What We Are (6 page)

I'm hit again but with too much power and anger and expertise, spun and lifted by my legs and backside of my pants and catapulted forward by six seven maybe eight hands. I land on my face and crumble with the force behind it, and just as I'm up on my hands and knees, thinking
these fuckers these fuckers
, I'm back on my face again in the grass, my hands being cuffed behind me. Suddenly I realize the true price of neutrality on this issue.

Off to the next little station of misinterpretation.

I hear, “Stay still.”

English: didactic, uppity Monte Sereno accent. There's a knee digging into the middle of my back, at about the second lumbar, two hands at the top of my neck, then one hand, as the other rips the beanie off my head. Don't know how in the hell I could move. Until something other than my own muscles moves me, like the first grumble of the Apocalypse, I'm still.

“Stay still!”

Mounds of dirt and grass in my mouth, nose, eyes, I can't talk, smell, see; I'm still.
Okay?
Fucking still. Blinking, tearing up, now I'll move. I twist my head for oxygen and the hand that (I assume) stole my beanie jams my face back to the dirt and shouts, “Stay still goddammit!”

So I'll eat dirt for the moment.

Finally I'm lifted to my feet. I hear the weeping, the American histrionics. She's bellowing like a widow at the funeral. I know who it is and that the tears aren't for me so I won't look. I can't really see anyway. But if she can't handle the paltry mess she's made here, imagine the trouble we're all in when it really hits. Any recent exhibition of strength on my part, as in
I don't need to hire Huns and Visigoths to do my fighting
, is being erased with every marrow-freezing wail of Athena.

“That's him!” she's crying. “He's the one!”

“He called that guy a spic,” someone else says.

“Yeah. A lettuce picker!”

“A greaser!”

“
El pinche puto alla
.”

I turn my head and it feels heavy. Off-kilt and oval, like a watermelon. My friend from Jack-in-the-Box, the paisa in the corner whose quiet dignity I was so taken by last night, is being cleaned with cotton, dabbed with rubbing alcohol, nursed with Q-tips. He's got blood crusting on his mustache and his neck is clawed and purpling where I choked him. No cuffs for the happy immigrant, just a gurney on wheels with clean white sheets.

I want to say,
Hasta luego, mi amigo
, but I can't move my face.

The world inside me and around me is blurring: yellow, brown, black, white....

Buenas noches
.

Good night.

Y
OU THINK
of good things when in chains in the back of the van.

Don't think about the Motel 6 studio you've slept in for the past few weeks, native son living in immigrant squalor, iconoclastic neighbor to the resident transients, cranksters, molesters, sometimes all three in one body. Drive out of your mind the nicotine-stained bed beneath the golden western landscape (acrylic on cardboard) with the cowboy mounting his neighing horse. Don't ask why it seems so vital to write poems on the flyleaf of the Gideon Bible, on AA pamphlets left at bus stops, and other trite items of writerly deposit.

Poems, yes, think of poems en bumpy route to the land of incarceration.

Actually, I'd gotten the Motel 6 studio because of the poems. About half a year ago, I'd written some half-ass love sonnets for a rich Haitian lady named Beatrice La Dulce Shaliqua Schneck, after we'd made it on the Chinese silk sheets of her Desdemona chamber bed. She went wild over the words, started calling herself my Sponsor Lover.

I'd say, “Wow. What a deep paradox: a sugar mama who loves the arts.”

Even at forty-nine, she's got the body of a Rodin sculpture. Not an ounce of fat on that sleek dark frame. Hindquarters that ride high on the hip from the side and bloom in absurd dimensionality from behind, a Moorish decathlete. It's like she came straight from the track and stripped, sack-hungry.

She drives me crazy. Any time she whines about her philandering Jewish ex-husband (“That puny techie is the antithesis of an African steed, my Samoan-stud baby boy!”) and her own thwarted authorial ambition (“I coulda been the next Terry McMillan if I never married that rat!”) and the aimlessness of her twenty-one-year-old kid I've never met or seen a picture of (“That
Cosby Show
nigga ain't got no mountain to climb in this life!”), I fantasize about throwing her out the bed. Sometimes my mind gets tangential in the late-night hours of her rambling, elaborates on the methodology of crime.

There will be time to murder
, said Prufrock.

People are always debating the best and worst ways of dying—in the midst of fucking or entrenched in fire—and I could see early on that with La Dulce the best way for her to go was like her Italiano namesake: in fist-pumping mid-soliloquy. She wouldn't feel a thing at the bloody bully pulpit.

I realized that the processing of her stories, something that is reflexive in me (I'll listen to anybody), was pointless since she didn't want my input, didn't want any critical evaluation of her life. She sought blind and docile affirmation. I was a body two decades her junior, a fact that, when we'd fuck, gave her a beauty stroke and, when she'd talk, a wisdom stroke. She liked to play the old sage with the allure of the young vixen. But like many women her age, she felt stretched by the pulleys of time, aghast in her midlife crisis. So I learned to master the transitional enablers in a conversation. Whenever her pitch in tone resembled a question, or there was a brief
interrogatory pause, or her finely stenciled Botoxed eyebrows would twitch in an attempt to raise the paralyzed flesh of her forehead, I'd hum, with as much bass as I could summon, “Ummmmm,” like a Buddhist. Or like Yoda. This trick will give the impression to the narcissistic that the listener is being enlightened, and you manage to keep some peace of mind.

As we slept in postcoital bliss one evening in the Milpitas foothills, the wide-open sky steamy-strip-club lavender, she screamed out from her sweaty dream, all revelatory and betraying her Haitian mysticism, “You got talent, nigga!”

I looked around the bed for a beheaded rooster, and then back into her manic voodoo eyes and was suddenly fully awake, reaching for my still-attached root.

Minutes later she was rushing me off in her Beemer to Slam Poetry Fest in Oakland, California, an event she hosted in her ex-husband's absence. She introduced me to friends as “this century's Walt Whitman,” which of course made her Emerson. She put me in the last slot of the lineup, and though I'd never publicly recited poetry before, I had done my penitence in prison long enough to memorize hours of Shakespeare and a few other Brits, plus my own personal effluvium, so what I did at the mic was plagiarize/ebonicize a little bit of each, apparently without anybody knowing, because by the end of the night I had a $1,000 fellowship called the LeRoi Jones Hookup for Off-the-Hook Artistic Achievement.

The reception was at an Americanized sushi joint called Yoshi's in Jack London Square. Someone other than my Sponsor Lover threw down some serious cash for a few rounds of Long Island iced teas between bluesy, soulful sets by John Lee Hooker Jr.

“It ain't fair!” Beatrice was shouting by the end of her second Long Island.

She wanted me, her intellectual stoolie, to graze at her feet. She wanted me to stop chasing the Long Islands with fifty-dollar merlot
from Sonoma (“Just sip, fool, sip!”) and ask her highbrow, exclusional, lisping friends about the enclave for artists in Villa Montalvo. She wanted me to weep uncontrollably at her generosity of spirit. But I played indifferent, the ingrate, pounding whatever liquor came my way, howling—
boxcars! boxcars! phonies!
—at her improprieties. I knew what authors she had on her bedside: She was the personification of a Latin mantra that I remember an English prof hanging over his office door:
Laudant illa sed ista legunt
—They praise good books but read the bad ones.

Anyway, by morning we'd made an arrangement that, rather than kick down the g she owed me, she'd offer unlimited stay at a Motel 6 parallel to highway 101 and a five-dollar daily per diem I could pick up at the manager's desk.

“Unlimited?”

“That's right,” she said.

“No catch?”

“Only one.”

“What's that?”

“You let me edit your book of love poems.”

I thought I'd push the advantage, see how far I could take it. “No problem. The only trick is I can't ever see you again. That way I'll have access to true tragedy.”

She said, “I understand completely, nigga. These be the mysterious ways of the muse.”

“Totalitarian. Fickle trick.”

“You get to work now. No cable TV, no honor bar, baby.”

I just thought,
What the hell, something to see, something to do. Who knows what will come of this silly elementary school contract?

But Beatrice kept her word and I tried to keep my end of the deal by earning my fellowship. I found I could write poems to Beatrice when I didn't think about Beatrice but of other women I'd either bedded or loved or both or neither. Beatrice in verse was a composite
of my ex-love Sharon, of the daemon-driven purist Marydawn, of the street-smart stray cat Monina, of the vain and simpleminded Kisa-La, of the good-hearted plump-bootied Morisa, of the long-legged obsidian-skinned Sayo, of the holdover hippie Flower, of Rebecca, Leilani, Shikima, of Anne Sexton to prevent her pain, of Dickinson with honey from her bees, of Meryl Streep in
The Deer Hunter
, of Katie Couric in a bob with banana pancakes in bed watching clips of her shows over the decades, of Madonna the mortal, of several cousins at reunions with furtive glances, of the quirky smile and subtle skills of Reese Witherspoon, of some woman at a bus stop in Santa Cruz weeping into her crusty hands, of Jorie Graham post-fifty reciting Sapphic verse in of course the Greek, of the pleasant, cursed, undoubtedly virginesque university librarian who loved to look up and then hunt down my obscure, dusty, gilt-edged books of poetry on Tuesday nights, of for some reason Hillary Clinton, of specifically the backside of J Lo for a game of Pin the Tail on the Donkey, of the Bush daughters on the Persian rug of the Lincoln Bedroom with a bottle to be drunk and then spun and then whatever.

I was rotten, am rotten.

What I figured out is that only the women who can find themselves in the poems, whether true or not, actually like the poems, and only poets, true poets or not, think poetry actually matters.

My Uncle Rich, the one guy I can talk to for longer than an hour, is someone who falls into neither category, highly suspicious of verse. I don't know why, really, but I've wanted to persuade my favorite relative otherwise for a long time. Maybe to convince myself that I haven't been wasting my life.

“I mean, I can't see it,” he's always saying. “What is the point exactly in putting all this energy into something you can't live on?”

After I won the LeRoi Jones, I gave him a holler with the intent of proving the point of poetry's utility. He told me, slurring his words, to meet him at a bar called the Redi Room on Saratoga and Moorpark
and to bring no money, no credit cards, only my relatively healthy liver. With the exception of the credit cards, which I didn't have, I brought as much cash as La Dulce had given me earlier in the week, which was the five-buck per diem, and headed out.

I got there and waited for an hour. Johnny Cash was busting “Folsom Prison Blues” over the juke and these two Hell's Angel–looking cats were throwing darts in their sleeveless vests with sewed-on patches of red-winged chariots across their bulging backs. They wore those asshole shades with the slanted lenses and had stormtrooper helmets on the table with lightning bolts and eagle heads on the crest. I could smell the burnt gasoline and dirty oil from the door.

When my uncle showed up, he was sloshed. He grabbed the cocktail napkin I was writing on and read:

“The brain is its own engine,
its own fuel, its own vapor, its own
contaminant
and it finally to its own amusement
and horror
breaks down in its own empty desert,
without its own water,
in the very heat
that it itself has generated.”

“Jesus Christ,” he said, sagging onto his stool, the barkeep with a Cherokee ponytail and a dreamcatcher around his neck watching with folded arms at the end of the bar. “Why don't you just hit me in the face with a baseball bat?”

“I guess you won't be attending my next poetry reading.”

“Nephew. You gotta stop wasting your time.”

“As in coming down here to meet you at a dive bar?”

“As in do you want a job?”

My mother's only brother, Richard, whom she hasn't talked to in eight years, became a multimillionare the right way, if there is such a thing: hard work, frugality, sound investment. But he had a better story before he ever earned a penny: a nineteen-year old army medic who won a Silver Star for valor during two voluntary tours in Vietnam; later, a run with the ACLU as a speechwriter and troubleshooter for potential cases; a baby born during the first year of night classes for a master's in history. He started at the bottom of a small real estate operation on the Peninsula and within ten years was running the whole deal and within twelve, owning it—Santa Clara Real Estate West—adding eight offices across the Bay. Faithful husband to my lively Aunt Lanell, father to my older cousin, Nina, who'd be twenty-nine next week except she's been dead for thirteen years, a gun wound to the head, her hand, his pistol.

After Nina died, Uncle Rich would take me out to have a beer, even when I wasn't yet of age, and talk about any range of topics. I got the sense that he cared about me, if only because he was always dropping little suggestions I might consider about what to do with my life. He's the one that got me thinking about going to an all-boys Catholic prep school. He's the one that got me thinking about West Point. Ironically, he's the one who thought I had some talent writing poetry, although he was quick to point out that it wouldn't make me any money and certainly wasn't something to build a life on. But it would kill time. He was visiting me in San Quentin. I remember I said, “Everyone in here's a poet.” Our conversations have always been pointed, he gets what I'm saying, and I get him.