Aeternum

Aeternum

She opened up her door the next morning, favorite coffee mug in hand, ready to scoop up her Sunday Times, and found me instead, with the grey wadding of print under my head, a rather flat pillow. Of course I didn’t realize she hovered over me, it was the vociferous yelps of a midnight black pug that eventually woke me – this barking frenzy combined with incessant mini-pink-eraser tongue licks. Flat on my back, my legs sprawling out across the corridor, worn Adidas soles nearly flat up against apartment 5G’s front door directly across from hers, my eyes roved up about five and a half feet, locking her gorgeous face in my view. Upside down, with the ceiling a type of floor from my angle, she still glowed like Athena, reigning over my empire of shit, as Trent Reznor once, with glamorously sordid pith, so aptly dubbed.

Oblivious to the vagrant scene I’d set before her vibrant Sunday morning eyes, I clambered up to standing and smiled an explosive grin, pure in its rapture to be back in the capture of her intoxicating presence. Though what she saw, and any sober-eyed, well-adjusted person would have seen, was a pathetic, pitiful sight – a 25 year old woman with vomit stains instead of a pendant where a necklace would be and pockmarked, plum-colored welts more conspicuous than the freckles that covered my Irish arms – I never comprehended just how tormenting of a scene I painted before Lea’s sights every day. Well, a few times a day. I disassociated. It’s not even that I denied how terrifying it must have been for her to witness what her girlfriend was going through, but I didn’t even know how awful my life had become. I mean, when I wasn’t high, I registered real fast just how moribund my world was, but as long as the junk was there, I thought I was too, for Lea. The junk, to me, made me even more of me, a better me. I didn’t compute the disjunct in my personality that was as palpable to Lea as if a cobra’s fangs had implanted their pain straight through the pupil of her clear-seeing eyes. All she saw was the slow, self-destruction of the woman she fell for years ago and never anticipated becoming a William Burroughs protégé. She saw the whimsical pinwheels in my eyes being overtaken by sinister pins. I was a full-fledged junkie who was deluded; I saw myself as an artist who used drugs as the transcendental channel they are to those with the right eyes. I thought I had the right eyes and control over my use. That is, as long as I used I had control. But Lea, and any sane mind, knew that this is the precise definition of the opposite: if I needed to use to keep control than I didn’t know just how out of it I actually was.

My using, to me, didn’t distance me from Lea, I still loved her more than life itself. (I guess more than my own life itself because I was “killing me softly,” as stealthily as a mako gliding in towards its hopeless prey.) Despite what I didn’t really recognize regarding the danger of my own smack-addled predicament, there was one thing I did know and that is how much I loved Lea. She knew how glad I was to have made it back alive, again, because she knew I lived for her. And she, though too feministic and self-reliantly proud to admit, found life’s most extreme excitement from me, too. As the director of UNIFEM, with a doctorate from Stanford in Gender Studies, she existed for her political causes and women’s rights movements but she moved beyond existence into thrill to know I’d always make it back home alive for her. When we first met, Lea was a cynic regarding love. She thought “true love” was a schmaltzy phrase spun by those who lived in fantasy land and were too afraid to live in the real one. Looking for one’s “soul mate,” to her, was what people running from loneliness and sadness do, using the quixotic quest to distract them from confronting the agony of their own solitude and depression. She felt that romantic types, like me, deposited too much misguided hope for salvation in their beloved, believing that if only they met the “right one,” they would be freed from misery and whisked into the fabled land of happily ever after. Rationally, Lea had a point. To expect anyone to be the anodyne to one’s personal suffering is, of course, daft. But when one already has a balanced life with a sense of wholeness of her own, then the love from another can add a richness to experience that even the hardest of cynics thaw to. Lea found that in me. She could not resist my daffy romance, my clever gestures of affection – like her name maneuvered out of seaweed in the sand that she could see from our balcony hotel room in Tobago that summer, or yards of my lovepoems when she’s least expecting it, like on the scrolls of toilet paper that turn Monday morning getting-ready-for-word doldrums into endearing exercises of her under-used grin muscles. And one day, she’d not have to keep kicking me out. One day, I’d kick my habit. One day, I’d prove that it was she who kept me high and not the dope. One day, she wouldn’t have to embarrassingly, quietly note, “Look what the dog dragged in.”

But that one day kept darting away from my attempts to make it be the first day of the rest of my sobriety. Of the rest of Lea and my white picket fence future together.

So I washed up to her front door once again this morning, sneakers murky and still soaked from my having to plunge them into the cesspool of what was the front yard of where I had to score my bags in upper west Harlem. To me, I was making marked strides towards improvement; I no longer shot, I only snorted now. Still, this was as convincing a story of recovery as would be a serial murderer who claimed she was weaning herself off homicide by switching to knives instead of guns. Lea just slammed me out of the house every time I began patting myself on the back for what I saw as a baby step forward toward eventual cold turkey quitting. She didn’t believe it. And rightly so. I’d been “weaning myself off” dope for two years now. And still, I showed up at our doorstep most mornings of the week, not as an early-riser delivering the paper from the corner newsstand, like a good little girlfriend, but drooling over the front page, substituting headlines for a pillow and staining my cheeks with ink (like a miniature slab of silly putty).

Why did Lea keep letting me in you ask? Good question but her reasons for doing so were better. She was in love with me. And “the heart has its reasons that reason knows nothing of” (a quote that dons our refrigerator, composed of other such affirming magnet proverbs like our Narcotics Anonymous plug, “Keep coming back, it works if you work it” and my own personal favorite, “If you have love, then you have everything”). Yes, Lea loved me all right, the way that makes one unable to “do the right thing” because the right thing kept getting more and more blurred, like the Sunday Times front page lettering after a night of my sleep and saliva-drenched manipulation of it.

Lea’s friends insisted she implement “tough love,” the position that argues for the loved ones of addicts to turn their backs on them when a constant show of support and comfort only enables the habit of their loved one (suffering from the disease of addiction) to stay fresh. But Lea couldn’t just shut me out, as often as she wished she could. Too many times had I brought her to tears of ecstasy in the past to just overrule these times with the new edict that I either get clean or get the hell out of her life. One can’t just leave a loved one in hell after having spent so many memories in heaven with her.

The thing is, I really don’t know why I kept choosing little cellophane packets of ephemeral opiates to the profoundly deep connection and bliss that comes when you’re truly in love with someone. (Well, aside from the need to stave off junksick states of agonizing bodily torture that by now were the only option if I omitted a fix.) I think I was desperately afraid of letting Lea know the real me, the one who twice tried to commit suicide (and who now has a sweeping pair of angel’s wings tattoed over the razor’s scars. Each white, supernal angel wing, outlined in anthracite black, camoflages the twin, nearly 6 inch, worms of a scar that slither up from each wrist towards my elbows), who thrice was committed to a psychiatric institution and who hopped from therapist to therapist, digesting a Skittle-like medley of meds along the way, trying to sort out just why she had such abysmal self-esteem. Would Lea really love me, the me I lived my life trying to hide from anyone who meant anything to me because too many times in the past had I sent my beloveds running. No one was ever ready to touch those places in me, and stroke them with tenderness. Instead, when suggestions of my sutured-up slabs of trauma fell into the light, the stitching must have horrified them, like a little Dr. Frankenstein monster standing before them; a monster to run from rather than a vulnerable girl to comfort.

Why couldn’t I just stick to my promise to be there for Lea whenever she needed me, like she had been for me so many times before and like I had been in the past, before my devotion to the fixes set in. We’d spent three years falling in love, or, rather, an instant noticing each other amid a thick overlay of cafeteria-going students and the rest of the time validating this love-at-first-site mega-attraction. It was like a vintage-era motion picture where we’d spotted each other among throngs of moving bodies and suddenly, in that characteristic fade-out of everything but the girl, we became two vivid figures at the center of an out-of-focus world.

And now here I was, coming home distorted most mornings, blurring our future, clouding her trust in me. Yet I was desperate to prove the proverbial silver lining.

And I swore that this morning would be the last time I presented myself flat on my back, rising from a just-clearing stupor, bags emptied and tossed recklessly about the hall from the last licks of a night of snorting oblivion. I’d thrown up almost all of my integrity, I’d shaken the last leviathan from my writhing skin, I needed Lea to know I was sincere this time; I was coming home for good. I was coming clean, because she was my home and I knew it now.

Anyone who cleans up vomit from the breakfast table, who holds a naked sweating pulsing body close to her 98 degree warm skin all night so her savagely trembling girlfriend won’t freeze to death…anyone who drives 180 miles in the dead of New England winter, in the dead of the night, because it’s the only detox center to accept our medical coverage…anyone who will put everything on hold to save the life of the one with whom she imagined the rest of her life raising kids and building extensions on the house in the country…anyone who will do this, knows what it means to be in love. Because once you’re in it, the only way out is to lie. To pretend that you really don’t care when all the while the only one you ever could have imagined still beautiful with as many wrinkles as your own, slowly kills herself. I didn’t realize this is what I was doing. Until this morning. Lea opened up that door, our little black pug scampering perkily to slush my face with his tongue, and I looked up to behold my Athena, my Venus, my north star, my goddess of wisdom and beauty and light, my crying angel, whose wings just couldn’t carry the both of us anymore.

As her tears smeared into my face while I flopped into our last hug, I tasted the salt from those wet gemstones down the quarry of her cheekbones… Her cheekbones, my burial ground, my smile exploding from lips who finally made it home, as I kissed her one last time and curled up on her tongue to live forever.

© 2010 Gretchen Turner

“…Leave a Light on for Ya”

“…Leave a Light on for Ya”

 Between the onslaught of snow and my gas tank that had been squeaking by on E for the past 39 miles, I knew it was time to pack it in for the night. My little skyblue Rabbit, with recent smirks of rust making cameo appearances along tire rims, had passed a friendly big, blue Service Area sign only one or two miles back (what luck!), but the highway sign had included the not-so-friendly information that the next pitstop/place-to-park-for-the-night lay another 48 miles ahead along the dark, snow-obscured, oil-slicked asphalt (hmm, must’ve missed that part in my opportunistic, selfinterest-motivated memory). The nearer service area itself was still visible from where my car tooled along. Only it wasn’t welcomely situated in front of me, to the immediate east, inviting my right-blinker-activated automobile onto its ramp. It was now receding like a squirrel into the distance after having just stolen it’s nutmeal for the evening and needing to tear off to perch itself way up in a tree out of reach of other hungry, needy rodents. Guess I was a rodent availing myself too late the Area’s Services. The last nut had already fallen from its limbs and been nabbed by more alert, paying-attention squirrels. I maintained my Volkswagen motor’s 56 mile-per-hour hum and asked the gods of nature to smile amiably on me until I had clocked another 48 miles on my odometer. (“Please don’t let this snow squall mar my vision to the sorry point where a rabbit and a girl go careening into a six foot ravine.”) I also sent some prayerful back up to the gods of human blunder. (“Please don’t draw a bright line under my automotive negligence by actually letting me run right out of gas here in the middle of nowhere! [well, somewhere but all the road signs had been coated with enough new white-out to effectively render every town an anonymous location on the map]. Amen.”)

 My attention was certainly not being paid to necessities-of-the-moment or I certainly wouldn’t have missed my last-chance-in-48-miles to refuel and pitch tent…or park hood as the case may be. My attention was a bur on the fresh cotton sock of fantasy! I was guilty-as-charged! (down goes gavel in mind, innerjudge decrees: “I accuse me of being totally, unrehabilitatably in love!”) lost in the reverie of the woman I had met less than twenty four hours ago. Only I hadn’t actually met her. Well, sort of I had. At least I had while I slept. And, whoa!, the sensations imprinted on my body after that full night of dream-drenched sleep were sending ‘signals through me that my mouth and head were having a hart time trying to interpret today’ (S. B.). I had met the woman of my dreams. Well of course I had if it was a woman with whom I shared company and my dream gave us life. But I mean she was the one I had always dreamed of meeting, knowing, loving. The one who would make me swear the rest of my life to…in sickness or health…in life or death. She was the one waiting for me, ‘like words in a pen’ (A. R.).

 And I had just spent the night with her. In a deep way. Unfortunately, in a deep sleep sort of way.

 But the memory of her was as fresh, as real as the urge to hurl it prompted in my knotted and terribly overwrought stomach. It’s not that the thought of her makes me sick. Not even close. It was the thought that I’d never see her again, that she was confined within the deceptive barbed wire walls of my over-too-soon dream. I was now driving along, within a snowglobed, woodland-besandwitched interstate, semi-sick, lovesick over a woman whom I would never meet again (Right? Dreams can’t possibly be premonitions???) yet would have vowed to meet tonight.

 I’d had dreams before, conjuring idealized women, fusing features from faces of past lovers. And nostalgia for sandpaper kisses, from those spontaneous gentleman who turned one night stands into one night horizontals or multi-month romances. But She was an entirely new creation. She was a goddess standing apart from any pantheon to which I’d ever thought I was paying homage. She was a whole new reason to believe. She was a promise: That a feeling this strong could exist, that it did exist and that I had already become acquainted with its source. Somehow she had always been alive in me and last night She finally made her appearance known. And now I couldn’t erase the vision of her as she packed herself into my doggie-bag-waking-life to nourish me after-the-fact.

 Yes, the image imprinted across my mind’s-eyesight nourished me but moreso, it bothered and ate away into cockpit of my thoughts; I couldn’t think of anything else. Just her. There we were last night, safe in the refuge of my dreamworld, in the skies spreading timelessly under closed eyes. Yet here I am, now, unable to shake myself from the craving to see and touch her again, to confirm her reality…and what can I do but gnash my teeth against a cardboard coffee cup rim whose fluids taste like milk to one expecting another succulent sip of freshly squeezed orange juice. She wrung out all other feelings in my chest like an indian burned towel twisted so tightly that not one more drop of wetness could be spared. I had nothing left to my feelings but the specter of what I wanted to feel for the rest of my life, yet I didn’t even have a name to go with the womanfantasy whose post-facto hold over me had just made my little Rabbit-that-could whiz by the service station my gas tank sorely needed to visit. So I grievously placed the Mobilmart, (ridiculous-psychological-tranferrence-recepticle) coffee cup back in the holder beneath the sound of Mr. Mister, who uncannily crooned “Broken Wings” from the radio within the cavity of my dashboard.

 What tantalized me immensely was not even so much that I got to connect my body with this strawberry haired goddess and now longed to recreate such sensual perfection. Yes, our lips briefly met and her long slender arms drew me in with a size of desire matching my own, but it was the recollection of the expression in those eyes that had me noticing nothing else now. (Yikes, just crossed the dotted road line and elicited a “beep beeeep” from car to immediate rear. Better at least try to notice fact of my driving just a little bit!)

It was the enamored and enamoring clutch of her life to mine, not just her body to mine, conveyed in the way her earthy deep eyes looked at me, that had me driving in a haze now, line between reality and fantasy so effectively blurred. And how strange to be able to recall now a scent exclusive to a dream (like a scratch-and-sniff: scratch against doors of memory and inhale intoxicating singular fragrance) or even to experience such a distinctly seductive fragrance within the mostly visual framework of nocturnal imaginings. But yes, did She ever come with an astonishingly amazing smell! For a nose to remember this exquisite eau-de-skin is for this suitor to never forget. To miss it in a way that only lovers separated in war can understand. A uniquely arousing hint of eternal gardens where only True Love sows Its aromatic beauty. Like every rose and cupcake and human sweetness joined hands and paraded their talent across the globe of my inbreaths, I now felt her through my pores and needed to eat of her cupcake, to prick my finger on thorns of the rose I was valorized to remember yet seemingly condemned to never pluck.

 I could hardly see the darkness in front of me; everything was becoming pitched with the effect of frenzied snowflakes falling in furious sheaves. And my gas tank was beginning to pound fists in objection, or, rather, sputter a Rabbit’s steady highway pace, due to my conscious ignorance of its drum-empty belly. I would have to pull over to the side of the road and hope miracles were on call tonight and they’d find my broken car. Could miracles fix a dream broken down the middle, too?

 But what do you know?! Wouldn’t a propitious Red Roof Inn have ‘left a light on for me’ just as I was deciding on where to best temporarily junk my automobile and me for the remainder of the blizzard swept, gasoline-challenged night. I’ve always had a quaint sort of love affair with roadside motels, but this one couldn’t have been any more opportunely road sided, like a diamond ring in the rough of the night. I was ready to ‘settle down and started a family with it’ (S. B.)! This time my right-blinker was flipped on in time as I caught sight of Saving Grace Red Roof before it was too late to pull off at the next exit and enter its drive-up parking lot. I opted to forego a desultory search for a gas station within reasonable miles from the exit. The snow left no room for autonomous human will. Plus, I only wanted to lay my head down just like I had the previous night, on a different pillow but in the hope that I could elicit that same sensation of lifelong dedication I had found and come to believe in thanks to the appearance of my lightauburn-locked, softly-freckled, slim supple-bodied, eternal-eyed, heaven-scented Dreamwoman. I was ready, with all my heart, to create a monogamous commitment with my slumber. If this woman were not a prophetic outcome of True-Love-longing, wishful thinking, and she existed only in my heart-governed dreams, then I would learn to fall in love with bedtime. Every night…or anytime I couldn’t keep my car on the road or my coffee in hand because it was She I needed to fill me up and provide my life’s direction.

 I parked my struggling dusty Rabbit on the gravel fronting an array of red, numbered doors held together under one giant, Red tiled Roof. The check-in desk was flush right so I had to walk a good number of paces, catching snow in the mit of my face like a Major League catcher who doesn’t drop a single ball. The flakes threw strikes every time: eye, lips, cheek, other eye…a flurry of perfect wind-ups and follow-throughs. I figured I’d cut the engine of my hobbling Rabbit then just deal with the gas situation in the morning. If the car didn’t start, it was an infinitesimal price to pay if I could meet and Be With my Dreamwoman tonight. If I could walk down the aisle of the rest of my life in just another encounter with Her.

 I fell into the warm lighting of the check-in room, a soft maroon, cottonball-fluffy carpeted interior with candleholders flickering their prizes on four walls under important-looking portraits of ____ (maybe forefounders of Red Roof Enterprises???). The woman behind the desk brightened her already affable demeanor and put Mystical Gems and Crystals down on the surface in front of her to resume reading once she had learned my name and given me a home for the night. I shuffled slushed boots up to greet her.

 Typically loquacious, I honored my predilection and began explaining the unfortunate situation. I began with just the mundane haplessness of my fuel-neglected Volkswagen coupled with snow cancellation of onward automotive pursuits. But the understanding, almost motherly, trusting look glinting from her jade-mottled irises somehow reached right into the soothsaying voice of my heart. The next thing I knew she had gently reached over the counter with a “there, there honey” arm around my shoulder. And I couldn’t be sure but the moment she touched me, it seemed every candle perked its glow and send a ripple of “We’ll take care of you” thorough the pleasantly cozy room and through the snow soaked sleeves of my jacket. Right into the place in me that needed to hear it – no, feel it most. I hadn’t heard anything, but the presence of this saviorinthenight-like woman at Red Roof check-in desk somehow had let me feel – no, hear in my soul, without overt words, that I was Meant To Be here right at this time. I couldn’t possibly tuck my feelings into words, but the language that enflamed those candles, reinforced by the solacing arm of this stranger – no, instant friend I’ve known all my life in an inexpressible way – around my dejected, tired body, couldn’t have spoken more clearly. I felt like I’d come Home and the lit fireplace under one of those impressive gold, fancyframed portraits, seemed to understand just how warm I felt inside.

 The friendly, twinkly-eyed woman exchanged one last smile with me and placed in my hand a copper key attached to a forest green diamond shaped plastic key chain. I dunked my head to look at the room number etched into the plastic plate and to learn which direction I needed to turn after departing back through the front door I’d come though (rooms 1-25 up the stairs to the immediate left, rooms 25-50 on ground floor to the right). My heart did a little leap as “24” smiled up at me from my hand. Twenty four has always been my lucky number – but it is so much more than a lucky number. It is like a guardian angel in numeral form.

 I clumped up the row of red carpeted (thrifty delight! astro-turfed) stairs and made my way toward the second to last room on the right. (Hmmm, that’s funny, a lamp’s light already seemed to be coming from that window. Maybe, this quaint motel is extra-hospitable and really drives home their slogan that promises to “leave a light on for ya.” How sweet, I thought.) A few foot-falls more and now a tremor of nerves, that really had no right to be in my nervous system’s domain, had been awakened in me: that was definitely movement coming from room 24, the second to last window on the right. Before I could put my key in the lock, the redpainted door opened slowly, and before my eyes could make out the sight standing calmingly in front of me, my nostrils had been greeted with the exquisite scent that I could never forget. Parading her sweetness across the globe of my disbelieving eyes, this strawberry haired, befreckled goddess, with a childlike, knowing smile, spoke and my tongue began to taste the salt from tears now falling like raindrops upon the roof of my top lip… “I sure hope you like roses and cupcakes.”

 © Gretchen Turner 2003

“Por Que Tú No Comprendes?!”

Snooping Exercise

I was sitting on a rotating stool at Kitchenette’s to-go counter, waiting the few minutes it takes for my soup order to be prepared and I picked up tidbits of a local conversation in Spanish. The two gentlemen were engaged in a lighthearted exchange in which the phrase, “Por que tú no comprendes?!” was repeated several times by the more lively interlocutor. I got the feeling he was relaying, verbatim, details from an encounter he experienced and was not directing the beseeching, “Why don’t you understand?!” at his current conversational partner. I could not understand much of the dialogue, since I’m not fluent in Spanish, but the main element, “Why don’t you understand?!” will be the thread for my story.

(Though I cannot compose properly in Spanish, the following takes place in this language. Set on a beach in Ecuador. Beautiful summer day. Felipe and his mamá, Paloma, star.)

***

Por Que Tú No Comprendes?!

“Felipe don’t sit so close to the water,” roars Paloma from her upright beach chair, whose metal legs have nearly disappeared under the sand from uninterrupted hours of sedentary positioning. “You’ll go out with the tide,” she finishes, but never looking up to notice Felipe isn’t even close to the water. Felipe has struck up an imaginary conversation with a dead king crab he notices while dragging his shovel along the dryish sand just between the hard flat wet bed where the waves lap and the dry fluffy stuff that each wave never touches. The king crab is leg-side-up, like most crustaceans who no longer need them to scuttle, and Felipe is having a dandy time poking tenderly at the shelly appendages.

 “Pobrecito little big crab. Your mama probably notices you’re not there in your crab bed anymore. I bet she misses you. I’m going to take you back to her now.” Felipe scoops the dead king crab up, half with his shovel and half with his other hand and plops it into his yellow bucket, previously home to nothing larger than some shreds of bladderwrack seaweed and broken scallop shells. The crab is way too big to fit entirely so its exoskeleton has been dunked in while the eight lanky-jointed legs protrude out creepily, making the whole body seem dislocated and dreadfully uncomfortable, had it not already been dead. Felipe sees how strained the posture is and promptly dumps the crab and the rest of the contents back into the sand. “I’m sorry little big crab, that couldn’t have felt too good. I’ll just carry you back to your mamá.” He leaves his yellow bucket on its side in the sand next to the mossy green bladderwrack and marroonpink shards of scallop shell and scoops up the gangly lifeless king crab with both of his four year old mini hands. The crab overpowers his grip, especially while balancing it momentarily in the palm of one hand, but Felipe can manage just fine when he returns the second hand to complete a bowl-like hold of the crustacean’s body, after having to yank up his swimtrunks which had bared his bright white toosh under his sunburned back. The little boy takes a few determined steps towards the ocean, a time that would have merited his mama’s cautionary holler not to get too close, but Paloma is fixatedly absorbed in her Suze Orman book, “You May be on Your Way to Millions – How to Notice the Little Things that Turn the Wishful into the Wealthy.” She does not see Felipe inching steadily out into the foamy duvet that has just lapped its way onto the shoreline. She does take the time to yell absently into the air, but directed at Felipe, “And don’t get that Hilfigger for Tots bathing suit too dirty, it cost me a week’s salary but I want my baby looking good! Nobody needs to know my boy doesn’t have a pot to piss in and neither does his mom. As long as we look good, that’s the important thing.” She glances up to remove her sunglasses and wipe the rim of perspiration around bridge of the nose. Seeing Felipe by the shoreline, she shouts, “Pobrecito, get away from the water; no one can see that expensive Tommy wear if you’re submerged under the water. Plus, you’ll go out with the tides!” she chuckles cruelly to herself at this far fetched yet, to her, clever, bit of sarcasm and returns her faux Chanel sunglasses to her face, immediately resuming her devotion to Suze Orman’s advice on how to get rich. Felipe cries in the direction of his mama, “Mama, why don’t you understand?!, this is important! I’m taking this crab back to his mommy. His mommy doesn’t care what shorts he’s wearing but I bet she does care that he’s DEAD!”

Paloma doesn’t bat an eyelash and whisks a new page into view after licking fingrtips at the speed of lightning. “That’s nice, dear” – an obvious dismissal having not heard a stitch of Felipe’s wail.

 Felipe has just set the little big crab into the rim of the water. The crab doesn’t move. Felipe decides he better help the dead guy on its way back to his mama so the little boy scurries the crab along the sodden sand with his foot, pushing it like a broom, mopping up ridges of sand between the crab’s crazy legs, now virtually cracking off as Felipe pushes it towards where shoreline ends and the actual water can catch on and float little big crab away. Finally the water wins out and the mangled-legged crab succumbs to weightless flotation as a wave hurries it back into the sea. Felipe waves triumphantly, “You go find your mamá little big crab. She misses you. She’s not too busy pretending not to be poor. And she won’t get mad if you spill Chocolate Fribble on your brand new school shoes that cost her a week’s salary.”

 Felipe now sits his Tommy Hilfigger-trunked toosh into the soaked sand at the ocean’s edge. He jabs both hands into the farina-like patches of briny granules at his sides and comes up with fistfuls of, well, wet sand, and plenty of other interesting seashore miscellany. He spies a bottlecap and shouts to his mama, “Mama, look, I found a bottlecap!” Paloma brusquely returns, “That’s nice dear.” Felipe yells into the air, “Why don’t you understand that this is important?!” then dumps the bottlecap and goes in for another dual-fisted dig, like a bulldozer, with those dinosaur-like jaws used for scooping. This time he comes up with, again, of course, wads of dripping sand and, after filtering out the more nifty things, a still alive minnow. “Mama, look, I found a little fis-” but before he could finish the sentence the bitty fish had popped out of his hand and immediately swum away at minnow-terrified-breakneck speed. “That’s nice dear,” again issues from a mouth about as interested as an elephant is to have a fly on its butt. Felipe, again, pipes, “Why don’t you understand…?!” but it’s more of a mantra let into the air with no hope of actually reaching Paloma and he goes in for another dig into the surrounding wet bed of sand around him. His butt has now deepened into the sandy earth, as a body will do when let sit there while rhythmic waves continue to rush up then back down into their source. He is buried up to his belly button and loving every minute. This time his ten-fingered trowel hoists up a broken bit of plastic syringe (needle is missing) among the soaked surround of wet salty sand. Felipe bellows to his mama, “Mama, look, I found some, um, weird thingie!” and the predictable retort, “That’s nice dear…” Felipe, again, “Why don’t you understand this is important?!” but in same breath his next dig into his beachsized sandbox, this time turning up a shark’s tooth. “Mama, wow, I found a shark’s tooth!” Paloma, “Don’t get those swimtrunks dirty – they cost mama lots of money pobrecito,” not even noticing pobrecito’s questionable position in the mouth of the ocean.

 Felipe’s bucket has now drifted down to him as one of the waves has acted as a messenger and was on its way to making it a donation out to sea, but the little boy’s body blocks its further drift. “Woopee, my bucket!” Felipe has jabbed all his newfound oceanic miscellany into his Tommy Hilfigger pockets and he promptly gouges out blops of sand along with the bottlecap, shark’s tooth, and broken belly of syringe. He wedges the yellow bucket into the firm sand so that it’s secure, half-submerged into the sand just like he is. He yells to his mama, “Mama, I’m collecting these important things for you,” and slamdunks the little treasures into the wet bucket. Felipe continues his archaeological-type digs.

 In the next fistful of sand, pebbles and wetness, a rather odd object of briny miscellany emerges. It is a perfectly circular, gold wedding ring. The band is dainty and without a nick, even after having spent time in the bed of the ocean! Felipe hoots, with the same bit of enthusiasm that heralded his previous five discoveries: “Mama, look, I found a ring!” Paloma, airly dismisses, yet again, “That’s nice dear,” having not registered a syllable. Felipe, fires back, “Why don’t you understand…this is important!?” He drops the salty curio into the bucket with the other sand-slushed bric a brac.

 What Felipe and Paloma don’t know is that in 1777 a pirate ship sank only one third of a mile off the coast of the beach they now inhabit. In 1986 a team of archaeologists and oceanogrophers got funding for a mission to disinter this ancient sea vessel and were successful! A museum now houses relics from this historical discovery that unearthed over $2,000,000 in buried gems and jewelry. Salvador Perez, the head archaeologist of the mission admits, in numerous national newspaper articles that covered the event, that while most of the loot has been recovered from the shipwreck, he estimates a veritable trove of riches still lay at the bottom of the ocean. Felipe was sitting in the right spot at the right time today! His ring, if it had bee appraised properly, would have been revealed to cash in at $350,000.

 Paloma, finally ready to call it a day, having turned the last page of Suze Orman’s manifesto on “How to Notice the Little Things that Turn the Wishful into the Wealthy,” bellows to Felipe, “C’mon pobricito, another hour here and it’s more money to unload into the meter.” She gets up and targets Felipe, still a half dunked cookie in the mug of the ocean, with little yellow bucket of discoveries by his side. Felipe, with great mournful effort, wedges himself from his suction-seat in the shoreline. The bucket has become heavy with all the piles of sodden sand and his new “toys” that the ocean has burped up. It’s too heavy to lift so Felipe drags it, considerably slowing his gait to catch up with his mamá, now waiting with beachchair folded under arm, and sunglasses propped on her head. Impatience overcoming her she booms, “Dump that silly bucket and c’mon!”

 Felipe, of course, does not want to do so – all his prizes are in there, including $350,000 ring – but he knows not to get mom angry. Paloma continues, “And look at you, you’re a mess. Those shorts cost more than all your toys put together!” Felipe, looks down at his Tommy Hilfigger trunks…and lets out a great poop in them (Mamá certainly won’t like this, he thinks) just as he dumps his bucket, like mamá orders him to, and watches his shark’s tooth and bottle cap and syringe and golden ring go tumbling back into the vault of waves and fish from which they came…Felipe yelps, “Mamá, why don’t you understand…this is important?!” as the ring becomes invisible with a crab catching it in a claw and scuttling out with the tides.

 

© Gretchen Turner 11/13/2006

Daddy’s (God Damn) Little Angel

Daddy’s (God Damn) Little Angel

I just remember lots and lots of people all standing in a circle around me. It looked like a big Christmas wreath of faces, but it wasn’t a happy, like-Santa-was-coming wreath with those little red balls of fruit that mom calls, um, mowberries, I mean mulbewwies…no, um, mul-berr-ies, m-u-l-b-e-r-r-i-e-s. Yes that’s is. But don’t ask me to say it again. I memorized it because Daddy had gotten so upset that I lost the spelling bee at school. (I only came is second because Marla Swinson had cheated and written all the answers on her bracelets. Actually, she made streamers with itty bitty writing all over them that looked like designs on curly conf-, confet-, um what’s the word?, mommy used it at my party, that stuff on the ceiling, o well, Daddy’s not here so, um, I forget the word and don’t ask me again…really those “bracelets” (yeah sure Marla, you poo-head) had every vocabulary word in Lesson Five that Miss McDonoughy assigned us for the next spelling bee…and Marla wrapped the stupid cheater streamers around her wrists to look like bracelets! She thought she was so cute, all sly I think is the word she used for herself, bragging that she’d win the bee because she was prettier than the rest of us. Now what the heck does her being pretty have to do with spelling?! I just knew she was off. Just a meanie, and a liar, too. Because I saw all the words on what she called a “bouquet of hand-crafted bangles” (she thought she was a smarty pants with big words and all — ooooh, “bouqueeeeeet”… “hand-craaaafted,” her mom probably made it for her and called it that stupid name) but they were really a roll of cheatsheets! The stupid teacher always believed her too. Miss McDonaughy never inspected Marla’s chewed-nail hands up close. I think she just didn’t want to get too close to Marla, smelling like tunafish and bar-b-cue Doritos all the time.) I wanted him to be happy. Daddy never seems happy like Santa is coming. He always seems like Santa forgot to deliver his present and he just got that big lump of coal. I don’t really know what coal is. When I heard it I always thought they were saying a lump of cold which I thought was ice. But then someone once said something about coal being a kind of diamond if you have the right eyes. But my Dad didn’t have eyes really at all. With his glasses being broke an’ all and him always letting us know hollering about them bloody no good cracked Lenscrafter glasses-in-an-hour crackpot prescription crap no good pieces of horseshit. Yup, that’s his line. I memorized that too because I thought it’d be fun to tell the class about my Daddy during show and tell. About how good my daddy is at explaining himself. We always know how Daddy feels. He uses his mouth like a Mack truck and it hurts my ears. Or he uses his belt with the metal handle to tell my bumbum it was all my fault. I never did know what my bumbum did wrong but I knew Daddy was never happy about it. Yeah, we always knew how Daddy felt. So I thought that quoting him (that’s what you do when you memorize what someone said and repeat it. Daddy sure made me know how bad I was to “quote” him after I did my show and tell to the class. Anyway, I thought that quoting him) would make him feel good. I’d tell all my classmates just what a good and loud and clear talker he was. So I went in on Friday, rehear- rehears- rehearsing my lines over and over again until I got them right: “…bloody no good cracked Lenscrafter glasses-in-an-hour crackpot prescription crap no good pieces of horseshit.” And I got the whole ex-, ex-, expression right! But Daddy wasn’t happy. I thought he’d be really proud, I went in to class all excited to tell everyone how good my Daddy talks – I once heard that “imitation is the best form of flattery” – I have no idea what flattery is but I do know imitation because Daddy liked to yell about “them glasses crackpot imitation Armani spectacles, damn pieces of shit go to hell blarney imitation shit-stickles.” I got the feeling they weren’t what he wanted and he wanted the real Armani glasses. Marla always bragged about her Armani backpack. How much better it is than my Wal-Mart one from the discount bin. So I knew that Daddy wanted the real Armani glasses and I should use the real words that my Daddy uses. Um, but I messed it all up because I used his real words but then I realized it became an imitation of him and he was as mad at me as he was at those imitation crackpot Armani spectacles, damn pieces of shit go to hell blarney imitation shit-stickles. He wasn’t happy that the whole class knew of his descriptinalidocious – I mean descripdsgjhpbv I mean de-scrip-tive-ness, d-e-s-c-r-i-p-t-i-v-e-n-e-s-s. Wow that’s hard to say. But dad said it so I remember it. He said his de-scrip-tive-ness is for us only and my damn bloody no good snot nose punk class had no business knowing what he says around the house. I was only trying to make my Daddy proud. Me trying to be my daddy. But now I remember imitation is bad. Damn no good imitation Armani shit-stickes. Damn no good kid shit-stinkin’ bumbum. He always tells mom to stop being so ignant. No, that’s not it, ignipitent. Nooo, what is it (oh he’s gonna be mad that I can’t remem-) oh ignorant. Yes, he tells mom to stop being so ignorant all the time. Ignorant must not be a good thing because he always uses the metal belt on her when he’s finished with his ignorant mack truck mouth speech at her. I didn’t want him to get mad at me that way. So I studied all the words on that damn no good stupid beelzebub (that’s one of his favorties) vocabulary lesson. And I would’ve won too if stupidhead Marla hadn’t cheated. So I got what he said was coming to me. My bumbum knew how he felt. Like his Mack truck mouth all coming out of his belt. He sure does know how to express himself. He was hurt and I knew it because he showed me how he felt my making my bumbum feel that way. And boy Daddy really must’ve been hurting after I lost that spelling bee.

 So what I remember was all those faces swarmed around me like buzzing honeybees and I was the flower. They were hovering oh yeah like a Christmas wreath but like Christmas wasn’t coming. And no red happy mul-berr-ies. But yeah there was lots of red all right. But it was all over like we had gone into the little kiddie pool but this time Daddy hadn’t filled it with beer. He said we should be really grateful that he drains his keg into the rubber blow-up pool for us to swim in. He gets a kick out of that looooooong straw he puts in while we swish around and make even more foam than the spongy top that always takes up more room than the damn stupidhead wate- I mean beer. So yeah there was lots of red like the blow-up pool, only red water. Or maybe red beer? I didn’t know. I just knew that Daddy was always saying that no one ever lent him a bloody no good hand. All he needed was an extra hand to get things done around here! were his exact words. Gimme a goddamn hand he would say. So that’s all I was trying to do. In art class I watched Miss Tanning cut through that paper maché figurine of the Statue of Liberty like it was made out of Twinkie filling. She kept the chopper thing, with that big long arm like a giant waffle maker but only thinner, locked in her special closet. The arm came down, like when mommie pours the batter then pushes the top piece down on the waffle-maker, and all of a sudden Miss Liberty was cut in half. Miss Tanning was showing us how to recycle paper materials and how they should be chopped up then put into the big bin with the right sticker on. She chopped the paper maché statue since it had been used in last year’s art show and now she would make a new one to use as an example. So I remembered the chopping thing kept in the special closet that wasn’t locked anymore since Miss Tanning had taken it out for class. And when Miss Tanning was washing paint brushes in the big sink with Jeffrey who always makes the biggest mess, I stepped up to the chopping thing – um the paper-cutter is what she called it, and just chopped. Then, I opened my eyes and that wreath of Christmas-isn’t-coming faces was around me like um, a halo, I think is the word Mommie used when she talked about angels. Yeah, I felt like a halo of people was around me. I guess that made me an angel? because Daddy just said he could use an extra god damn bloody hand.

© 2006 Gretchen Turner