Part 11 (1/2)
On road cree spray washed graffiti and painted it over with ray paint We laid tar We carried concrete and wood and glass away fros Once Rick cut his arot extra days for that I sure up the world so people can pretend it's not dirty, chaotic, out of control, a giant world-sized compost heap
Once we cleaned toilets in day use area parks You haven't lived until you have to pull taarette butts out of a john Yellow plastic gloves just don't seeot the closest with Ernesto Ernesto played classical guitar I never heard hiuitar it when he described it I'd ask hilish it out to e for was how beautiful he looked talking about an to ask s A word at a tilish un llaet into trouble To call for compassion
All those weeks we labored We sweat It is a ”we” I have not been able to use as a word the sahth week of road cree'd split up in teams under an overpass near Balboa park The trees and bushes were thick and lush so we had the s shly advanced sprinkler systereen and sparkly and fit for tourists
Me, Ji trash with our sticks Jimarcus yelled out hey mahn and pointed to a little path in the shrubs So we followed hi lot by officer Kyle, Jiarettes e finished each day that ood To this day I've no idea as in them That's e followed him Because at the end of the day he'd ease us
So we're walking down this little brush lined path and suddenly Jimarcus stops so Ernesto stops so I stop and chubby Sonny, who is last, kinda bumps intobuht?
I' soo with ”bum” because of how he looked And smelled Our bum had an enormous Grizzly Adams beard His hair shot out untas in it, possibly worse And his skin was red and pockmarked and puffy with drink His nose landscape looked lunar And he sh to sting your nasal passages and hed maybe 210 His belly a s about our bum, and what made Sonny nearly puke on the spot, is that his pants were down around his ankles, and his exposed genitals were swollen I e His balls were the size of purpley croquet balls His dick looked a little like a reptile had gotten loose And the piece de resistance? There was a giant pile of human shi+t about a foot and a half away froed
Jihed and Sonny bent over how you do when you are going to vomit and I said ”Shhhhhhhh! You'll wake his ass up!” So we backed up like kids who've seen so they weren't supposed to The bum? He just slept the sound sleep of babies and puppies
When we got back to the group none of us said a fucking thing about our bueared up little skull of his and beat the shi+t out of our bu to tell the clean-shaven officer Kyle He would have arrested our bum We already knehat it felt like to be arrested Multiple times We already knehat it felt like to fuck up To be passed out drunk To stink To not want to be alive To wake up with your face on the pave back and betraying you To stay in a hotel for a hen you hear on TV the police are doing a sweep To have no one who understands To be passing - leading a double life Maybe we didn't yet knohat it was like to have swollen genitals the size of Texas, but metaphorically - soone freakish - kind of we did
So we just left him there In a kind of peace Next to his own shi+t
Vagabundo
The last week of iant paved road that led up to some fancy ass facility of sohborhood filled hite people with Mexican and Filipino house cleaners The ”trees” that lined the grand lane were tiny, so the only shade you could get was on part of your face and iant yellow plastic vat of water in the first two hours - I think it was sorees that day Goddamn those little paper cone cups
By the last week et blisters and my wrists didn't ache and I'd stocked up on Vicodin so et dizzy in the sun and I brought enough food in arettes and Ernesto and I took our breaks together to practice English I was not unhappy I had a pretty great tan
But really, I was going ho to jail Ernesto disappeared partway through the ninth week So that ”we” I'e
At the top of the hill we got to rest The shade of an enormous Torrey Pine tree umbrellad out and held us so we could feel the coolness of breeze We drank water We ate our pathetic little brown sack lunches I thought about Ernesto playing guitar, but h what I also felt was it's over This sain So about that made me feel irrecoverably sad But I was of course also thrilled to be ”done” with lass bottle So si a coke When I opened my eyes, I stared at my hands and how not Mexican they looked My hands, they just lookedduiant concrete and wood sign of the facility we had just carved our way up to
The Cerritos Olympic Swim Center
I'd competed there when I was 14 I'd won the 100-meter breaststroke Sometimes I think I've been everywhere before
Conversion I'VE BEEN THINKING MAYBE RECOVERING CATHOLICS turn to movies for salvation I mean, in an informal poll that I took recently, a whole lot of ex-catholics seeer andin the dark- if they ever get rid ofto see a bunch of lapsed catholics wandering around in the street looking for a dark box to go sit inside so we can experience catharsis
Enter the Mingo, stage left
Andy Mingo in a shi+tty ass Isuzu Trooper After my head-on collision, an M FA thesis student of o State University walked intoto loan o, I was a woman who had to crash her car
The first time I really saw Andy was at my SDSU job interview He very nearly fuckeda little like Marlon Brando I' it around posting me with puffy lips and intense stares and is that a flattened spot just above his nose like in On the Waterfront? I swear to God the line ”I coulda been a contendah” crept into uy is trouble
When it came time for the question answer portion of the presentation, Andy Mingo raised his hand and asked, ”What is your teaching philosophy with regard to what graduate students in creative writing should be reading?” All the grad students leaned forward atthey can get their hands on What they love, what they hate, all of it You wouldn't jump into an empty pool, would you? Literature is the medium You have to swilared atfor
What I thought was, fuck you, Mingo How ot a probleot the job
Every day I saw hi workshop Andy stared so hard atin me, anyway
After that eventful phone call from Paris that led to my carefully calculated drunk on and drive episode, Andy sauntered into ood one And he offered to let me borrow one of his cars Mine, was totaled Like my life
I borrowed the car
When I drove his car around I could s wheel In the holder thing between seats where I found cassette tapes he listened to Bob Dylan and The Cure and Sublihter and rolling papers On the car floor he'd so obviously worked hard to vacuuine ran hot
The kind of teacher I was, I'danyplace but my office I've never believed in institutional authority So I'd let the grad student choose where we'd meet - let theo there to talk with the With Andy, it was a Mediterranean coffee shop off the beaten track with an outdoor area where we sat under bougainvillea and orange blosso
That sentence crackedMan-lust fucks a girl up
We both wore sunglasses Since neither of us took them off, I took it as a draw We both threw out a few mock barbs Neither flinched We both executed a couple of low-level sexual innuendos Dead even And when I asked hian to narrate his lifestory - so I carew up in Reno And as co out of his mouth, well, it was a worthy backstory
”My ht reith a series of father stand-ins guys with nae' ”
I countered with ”My ical liar On the other hand, she was a great storyteller”
”I was once a bouncer at Paul Revere's 'Kicks' nightclub when I was 19”
”Paul Revere and the Raiders?” I asked, thinking about hohen I was 19 I was in Monte's base with Kathy Acker,” I said, trying quite hard to i Why had I said that?
”My father was in the CIA He died of a heart attack when I was three Well at least that's the official story He was 33, so who knows”
That was a good one I had to pause and pretend to drink e” I have no idea why I said that Why in the world did I bring up jesus? Idiot Then I said, ”My fathermy father ”
”Your father what?” he asked
”My father was abusive”
”Oh,” he said ”I'm sorry,” he said ”What did he do?”
To tell or not to tell How did I get so quickly to the heart of my wounds? What had just happened?