*Sprigs was my first blog, which most of you never laid eyes on. I wrote this post Nov. 23, 2005. It is part two in the bathroom series. Part one can be found here.
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Passage
— for Ray

When I open the bathroom door, he is standing there, nearly as large as the door’s framed opening. I’m startled. I had waited until he’d gone to bed before quietly slipping in and carefully sliding the door shut so I could pee and brush my teeth. He’s a large man, tall with a barrel chest. I am 13 years old and still growing; I’ve reached a height of about 5’6”. Still, he dwarfs me.

He and his wife had been friends of the family for years, since well before I was born. They were one of only two couples with whom my parents spent any appreciable amount of time. My father had died in March, and this couple had taken me on vacation with them. His idea. He told my mother the trip would do me some good, take my mind off losing my father.

He was grieving the loss, too. I remember the day he sat at our dining room table, adjacent to my mother, my father’s usual seat at the table conspicuously vacant. They were crying. His head was hung, and he moved it from side to side in small motions, the way we’ve all tried, unsuccessfully, to shake off grief. It should have been me, he told her over and over, dabbing his eyes with a handkerchief. Then he said it slower, and adamantly, as if putting his fist down, disallowing this death. His words came out in hard, stuttering dactyls, with a single accent at the end followed by a caesura: Mignon. It should … have been … me.

I watched them from the far end of a long hallway that spilled without fanfare into our unattractive dining room. They didn’t know I was witnessing such an intense and private moment meant only for adults. I’d learned after my father’s death that children are not allowed to fully enter the space of grief, the kind that takes your body over whole, like possession or glossolalia. We are told to carry on. To go play. To go to our rooms. That our father is in heaven.

There, there now is the most anyone said to comfort me after my father’s death.

::

He was 16 years my father’s senior, which meant he’d been old as long as I could remember. He could have passed for my grandfather. But he still had a solid build, and it was easy to imagine him playing football or building ships in his younger days.

The vacation entailed driving from the middle of Oklahoma to Memphis, where the couple’s eldest son and his wife lived. The two were going on vacation, and we were charged with watching their house while they were away.

It was a long, difficult drive. The couple didn’t want to use the air-conditioner and, to solve his overactive bladder problem, he peed in a tin can every 30 minutes or so. The combination of the heat and urine was almost unbearable.

Still, I couldn’t help but be grateful. The trip was a change from the ordinary. I’d never been so far from home. Memphis had a glittery, twangy sound to it. I had great expectations and high hopes for the couple as well, even looking to him as a potential father figure. Nobody could replace my dad, but this man was the next-best thing. The two had been best friends for 30 years, after all. And sitting in the back seat, looking at the back of his head the entire trip, I began to reason that he and my father were not terribly dissimilar. They both loved fishing, drinking, smoking, football, talking on the CB radio, speeding and flipping through a good dirty magazine now and again.

One of the best stories of the two of them, my father and this man, involved their trespassing on private property in rural Oklahoma. They sneaked into a pumpkin patch they’d seen while driving on a back road and were unable to resist the temptation of not-quite-ripe fruit.

As they made off with pumpkins under their arms, gunshots were fired behind them. The property owner: He had a rifle; he meant to take his pumpkins back. The two spun a tale about heading up a Girl Scout troop and wanting to take a couple of pumpkins to the girls. Hearing that lie, the property owner softened. He wouldn’t be one to disappoint little girls.

How many do you need, he asked, or something to that effect. Then he had my father and his friend back their El Camero up to the patch and helped them fill its bed up with pumpkins. They must have chuckled as they drove off, the burnt orange El Camero struggling under the load’s weight.

::

The couple’s son’s home was well-appointed, its bathroom large and as nicely designed as any bathroom I’d ever been in. The door to the bath was hinged on the left. Toilet and sink to the right. Bathtub to the left. I don’t remember the room’s other details, besides a pleasing color scheme and high-end fixtures.

I do remember what happened there July 17, which would have been my father’s 56th birthday. The day had been rough. Images kept coming: me rushing to my father, eager to present the birthday card I’d picked out all by myself; him holding the card in his left hand, slipping his right arm around me; how he always read those cards and then said, That’s great, Danawana with more enthusiasm than was called for, as if I’d handed him my heart instead of a Hallmark card.

But of course, I had handed him my heart, as I did every day of my life up until his death.

The anniversary had affected me all day. I still crumble on anniversaries of difficult events, even though I tell myself dates don’t matter — that they are just an arbitrary way for us to measure time and thus have no inherent significance.

The other night, when my migraine prevented me from sleeping, I read a few blogs I like. I don’t know why, but I had the idea of reading people’s entries from Dec. 20, 2004, and from Aug. 11, 2004. The first is the day my mother died. The second marked my 33rd birthday. I was struck by how differently these days unfolded for other people. Even though it makes no sense, I sometimes feel the whole world must thrum along with me when I am happy, and that everyone must feel a little sadness nipping at their heels when a tragedy has occurred in my life. A ridiculous notion, I know.

::

It comes as no surprise that nobody feels a thing when this man asks me to hug him goodnight, then pulls me close and latches onto me. The pressure of his body turns my lungs into bellows that force the air out slowly. Locked together, we become a single, deformed creature that barely fits in the bathroom doorway. I love you so much, he whispers so as not to wake up his wife. I love you so much, he repeats, saying the word love in a low and throaty way as he tightens his grip and slides his right hand down my pants, inside my underwear, all the way down.

::

The rest of the world chugged along as usual. His wife in the other room sleeping. My mother at home, her eyes most likely heavy from grief and alcohol. The next day, when I called her, he stood within earshot as she and I shared an intense and private moment. She said I sounded sad. I started crying. What’s the matter, she asked. I didn’t answer. She said she thought she knew what it was. You miss your father, don’t you.

Yes, I said. Yes.

*Sprigs was my first blog, which most of you never laid eyes on. I wrote this Nov. 22, 2005.
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(because a lot of shit goes down in bathrooms)

This is the first installment of the bathroom series. I had the idea for the series the other day, when I was thinking about an experience I once had in my grandfather’s bathroom. Then I started thinking about other bathrooms I’ve been in over the years and realized I have some issues to explore. Here goes.

I am holding a photo of me from 1996. The hairy thing behind me holding the camera is LoveShack. He’s nude. I am not nude, much to the dismay of at least three of my readers. But I am braless, which is all you get for now.

I didn’t want LoveShack to take this photo. I had no make-up on, my hair was piled on my head like a ladleful of spaghetti, and I was wearing his ratty undershirt and humungo striped pajama bottoms. Now, I love the photo because it’s one of the only ones LoveShack and I have of us together. It hardly constitutes a couple-photo, though, because he is almost completely obscured by the camera and my body.

This is the last apartment we rented in Kansas City before buying a house. The joint was totally swank. A few years earlier, the owner of the building had remodeled the unit before moving his lover into it. He’d spared no expense. The bath had been revamped with a Corian countertop and tub surround. We had sex in that bathroom a number of times, and the Corian was a great surface for my hands or ass to rest on or press against, solid and never too cold. Unlike the large mirror, which was fragile and cold to the touch but reflected our bodies nicely when it wasn’t steamed up.

The door to the bathroom was original to the 1920s building. It had a crystal doorknob and took a skeleton key. When we fought, I would lock myself in there. Once inside, I’d sit with my knees to my chest on the original porcelain-tiled floor. I would rock back and forth in a childish attempt to comfort myself, clutching the skeleton key in my hands. These fights were never over anything important. I was just young — and volatile.

This is the same apartment where LoveShack made me shave his head. I protested; he insisted. During the year in which we’d known each other, his hair had been one of our sex toys. I would clench it in my fists. He would brush it lightly over my body. But he didn’t want long hair anymore, and I loved him, so I took a pair of scissors in my right hand. I had to cut the hairs short first using the scissors, he told me, then I could go over the scalp with the electric shaver.

Once I got half his head shaved, I puddled to the floor, bawling, and began rocking back and forth to comfort myself. I clutched bits of his hair in my hands. LoveShack is a man who looks fundamentally different when he changes his hairstyle, and I’d never known him with anything but a sun-bleached, shoulder-length mane worthy of a romance novel cover.

With his head half shaved, he looked like someone else. (You don’t believe me? Go shave your dog or cat and see what it looks like bald. Then come back here and tell me I am exaggerating.) LoveShack begged me to get up. I rose to my knees and clung to him, this man who was half lover, half stranger.

My tears and snot coated the hairs I’d cut and shaved, resulting in a huge mess of long and short hairs that stuck to the floor — and clung to both of us.

Then I composed myself. There was nothing left to do but shave the other half of his head. When I was finished, we showered to wash the hair, tears and snot off ourselves. I kept running my hands over his scalp, feeling the hairs that had been reduced to nothing more than stubble. But we didn’t make love in the shower that day. I needed time to get to know him again, this new person who’d emerged from behind a blond curtain.

Every month at this site a different poet sets an exercise, chooses the most interesting responses from readers and offers an appraisal of those responses. So what are you waiting for? Check it out!

My posts are to the right under the “Recent Posts” header. If you want to see all my posts, just click on the “Blog” tab in the secondary navigation bar. If you want to read the entire current post (that would be this one) and leave a comment, click on its title.

Palinode: As for monkeys, they not only make a great food source, they will first cook you a meal. It’s like you get the labour AND the raw materials. Score!

Dana: But ironically you die of hunger because things are all fucked up and out of order — the monkeys cook you dinner, but there is no dinner because the dinner is them, and then the monkey dinner cannot be cooked because the cook is dead.

Palinode: Monkeys are masters of paradox. They are able to cook and serve themselves while alive, and even wash the dishes afterward.

That Palinode sure knows how to make the monkey-talk. Mmmm … I loves me some monkey talk. Schmutize is one lucky lady, having a monkey-talker like P in the house. Go read the rest of this strange conversation on Palinode’s blog. You know, if you dare. But I’m warning you, the convo gets even stranger than the tidbit I’ve shared here.