesmerized by the orange cliffs and the yellow grasses that lined the highway. In the distance there were shades of purple and deeper shades of rust. I took a short cut my uncle had told me about and drove through a town where every house seemed to have a mobile of dried chili peppers hanging from the porch. By the time I arrived in Albuquerque it was starting to get dark. That was the night I met Marco.

I found a coffee house where there was an open mic that night. I always travel with my guitar. It makes meeting people easy. I asked the host if I could sign up and he said that the list was full, but if I stuck around I may be able to play later. I was terribly hungry, so I got a bagel with cream cheese and some coffee. I felt the presence of the man sitting behind me. Without intentionally looking at him I turned around so I could see him. He smiled and I noticed that he had crooked teeth. I turned around and I could still feel him looking at me. I soon noticed that he had a very pungent smell. It disgusted me and turned me on at the same time.

He was signed up to play and eventually it was his turn. He walked up to the mic and threw some little paper airplanes around the room. They were flyers for his art show and everyone was invited. From the way he looked and smelled I was expecting him to have a deep voice, but he a high, rather feminine voice. Once his hands were free of paper airplanes he played a few songs. I don’t remember what they were about, but I found him to be a compelling performer. Later that night I did get to play. I was the last one. He was impressed with me as well. Looking back we were not as impressed with each other’s work as we were just impressed with each other’s lives. He was an artist. He made all his money selling his artwork and did not have a day job. I was a woman traveling alone with her guitar and singing at open mics in new cities. I gave him a ride to his house and he showed me his artwork. We talked for a long time and he had many profound things to say. “First there is being, then there is doing, then there is having, but most people have it backwards.” "In a sense artists are the most uncreative people. They are transient and reclusive. They do not create families and communities the way other people do. they just analyze and dissect the real creators." I did not find him to be attractive, but I was attracted to him. To his crooked teeth and thick black pony tail, his social theories and his philosophic musings. He sat behind me on the couch and put his arms around me. It was then that I said I needed to leave. I had already paid for my bed at the hostel and I was taking that as a sign that I was meant to stay there. The next morning I fled the city and drove to Santa Fe. The next day I fled Santa Fe and went to a small town that had geothermal springs, but that paper air plane flyer was still in my pocket. I drove back to Albuquerque the next day.

His “art show” was actually him hanging all his work in the back yard and inviting neighbors, friends and anyone passing by to see it. I had been feeling cynical about the whole do-it-yourself ethic in my own art. Not too many people showed up for his show. My cynicism was not really erased that day, but I felt a kinship with him. He was not trying to be part of some scene; He was just trying to do honest work. As it started to get dark we spread out a blanket on the drive way. “I love the desert because you always have to rejuvenate yourself here. It’s like the environment sucks out all your life and you constantly have to replenish it.” He had some fancy cheese left over from an opening some of his work had been in. I went to the grocery store down the street and bought a bottle of wine and some crackers and grapes. I had intended to drive back to Tucson after we ate, but he seduced me. I let him seduce me and I enjoyed it. Right there on a blanket in his driveway. I spent the night and we went to get coffee together the next day. When I finally did head back to Tucson I had no false illusions about what had happened. I was still cynical, but somebody had reminded me that there were other options. I knew I was not going to fall in love with him. In fact, I would probably never see him again, but I did not need love at that time in my life. I needed whatever I got that weekend in New Mexico and that night in that drive way. I went back to Tucson and then traveled around California with a friend from college who had moved to the West Coast. I arrived back in Chicago a month after the day I had left.

When I arrive at my new apartment it is as if I’m still on vacation. It is unseasonably warm for Chicago in late September. It is still hot. I have never lived in this neighborhood before and am not really with the configuration of the streets. My new apartment is a fourth story walk up above a Mariachi bar and the building smells heavily of pine scented cleaning solutions. The building itself is sandwiched between a taqueria and one of those stores where you buy random useless things for cheap– fake flowers, mardi gras beads, plaster figurines of the Virgin. There are three other taquerias on the block and the street is pungent with the scents of Mexican food and chicken fat. I park my car in a place I don’t feel safe parking it and slowly make my way to my building carrying two heavy bags and a guitar. The dumpster stinks and the alley surrounding it is littered with chicken bones, trash, and a rotting fish head. When I arrive at the fourth floor I open the door hoping that my new roommate will not be there. He is not. I need to eat badly, so I buy some yogurt, apples, and cans of guava and papaya juice at the supermarcado down the street. I walk with my plastic bag through the neighborhood. I see stray kittens under a car fighting over a chicken leg and dogs with testicles dangling down to the sidewalk. There are women with babies, greasy men, and kids walking home from school. There are babies everywhere. Baby people and baby animals. I make it home and eat my food. Thankfully my roommate is still not around to add to the sensory overload I am feeling. The next few weeks will be difficult, but eventually I will find a new job and get back into my regular routines here in Chicago. To my surprise, Marco and I do keep in touch. He always ends our phone conversations with “I love you,” but I know that that means something different to him than it does to me. He loves paint, he loves trees, he loves Buddah. This is a man who said that when he dies he will be reincarnated as the color yellow.

I thought about visiting him, but I did not decide to do it until that strange Valentine's Day. I went to Bar Vertigo with some friends to see some bands. The special that night was a syrupy sweet vodka drink with red sugar around the rim of the glass. Love juice. There are condoms strewn on the floor that the singer of the last band threw out into the crowd. I pick a handful off the ground. A guy I used to date is approaching. I hold out my full hands. “In case you need them for later.” Then I notice that he has a date. I feel like an ass. My roommate leaves, but I stick around for the next band. I want to catch a ride to the big loft party later. A male acquaintance sits down next to me. It is very loud and very dark. “You’re beautiful. You look like Cleopatra. You’re beautiful, you know.” He is starring very hard. I go to the bathroom because it is something to do beside watch a male friend reveal his dark side to me. I slip out of the bathroom without him seeing me and catch a ride to the party. I get this sense of awareness that people in their 30s getting wasted at a party is like people in their 20s getting wasted at a party except that the 30s crowd is well aware that their verbal masturbation is just that. The product is stained sheets, not some grand piece of abstract art. It is comforting, but also a little depressing.

I am sitting with a group of people, including Sam. This is his loft. There has been sexual tension between us since we met a few years ago, but nothing will ever happen. Our glances are loaded. Our words have a thousand hidden meanings. “Why are you here?” he asks. I am embarrassed. Our little game has ended in a not so subtle way in front of a lot of people and I feel embarrassed. If cupid is at this party his hard on is certainly getting in the way of any good intentions. Amid all the verbal jism and cupid erectus Marco calls me from Albuquerque and leaves me a silly voice message. He sings “Happy Valentines Day” to the tune of Happy Birthday. It is dorky and sweet. It is the nicest thing anyone has done for me in a long time. I decide I will visit him. That is how I ended up here, having a miserable weekend with a man who despises me. I am an unwanted houseguest and I need to go.

Airports are full of people starting or ending an adventure. Mine is over. I am two hours early, so I walk around and get some ice cream. I look at the jewelry the gift shops. I like it, but I would never wear any of it. I am Midwestern. All the stones are huge and brightly colored like Marco’s art. I come from a place of subtlety and discretion; a place of secret codes and endless shades of gray.

I do not like his artwork. My appreciation of his art was all contingent on my appreciation of the artist. I like a few of his black and white photos, but that is all. I find his paintings to be a bit tacky - all those bright colors and sharps lines. He probably thinks all my writing is shit too. I asked him what he thought of a song I wrote and he said, “Anything that comes from the heart and soul is beyond criticism.” I found what he said to be profoundly beautiful and honest and a load of shit at the same time. The night we had met I gave him a CD and he gave me some photographs and a print of one of his paintings. I kept the photos, but I just left the print on the wall when I moved out of that apartment, and left Chicago for good. My roommate had liked it. It was an abstract painting of a mountainside. If you looked closely you could see woman’s figure in that orange mountain, maternal and glowing with warmth.

Kabuki (part 1 of a larger work)

“I think that tattoos are about celebrating your body now. I know they aren’t going to look good when I’m older. Just think, someday we’ll have kids and be these moms with tattoos.” I was surprised to hear her talk like this. I didn’t think she wanted to have kids. One time in college she had said that if she ever got pregnant she would have the baby, but then she’d eat it. She was joking, of course. Half joking at least. Her tattoos were lovely. One of her tattoos was a Chinese fan on her back. That was her first one and I was with her when she got it. During college, she had been pretty conservative in appearance. She had chin length hair and didn’t wear a lot of make up or flashy clothes. This tattoo signified the changes that were to come.

It was the weekend before she was going to leave for Portland and she drove up from Charleston to visit me in Chicago before she left. She said she wanted to get a tattoo, but did not know exactly what she wanted. The one idea she had was a Chinese fan. We went to a tattoo parlor a few blocks away from my apartment and looked through the flash books. I was the one who found it. What I found was actually a kabuki opera character. She was a stylized woman in a kimono holding a fan. The tattoo artist made an enlarged copy of the picture. The fan was perfect. Susana managed to get it done for only $60.00. She had a strange power over men. When he asked her which colors she wanted she said he could pick whatever he thought would look good. It was beautiful. The fan had a solid black outline and was filled in with brilliant shades of orange, yellow and turquoise. She was unusually pale for a Latin woman and the colors were brilliant on her skin. That night I helped her clean it off. It was still a little bloody. She wore a low cut tank top and went out without the bandage.

She said she liked the symbolism it had. A fan was traditionally something women hid behind – a sign of modesty, but she wore the fan as a sign of immodesty. She would become less and less modest over the years. Was she transforming into something different or just peeling off the layers of dust and grime that had gradually covered her true self?

We had always been good girls. We had always been small and quiet. We did not take up too much space with our bodies or voices. We were entirely comfortable hurting ourselves but had not yet learned how to gracefully inflict pain on others. We had been warned about doing things we might regret - things that might permanently mark us and now we were realizing that all those warnings were bullshit.

Susana once told me that when she was in high school she ate nothing but cereal for a year and then walked six miles a day, focusing on how she could burn off the cereal calories. It seemed that adding something to her body was a sign that she had come a long way. She no longer wished for parts of herself to disappear.

Hung Over in Memphis (part 3 of a larger work)

I had no trouble getting out of bed that cold December day. I started the car so it would warm up while we packed a few last items and waited for the coffee to brew. I am normally a beast in the morning, but not that day. I was looking forward to the long drive. There is nothing I find more relaxing than a road trip. It is a sort of forced meditation. I am forced to focus on where I am, where I am going, where I will be. One can always make extra stops and take detours, but the final destination will always be reached. A certain selection of CDs. Bottled water, fruit, and chocolates. There is something comforting about having limited resources; of knowing that you must make due with what you have, even if what you thought you wanted yesterday is not what you really want now.

Susana found two travel mugs in my cabinet and filled them up with creamy coffee. We laughed at how both of my travel mugs had been left at my apartment by ex-boyfriends. She got the Scott mug. I got the Eric mug. We put the CDs and snacks in the front seat and put our bags in the back. The ice on the windshield had melted. We were ready to leave.

We did not make a lot of stops this time; we only stopped for gas. It was impossible to romanticize I-57, like Highway 101. Rural Illinois and Missouri were more a reminder of what we had escaped from. Gas stations full of overweight women wearing sweat pants and baggy T-shirts. Pork rinds. The mullet. The landscape was not new to us; we were accustomed to the flat, dreary landscape of the Midwest in the winter. For hours we listened to music and talked as we drove past the dormant fields and trees without leaves. Our excitement lay in the fact that we would be in Memphis before the sunset. It was only 4:00 when we arrived.

We normally stayed at hostels when we traveled to cities, but Memphis did not have one. We wanted to be near the center of town, so we splurged and stayed in a nicer hotel. When we got out of the car we were excited that it was warm enough to be outside without our coats. We spent only twenty-four hours in that city. I knew that the Beale Street bars and clubs we went to were there for tourists and that I was not really going to understand this city’s essence on my first visit. Some cities are secretive like that. We listened to some blues, saw an Elvis impersonator, and then saw a cheesy cover band at the last club we went to. I was too drunk to care that they were cheesy. I kissed some guy who was also visiting from another city. The next day I had a horrible hangover.

Our road trips were an effort to explore America the way people did when there was still something to explore. Before every U.S. city started to look the same. Before Wal-Mart and Denny’s. We would always drive around hungry until we found a restaurant that was not a chain restaurant. I’m sure Jack Kerouac did not have to do the same. We went out of our way to make our travel experiences authentic. That morning we had had trouble finding somewhere to eat. In my hung-over grouchy state I was getting agitated, but Susana insisted we keep driving. We finally found our perfect Memphis diner and had omelets with hash browns. Living in Chicago and Portland we were used to having our choice of cheeses in an omelet. I was a swiss girl; she was chedder. Nothing made us happier than to learn that the only kind of cheese they had was orange American cheese. We were in Memphis.

One thing that really struck me about Memphis was the amount of Pawn Shops. Susana had wanted to learn guitar and I had told her that a pawn shop is a good place to find a used guitar. We decided to split up for the day. I went to Graceland. Susana took the car to go pawn shopping. The orange cheese omelet had not been a sufficient remedy for my hang over. I really felt awful. It was hard to enjoy all the fringe and carpeted ceilings. Of course, I would not be learning any sort of lesson. I would do this to myself again and again.

Perfect Blue Buildings (part 2 of a larger work)

“You’ve got the attitude of everything I ever wanted; I’ve got an attitude of need”

~Counting Crows

Portland to San Francisco should not be a long road trip, but it was when we took it. It's a long trip when you take Highway 101. The road twists and winds along the Oregon Coast, sometimes going through the center of towns and slowing down to 25MPH. We stopped all in all sorts of little towns along the Oregon Coast. We went to the Salvation Army to look for wool sweaters and glass candle holders. In one town we stood on a bridge overlooking a fishery and watched a man gut fish.

I was shocked by how well the two of us got along. I had met Susana right before I graduated from college. I moved to Chicago and she remained in our Central Illinois college town, with one more year to go. After she graduated she moved to Portland. We had really not spent a lot of time together. I am a loner by nature. I was not used to spending a lot of time with one person, especially another woman. Susana was not like other girls either. She also had a strong loner streak and we knew when to sing and laugh and tell stories, and when to have silence. The amazing thing is that our silence was always a comfortable silence. As our journey progressed, we learned that we knew when to split up and spend a few hours by ourselves. Then we would always meet for dinner and share our adventures with each other.

Somewhere in Oregon one of us made a joke about picking up hitchhikers. The joke continued by listing the qualities a hitchhiker would need to have to earn a ride in our rental car.             She was a white Malibu that we had christened Odessa. Lady hitchhikers were an automatic yes. Attractive males in their twenties who did not look like they had just gotten out of prison were a maybe. If the attractive twenty something had the sort of physique that would allow a woman to kick his ass he was closer to the yes side. No older men, no men that looked dirty or like rednecks, no tall or muscular men. In the midst of this conversation we saw one that fit our qualifications. He was young, small. We made the decision in what seem like a fraction of a second. “Should we?” “I don’t know.” “Just do it.” ‘Okay, I’m going to.” I was the one driving at the time. I pulled over about 50 feet down the road from where he was. As he walked up to the car we were impressed with ourselves and felt giddy about what we had done. We really had acted as one person. Neither of us would have picked up a hitchhiker alone, and neither of us had another friend who would have been an accomplice in this act. I felt really close to her then, as if she were the sister I had never had. Susana opened the door and he climbed into the back, shocked that two women had picked him up. His name was Heath and he was from Montana. We tried to make conversation with him and offered him fruit, chocolate bars, and trail mix. I think he knew we were amused by him. Twenty minutes later he asked us to let him out; We obviously made him uncomfortable. We shared a special power when we were together.

I enjoyed Susana’s ability to bring out this positive quality in myself – this sense of adventure. Most people in my life have tried to suffocate this part of my personality. After college Susana had moved to a new city alone; I just moved back to the city I grew up in. Most people in my life seem to exacerbate my negative qualities and she had done the opposite.

As we headed toward the California border, hitchhiker free, we drove faster. The sky was gray and there were lush redwood forests on both sides. At the border we were asked by a guard if we had any exotic fruit in the car, like mangos or papaya. We secretly wished we had brought more exotic fruit, instead of strawberries and grapes. We spent the night in a little inn just past the border that I had read about it while researching our road trip over many cups of coffee back in Chicago. From the tacky sign on the road one would expect it to be like any divey motel you might find along the interstate, but it was actually a little inn owned by a German family that was surrounded by forest. Some elk, not restrained by any sort of fence, stood in a clearing near the entrance. There was a road that went past the inn, through the forest, and to the beachfront. We closed the windows and followed it. We were listening to a CD I had impulsively bought at a show I’d gone to the last week. Our forest was filled with the sounds of pedal steel and a women’s low, eerie voice. We kept silent and listened to the music as we looked at the towering trees, the light and the shadows, and the overwhelming green. The air smelled fresh. We decided we would come back here by foot in the morning.

Our room had creepy old lace curtains, and patchwork bed spreads. Animal sounds we were not familiar with echoed through the forest and in to our room. The next morning I got up to go hiking, but Susana did not. I knew she wouldn’t. She was never much of a nature girl.  I am not either, but I thought I’d take advantage of the opportunity while I had it. I walked past the elk and found a trail. The elk were so close to me that I was frightened. Like I said, I have never been one for communing with nature. Aside from my college years I had always lived in large city, or a suburb where one could never get deep enough into the forest preserve to escape the sounds mini vans and SUVs. I made an effort to appreciate the fresh air and look at the trees and the moss, but my mind kept wondering. I thought about my job, the shallow acquaintances I had back in Chicago, my family, all the things I wanted to change about myself.

I put together all these little details….all these scraps of light and sound like some self righteous beat writer who thinks his audience will be impressed by his accounts of adventure and personal tragedy. I feel guilty for thinking this way – for acting like a preadolescent who leaves her diary out for everyone to read – for acting like I am on a reality TV show. But this is the way I have learned to sort out facts – piece by piece….eliminating some details and exacerbating others to form some sort of cohesive story. I want this to be a cohesive story. Right now it is a mess. It is bad poetry.

Some of my favorite things about San Francisco: the chandelier in our dingy room at the hostel, chocolate coved macaroons at the bakeries in North Beach, the bars in China Town, and the pink gingerbread houses. One day we went to the other side of the bay and went to Berkley where we looked at all the sidewalk jewelry stands and went to the library at the university. We talked about our own second rate university. She went there because they paid her for being Hispanic. I had not gotten into the more prestigious school I had applied to and ended up going there because it was my back up. I always thought I would transfer, but I knew I would just be unhappy somewhere else. I had had plenty of good times there, but I had been in this fog of depression that I had still not completely gotten out of. Without a map we found the intersection of Virginia and LaLoma mentioned in a Counting Crows song. We both had a poor sense of direction, but we were confident that Berkley would somehow guide us there. I had read that Adam Duritz had to move out of that house because people would come and camp out on the lawn. He had no idea he would become famous when he put his address in a song. Sometimes the crazy consequences of ones actions seem unfathomable at the time we commit the act. My crazy consequences seem more like a strange karma created by wishful thinking. I think Adam's were too.Susana took a photo of me standing under the street signs.

The ride back to Portland was rough. We planned on taking the interstate but could not find it, so we got stuck on 101. Forest fires had closed off the road that connected the two in California, so we had to take 101 past the Oregon border. It was a slow drive, but we had to do it. Susana had work and I had a plane to catch. When we got back we were exhausted and went straight to bed. Susana went to work on 3 hours and of sleep and I flew back to Chicago that afternoon. This trip had really been the start of our relationship. One of my intentions had been to check out Portland and San Francisco because I wanted to leave Chicago for good, but when I returned home my life improved drastically over the next few months. I somehow ended up hosting an open mic at bar where I would not pay for a single drink for the next two years. I started to gain a lot more confidence in myself as a songwriter and started performing regularly. Suddenly making new friends was not as horribly difficult as it had been when I was younger. I even found myself with a boyfriend again. It was like some curse had been lifted off of me while I was away.

Humboldt Park

I vividly remember getting off the 50 bus in Humboldt Park this one December day. I usually took that bus dowtown and then transferred to the train, but that day I decided to take it all the way to California Ave. and then catch another bus. The bus ran through the Ukrainian Village, where the man I was in love with at the time lived. The neighborhood had beautiful old architecture and lots of little Ma and Pa stores with Ukrainian signs. There were even a few ornate churches with bulbous towers that made me feel like I really was in some Eastern European city. After the bus crosses Western Avenue it is like we are in a different part of the world. The buildings are run down and there is trash in the streets. The signs are in Spanish and English instead of Ukrainian and English. There are Taquerias and Puerto Rican Grocery stores. This is my neighborhood and these are the shadiest corridors of my neighborhood. I usually take the train to avoid having to transfer buses here. I could just walk the seven blocks home, but that would mean having to pass the park. The worse that will probably happen is a few cat calls or being hit up for change by a crack head, but I’m not in the mood. I wait a long time for my bus. It is only 6:30, but it is mid December, so it is already as dark as it will be. I am overcome with sadness as I wait. I will miss this city when I leave. I will be leaving soon. I will miss him. If only he would say he will miss me too. Then I might stay. I am secretly glad he can not deal with his emotions though, because I need to leave. It is freezing. I will be going somewhere less cold in the winter and less hot in the summer. This is what I need. Less freezing and boiling. My bus comes. There are so many women with children and dirty old men on this route. Coming home from work, coming home from day care, coming home. Later that night I will go over to his apartment, down the street from the church where the plaster angles wear coats of gold leaf and the kids wear blue plaid uniforms. We will pretend that we are not in love. I will pretend that I am not leaving him, and he will pretend that he does not care that he is being left. Somehow we will both regard this sorrow as being better than being alone.