from the sprigs* archives: another post for ray
October 5, 2008
*I wrote this piece Dec. 5, 2005. It appeared on my first blog, Sprigs, which most of you have never heard of. This is a follow-up piece to Passage.
* * *
Later that afternoon they rode in the car
without speaking she twisted each button
on her sweater until it popped
— Rebecca Loudon, flicker like a bluegirl under water
* * *
I bought volume 1, issue 6, of Cranky today because it contains two of Rebecca Loudon’s poems, and I couldn’t wait until her book arrives to read her work. (I ordered her book, Tarantella, online over the weekend.) I modified the opening words from the poem above to start my post tonight.
* * *
Later that week, we ride in the car without speaking. I am in the back seat, looking out the window. He is driving, his wife at his side wavering between wakefulness and sleep. He says my name now and again. I look up each time to be polite (his wife always tells me to be polite), produce a quick, closed-mouth smile. Then I look down at an angle, to the clock on the dash. Count the minutes I have left in this vessel with him.
The rear-view mirror frames the lower portion of his forehead, his eyebrows, the bridge of his nose and eyes that dart back and forth between the road and my reflection.
* * *
A day or two after the bathroom incident, his wife took me to The Peabody hotel. She wanted to get there early to see the ducks march into the fountain. I wanted to get there early because it meant we’d be away from him longer.
I have a picture she took of me that day. My lips part in a smile but I look more like I’m wincing from someone laying hands on a part of my body outside the frame of the shot. I wear blue shorts and a white shirt. I sit in front of the fountain at a table where two drinks rest: Shirley Temples that she had us order “for fun.”
A tiny plastic sword spears the cherry in mine.
* * *
I want to nap, like his wife, but am afraid somehow he’ll produce another set of hands and arms, ones he doesn’t need to keep on the wheel: free ones he’ll be able to wrap around the back of the seat then shoot up my shirt, down my pants.
“I dare not close my eyes,” I think. “He could snare me in a blink.”
* * *
We’d drive down to the lake in separate cars most weekends. He and his wife in one car. My father, mother and me in another. He and my father docked their boats in adjacent slots, but we all usually piled into one boat or the other when we went out on the lake. We hauled everything we needed for the day down to the docks: eight-track tapes, a cooler full of ice and beer, tackle boxes, my dog.
He and my father loved to shoot the shit, reel in big and not-so-big ones, listen to Johnny Cash and piss over the boat’s edge.
I would gravitate toward the bait in the tackle boxes, taking the oiled, glittery worms in hand along with the colorful plastic fish that had gold and silver markings. As I handled the lures, their hooks dangled, caught light. I would run my fingers over the metal. Seeing this, my father would swat my hands away, saying I shouldn’t play with lures. One day they might prick me.
* * *
The rest of the trip, I sit quiet but alert. I am on watch.
I look out the window as much as possible, but I don’t recall a single thing about the view. I don’t remember the rest stops. I don’t remember what I have to eat or drink. I am focused only on what is going on in the immediate vicinity — my world reduced to a dashboard clock and a rear-view mirror — and what is going on inside me: something like death.
Like a maraschino being crushed between teeth. Like the day’s catch being hauled out of water.
from the sprigs* archives: don’t worry, this story has been pre-approved by loveshack
September 30, 2008
*I wrote this piece March 19, 2006. It appeared on my first blog, Sprigs, which most of you have never heard of.
(I’m a little silly on soy milk, so I’m throwing caution to the wind and posting this without reviewing it for typos and whatnot. Yeah, that’s right: This is how I roll when I’m silly on soy milk. Just when you thought you had me all figured out. Now watch: Dave will swing by and point out all my typos and whatnot.)
It’s 1998. Valentine’s Day. When I wake up, LoveShack is full of energy, which is unusual for him. He’s never been a morning person. He tells me he’s got something special planned for me, instructs me to get dressed.
We’ve been dating for almost three years, so my mind begins to put the pieces together to form a very specific picture: The chipper mood. The special plans. The cheesy holiday. I’m convinced he’s going to ask me to marry him. We’ve been talking about it for quite some time but haven’t made any real plans, and there’s been no proposal.
LoveShack asks me what I’m going to wear. It should be something comfortable, he says. Don’t wear a dress. Maybe that cute brown skirt and a top.
Although LoveShack often compliments me on the clothes I wear, he rarely micromanages my dressing process. This could mean only one thing: He’s going to ask me to marry him by one of my favorite trees, the one that’s about a mile in on a hiking trail just east of Kansas City. I need to wear something cute, so when I recall the moment he asked me to be his wife, I don’t have to envision myself in ratty old painting pants, a T-shirt and my hiking boots, my usual hiking get-up.
How considerate of him, I think. To be thinking ahead like that, making sure I have an attractive visual of this day to store away in my memory. And how wonderful for him to tell me I should wear something comfortable, something I can move in, since a long hike down a dirt trail is required to reach the destination that will witness our commitment to being together for the rest of our lives.
I spring to life, now in an even better mood than LoveShack. As I push my arms through the sleeves of a white knit top, I try to pretend like I don’t know what he’s got up his sleeve. I tell myself to quit smiling. If I smile too much, he’ll know I know what’s up. My mouth keeps working its way into a smile, in spite of my silent directive that it not do so.
I locate the brown skirt, the one LoveShack asked me to wear. Then I find some thong sandals. They won’t be the best for hiking, but they go with the outfit, and they’ll do just fine. I pull my hair back, apply a little make-up, something I wouldn’t usually do for a hike, but today isn’t just any hike. It’s the first hike of the rest of my life, the one where he’ll get down on one knee, the branches of the tree will make the sun dance in patterns on his face, he will produce a ring from the pocket of his coat, smoothly, as if he’s practiced this motion thousands of times, as if his life depends on its effortless removal.
I will cry immediately, my mascara running in feathered lines down my cheeks, my tears making criss-crossed paths as they go and sweeping my blush along with them in the process. I will fall on top of LoveShack, straddling and clinging to him, my face in his neck, my tears on his skin, and he will know from this reaction that, of course, my answer is yes. Although I won’t actually say it, caught up as I am in the enormity of his gesture. The hike, the tree, the absolute most-perfect way to ask for my hand in marriage.
Once I’m ready to go, LoveShack tells me there’s just one thing left: He needs to blindfold me. He has a handkerchief in his hand for this purpose, which he ties around my face. Then he leads me out the door of the house, carefully guiding me down the stairs. I love that I trust him this much, knowing I won’t misstep in his care. And if I do, he’ll be there to right me.
We pull out of the driveway and, before I know it, he tells me we’ve arrived at our destination. By my calculations, we’re about 45 minutes away from the head of the hiking trail. I rework my image of what’s about to happen. Perhaps he decided to take me to a park in town, but even if that were the case, the drive should have been a little longer.
Before allowing me to remove the blindfold, LoveShack plays up the moment.
Honey, you said you wanted a ring, he says. So I’m getting you a ring.
A bright, metallic feeling moves through me. This must mean he’s taken me to the antique jewelry store in our neighborhood so I can pick out one of the old-fashioned wedding rings I love so much. How wonderful to include me in the selection of the ring.
You can take off your blindfold now, he instructs.
I do. And I see that we aren’t at the antique jewelry store after all. We are parked in front of a strip mall that contains a liquor store, a used vacuum cleaner store, and a tattoo shop. I ask what we’re doing there.
I wanted to get you a ring for Valentine’s Day. A belly-button ring. Remember how you used to want one of those?
I look up at the sign for the tattoo shop and realize they also do body piercings. I start bawling, but not the kind of tears I thought I’d be shedding on this day. Then I start screaming.
I can’t believe you did this to me on Valentine’s Day! You can’t just date a girl for three years, then blindfold her and tell her you have something special planned without her thinking you’re going to propose!
LoveShack, still not realizing the enormity of his blunder, laughs and replies, I said I was going to get you a ring, didn’t I?
I cry more and yell louder, Yes! And when you just said that, I thought you meant a real ring, a wedding ring! Not a belly-button ring!
I am inconsolable. I refuse to look at the thing in the seat next to me. The hurtful, cruel thing that has been in my life for three years. The thing that should have known me better than to treat me like that. (Should have known not to treat any woman like that.) That’s when I realize he is not the kind of man who will get down on his knee in front of one of my favorite trees to propose, let alone dream up such a plan in the first place.
Still, as I demand he take me home and swat away his attempts to reach out from his bucket seat and hug me in mine — as if he is a swarm of mosquitoes whose every bite is lethal — I know he’ll manage to right even this situation, to thrill and delight me with so many loving gestures during our lives together that sometime, long after we’ve gotten married, this day will become nothing but a funny story, one that will make me love him even more with every telling. (Or maybe not.)
letters to myself
September 20, 2008
How you allow men inside: through breath that parts your lips, is taken up in your lungs. They say your name and it threads through you like a weed vine. Their diamond stylus needles fall into your ruts, take up residence there, scrape gently along your ridges. Men pull from you what is within you and translate it as sound. You keep skipping, like a record. You keep skipping. You hold their names in your mouth, roll them around like rocks. When you speak, you return to them what they have breathed into you. When you speak, there is no sound, only motion.
from the sprigs* archives: boob job
September 19, 2008
* I wrote this piece Nov. 27, 2005. It appeared on my first blog, Sprigs, which most of you have never heard of.
I am lying on my stomach, my bare body covered only by a white sheet. The thread count is high, so the sheet feels like silk when it brushes against my back and ass. Music is playing softly in the background, something slow featuring wooden flutes.
I hear the doorknob turn, then Natasha steps into the room. The lights are off, the room lit only by three scented candles. Natasha is young, mid- to late 20s. She is thin with delicate features and long, brown hair that she’s pulled back. She giggles as she carries a bottle of warm oil across the room to where I am lying.
Natasha gently lifts the sheet, uncovering my left leg. She works the oil, which is mixed with sea salt, into my skin. With all the force her small hands and slender arms are capable of, she begins kneading my thigh and calf.
That’s right. I am getting a massage and exfoliation. I’m at a fancy spa in Victoria, British Columbia.
I don’t care that I don’t know Natasha, that we will probably never see one another again. I don’t care that I had to pay her to touch me like this. All I know is, this massage — which I thought would be relaxing — is actually quite hot. I haven’t been naked with a woman in a long time. (Sure, I am the only one who’s naked, but I’ll take what I can get.)
Plus, I know I am going to leave this spa without any trace of dead skin cells on my body. Natasha will see to that.
Just when I think the massage has gotten as good as it’s going to get, Natasha, who has asked me to reposition myself on my back, asks in her soft, high-pitched voice, Would you like me to do your chest?
I play it cool. Um … suuuure. She slowly removes the sheet from my chest. Standing behind my head, she leans over me, arms outstretched, her own chest practically touching my face. I try not to make any strange faces at the feeling of her hands working the oil and salt into my breasts.
When her pinkies sweep my sides, it tickles a little. I start to smile, only partly because she’s tickling me. I say, Sorry, I’m a little ticklish. She responds, Oh, I’m ticklish, too. She giggles. I giggle. Would you like me to stop, she asks. Oh … noooo, I respond.
When it’s all over, I leave her an enormous tip.
That was in August, the last time I visited Victoria. This past weekend, when LoveShack and I were visiting again, I made an appointment for the exact same spa service at the exact same spa. Yet things didn’t go down in exactly the same way.
It started out promising. Different room, different masseuse. But I am naked, and there’s oil and salt involved. All in all, things are looking pretty good. I notice at the outset, however, that there’s no music. And the candles aren’t lit. But I can look past those details. Any moment, the masseuse is going to enter the room. She’ll have an exotic name, and I will be minutes away from being felt up.
The masseuse, whose name I forget, gets things off on the right foot when she says, I’m just going to ask you to part your legs a little for me. Oh yeah, I am thinking, This is going to be good. But it immediately becomes apparent she doesn’t have the same touch as Natasha.
Natasha combined extreme pressure with intense abrasion. With her, I felt like a naughty girl who needed to have my naughtiness scrubbed right off of me. I thought I was going to have to scream STOP before she removed all the skin from my limbs, not just the dead skin.
Not so with this gal. She wasn’t digging into me with everything she had. And there was absolutely no giggling. Then, right before the part where she would reach second base, the worst thing of all happened: She quit.
We’re done now, she announced almost brusquely.
What? But what about the girls, I wanted to ask her, but I didn’t think it would be appropriate.
How could she be done with the massage without any titty-touchy? She didn’t even do my stomach. What the FUCK just happened here, I asked myself after she left the room.
She told me to take my time before coming out to shower off. So I laid there and did for myself what I’d paid her to do. I rubbed the salt and oil mixture into my own breasts and stomach. But it wasn’t the same. I feel myself up all the time.
As I took matters into my own hands, I wondered if the boob rub was an optional part of this service. Or had Natasha offered me a little something extra, if you know what I mean. Had Natasha given me the female equivalent of a ball rub? Images from that massage flashed before me. The candles, the music, the giggling, her chest in my face.
Had Natasha played me for a bigger tip? Or was this masseuse just shirking her responsibilities?
I would never know, because I couldn’t figure out a way to ask the spa’s managers without seeming like a perv. And I didn’t want to get Natasha in trouble if she was working the system. I might want to go back sometime and ask for her by name, after all.
from the sprigs* archives: piss
September 16, 2008
* I wrote this piece Jan. 20, 2006. It appeared on my first blog, Sprigs, which most of you have never heard of.
As a child, I had a strong desire to control myself and my environment, and that desire extended well beyond the areas in which I could exercise any degree of control.
This is how it came to pass that I peed on my paternal grandmother.
It happened when I was about five or six years old. She was on vacation with us at Lake Texoma, where my father loved to go fishing. For some reason, my grandmother had agreed to make the drive down to the southern border of Oklahoma with my parents and me. My grandfather may have tagged along as well, but that doesn’t matter. This story involves only me, my grandmother and my control issues.
I was in the bathroom peeing when I suddenly became aware of how well I could seemingly control my stream of urine. Off, on. On, off. I was able, with just a few flexes of the right muscles, to start and stop the flow with precision. In the excitement of the moment, I was convinced I could make just one drop of pee appear before stopping the stream.
Further, I somehow imagined the single drop would remain suspended in the air, as if my mind could control it once it left my body. As if through thought alone I could make that drop hang there as long as I wished to have it hang there — so everyone could see my achievement of producing only one drop of pee.
In my delusion, I rose from the toilet and ran, naked, into the bedroom next to the bathroom, where my grandmother sat on a twin-sized bed.
Grandma, Grandma, look at my pee, I said.
No, honey, I don’t need to see your pee, she replied.
I insisted, No, look. I just want to show you something.
Why don’t you go put your clothes on, she said.
Though phrased as a suggestion, it was clearly more of an order. An order given by an old woman becoming increasingly uncomfortable with the situation in which she currently found herself.
I was always a stubborn child. I knew I’d discovered something special, the ability to pee and then not pee at will. To overcome my body’s instincts and desires through focused application of muscular force. I wanted to share this discovery with her. She would see. Once I showed her, she would see how special this ability of mine was. And, in turn, how special I was.
So I peed.
I stood in the bedroom and peed all over the brown shag carpet, all over my grandmother’s feet. I was mortified. Couldn’t figure out why I hadn’t been able to control it in front of her. She gave me a look that said any hint of love for me which had ever flittered through her cold heart was, at that moment, snuffed out forever.
I ran, naked, from the bedroom, back to the bathroom from whence I’d come. I again sat on the toilet, this time rocking back and forth. What have I done, what have I done, I asked myself in rhythm with my rocking.
To her credit, my grandmother never told my parents about the incident. She didn’t have to. I’d already learned my lessons: First, pee has a mind of its own and can’t be controlled, especially not by a mere child. Second, don’t ever pee on someone whose love for you is bounded, else you are bound to lose their love entirely as soon as the warm rush hits their bare feet.
family album
September 13, 2008
Getting ready for Korea. Note the RefrigArranger on the table, one of their wedding presents.
Sometimes I pick at myself, at the way I look. Then I stop and think: How could I ever want to look like anyone other than the product of these two?
I can’t imagine two more beautiful people, and I am not just saying that because they are my parents. I truly do believe they are the most handsome couple to have ever set foot on this earth. And how I miss them. How I ache for them every day, every day. Despite everything.
All those long, slender fingers. And her nose even slants to the side like mine.
The job my father did until he died. Seen here doing his best Clark Kent impression.
Father in Korea, smiling.
My ears do not stick out like this, although this photo does explain why my nose is so long. I like that my father looks a little like Joshua Homme in this one.
Happy. Need I say more?
Several of the photos below of my mother were taken at Lake Texoma. This is where I grew up and grew into myself, even though our real residence was in a town two hours north and Texoma was just our weekend home. When my father died, we lost the lake, too. My mother couldn’t bear to go back there for years.
How can a man-made body of water hold a family’s identity? I can barely look at these photos of my mother there without crying. Which is to say, I can’t look at them at all without crying.
My mother doing her best Sylvia Plath impersonation.
The lake, the lake, the lake.
Yes, I inherited this body. Commence with the drooling. I even have her feet.
Notice the nails. She always paid attention to the details.
This is how she is to me now: a dream, an apparition.
I like my mother in this photo. I imagine her inhabiting this space: the big Oklahoma sky, wind pushing her white dress into her body, and her looking out, and out.
words cannot express: b
September 1, 2008
I was so embarrassed by it that I resisted wearing shorts, even on the hottest summer days when the sun seemed to take up the entire sky, shouldering every blue shade out of the way, and when tar lines meandering down the roads’ midsections rose to meet the heat, filling with pockets of air, before hardening again at night while we slept in our heavily air-conditioned bedrooms.
Even walking shorts only covered it when I stood up, not when I sat down and the fabric hiked up my leg to reveal that dark splotch with its strange thick hairs, the ones I later learned to shave off each day. But I could only do so much cosmetically. Concealer, even caked on, could not cover that blemish. And nothing could alter the texture which, had I held your hand to it without your looking, you would have sworn was not human skin at all but rather the tough exterior of some inedible fruit — something to be peeled only by thickly calloused fingers and tossed aside as soon as the fruit was free.
Blemish. That’s what I should have called it back then, since that’s what I saw it as. Something to hide, to be ashamed of.
A mark. That’s what my mother always called it. My birthmark, which by definition must have taken up residence on my body while I was still in the womb. Of course this means I held her responsible for it, for what she had done to me. I was also born with holes in my teeth, she told me, but at least I had all my fingers and toes. For that you should be thankful, she would always say.
It’s hard for a child to feel thankful for something she has never lived without and could not imagine living without. I didn’t even know anyone who did not have all their fingers and toes, save for a distant relative with a half-finger, which barely constitutes a missing digit.
And don’t we all have a distant relative like that? One who is so happy that when he sees you once a year, he scoops you up and for a moment you think about that deformed finger touching you, and later he tells you it’s OK to look at it, but when you do all you can think of is the manner in which is was cut off, which he delights in telling you over and over again while you squirm away and try, but fail, to not see him as anything less than fully human?
But the deformed finger makes him less than human, because as a child you cannot understand otherwise, which is precisely why I felt my birthmark made me less than human.
* * *
Thirty eight doesn’t seem old now, but when my mother became pregnant it was, according to her, considered a disastrously late age for a woman to give birth. That’s why she checked my fingers and toes as soon as I was born and why she was so relieved they were all intact.
She had delivered the news of her pregnancy to my father as they were driving to a mobile home dealer somewhere in Oklahoma. The plan was to select a two-bedroom unit from the available models. They would place the unit on a small lot near Lake Texoma, and it would serve as accommodations for their weekend fishing trips.
As they drove, my mother became increasingly nervous, she told me years later. She knew she had to tell my father and she had to tell him right away because the pregnancy affected everything about their lives — most immediately, and most notably, their mobile home purchase.
She didn’t want to tell him. Their children, a 15-year-old boy and a nearly 14-year-old girl, were becoming young adults. In just a few years, they would go off to college, and my father and mother would be alone again.
She must have seen that future clearly — as if time could be measured in inches, one inch equaling one year, and in four short inches, less than the length of her hand measured from the tip of her middle finger to the point where palm and wrist meet, it would be just the two of them driving to the mobile home, then slipping into their motor boat and slipping the motor boat into the water.
It would be just the two of them catching unsuspecting fish and being photographed for Lake Texoma Life, the flimsy monthly newspaper published in Northern Texas for the lake community on both sides of the state line. In those photos, my parents would stretch their catches out in front of them, one hand securing the caudal fin, the other pinching the mouth as it hung slack and open, like a screen door left ajar.
In these photos, my parents would open-mouth smile down at their accomplishment — my father not even modestly ashamed of his half-rotten central and lateral incisors, my mother giving no thought at all to her solidly constructed but markedly coffee- and nicotine-stained teeth.
The captions of each photo would invariably contain their names, the city where they resided, and the length of each catch, measured in inches. After each photo shoot, my father would ask when the issue was due out. On the appointed day, he would walk down to the bait shop situated at the end of a pier and grab a handful of copies so he’d have something to brag about to his friends back home.
But this would not be their future. No long afternoons, the two of them drinking beer on the boat and watching the marine radar for signs of activity. No peaceful, quiet drives to and from the lake with silence interrupted only by my father’s periodic encoded stutterings on the CB and the nasal lyrics of country artists wafting through the car as they detailed relationships far, or at least somewhat, worse than that of my parents.
* * *
Even before my mother had come to terms with the fact that her future did not look like she wanted it to look, she had to alert my father that his future also looked different. If she let him buy a two-bedroom that day and broke the news later, he would come unglued in the way he often came unglued. She was also terrified of how he’d react to the news of her pregnancy, but she felt that if he was going to be upset about the pregnancy, he’d be upset no matter when she told him. Best not to also have him be upset about his choice of mobile homes.
We’re going to need a three-bedroom, she said.
He didn’t understand.
How could he? Twelve years earlier, one of her eggs was fertilized but didn’t make its way out of her fallopian tube. It implanted itself there in the tube, and she lay on the couch in terrible pain — the doctor said there was nothing they could do for her and that waiting was the only course of action — until her fallopian tube burst, terminating the pregnancy. It left her scarred and nearly killed her. She was told she’d never be able to have another child.
So she had to walk my father through it, explaining to him that somehow, more than a decade later and right at that very moment, a life was growing inside her.
My mother’s own mother had done the same thing, gotten pregnant long after her son and daughter were born, when she was no longer supposed to be fertile. When she found out, my grandmother went to visit relatives in another part of the state, stayed with them for several months and returned home nine months pregnant. Belly sticking out to here, as my mother put it when recounting the story, holding her hand nearly two feet in front of her stomach for exaggeration.
My grandmother didn’t have to say anything to my grandfather when she returned. As soon as he set eyes on her, he knew he was about to be a father, again. It was my mother she was pregnant with — my mother whose existence was kept from my grandfather until it was too late for him to put up a fuss about it.
Perhaps my mother would have done the same thing when she was pregnant with me, let herself start to show, let people, including my father, come to their own conclusions. But she couldn’t do that because she knew there’d be a baby on those lake trips, and that baby would need a room of its own. She certainly didn’t want the crib in their bedroom.
My father didn’t react the way she thought he would. He wasn’t at all upset at the prospect of spending another 18 years of his life raising a child, of hauling a baby to and from the lake. The diapers, the crying and the formula. He was thrilled, probably much happier about it than she was. She hadn’t planned on any more diapers, crying and formula. She didn’t like the thought of their lives together not beginning in earnest until she was 56, and he was 60.
He told her it was a miracle, and he believed it. And what’s a little personal sacrifice where miracles are concerned?
* **
Birthmark. A blemish or soft, raised swelling of the skin that forms before or shortly after birth. Exact cause, unknown. Believed to occur as a result of an increased number of blood vessels in the skin. Birthmarks are not inherited and are not caused by anything that happens to the mother during pregnancy. The most common types of vascular birthmarks are macular stains, hemangiomas and port wine stains. Macular stains are also called angel’s kisses or stork bites.
* * *
When I was a child, I wasn’t familiar with all the folklore surrounding birthmarks, such as the Italian, Spanish and Arabic translations of the word, which all stand for “wishes,” since the marks were thought to have their root in the mother’s unsatisfied wishes during pregnancy. My parents’ friends would tease me from time to time about my being damaged so to speak. They hinted at the negative connotations birthmarks conveyed, and the suggestion of being marred was all it took for me to feel I was wearing the proof of my inferior design right there on my right thigh for everyone to see.
And there wasn’t just one. There were two. A second “stain,” located on my back, was roughly the same size and color at the one on my thigh: loamy, like our garden after my father had hand-tilled fertilizer in each spring.
The one on my back was easy to forget about, since I never looked back there without the assistance of a mirror and since, being young, I was not yet in the habit of checking my body daily from all angles for evidence of further erosion. But the one on my leg always drew attention from friends and strangers. When the heat did me in each year and I finally acquiesced, slipping a pair of shorts on before going to school, I was certain the questions would start as soon as the other kids came close enough. What is that? That, on your leg? Eew. Or something to that effect.
* * *
I finally took a shine to the birthmark on my thigh when I reached my early teen years. I fell into the habit of talking to my friends on the telephone for hours on end and, to occupy my free hand, I would draw on every part of my body that I could reach using a Bic pen. I always started with the birthmark on my thigh, and the adjacent territory, drawing it into a man wearing a top hat and carrying a cane. The design would work out from there, with people, animals, stars, hearts and squiggles reaching up to my underwear line and down to my ankles.
I would even say that I was sad when the family dermatologist said he wanted to remove both the birthmark on my thigh and the one on my back. A precaution, he said, since they put me at risk for skin cancer. While I was delighted at the prospect of having a normal-looking body, I was also attached to the ugly little things and didn’t want to see them go. By that time, I did not see them as part of myself but as something separate from me, which meant I could love them.
Also, because the birthmarks were removed shortly after my father died, that alteration of my body made me feel like I was that much further removed from him. This makes no sense, I know. It’s the same feeling I had when the dog he bought me died. The dog didn’t tie me to my father in any way, just as the birthmarks didn’t tie me to him. But they were part of who I was when I was born and therefore were part of whatever in him was passed onto me. This made their removal more than a dermatological procedure; it was a passage of sorts, a loss.
I made the mistake of watching the dermatologist perform the excision of the birthmark on my thigh. It’s one of the most graphic memories I have. The mark wading there, all cut out, a moat of my own blood and fluids filling up the space created by the doctor’s incision lines. The birthmark in the middle, defenseless, a dark castle about to be overtaken.
* * *
Why did I hate that birthmark on my thigh for so many years? It wasn’t only because of the name and what the word mark portends. Nor was it simply because I needed to have more to blame on my mother than my very existence. The crux of the matter was that the mark was visual proof of what my mother had passed on to me, thoughtlessly, and that would follow me over the course of my life: a small brown pock wherein my fate was sealed and which, before I’d even had a chance to become my own person, bound me to having a life no better than her genes would afford me. Even its removal could not change that fact.
oh dear god, not a fucking list post
August 29, 2008
Hell yeah, this is a fucking list post.
Why? Because someone (who I won’t name but three guesses as to who it is) says I need to post. I do everything that someone tells me to do. So let’s do this.
1. I dislike my site host. They can take the invisible ***** hanging from my invisible **** and suck on the hairy things as if they were designer candies. I don’t mean to be graphic (OK, I do), but my site host has left me no choice. They have been completely unresponsive to my requests to fix the server that my site is hosted on, or at least force the hosed-up site or sites that are also on my server to shape up because those hosed-up sites are affecting my site as well as Postal Poetry. And that gets my invisible **** in a twist, as if I were one of those two dudes in Puppetry of the Penis.
2. I dislike this blog template. It’s proving to be inflexible and downright annoying. I thought I could make it work, but apparently not. Sometimes you just have to learn when to walk away from an unsalvageable relationship. And sometimes you have to learn how to spell the word “unsalvageable” without misspelling it seven times first.
3. I had a boil most of the week. Furuncle is a better term. If you squint hard enough, the word “furuncle” looks like “funnelcake,” and everyone knows Mrs. Funnelcake and I like the word funnelcake.
4. My hamster ran off tonight. I found her. She was acting all cute and innocent when she waddled out from behind some crap I’ve amassed in a closet near her cage. But she screwed up my planned three-day vow of silence, that she did, since I ran all over the house screaming her name like this: “Trudy!!! Trudy!!! Truuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuudy!!! Trudeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeey!!!”
5. About that vow of silence: I decided to have a three-day vow of silence. Vocal silence, to be precise. I wanted to resist my impulse to speak, since working against impulses is always sometimes occasionally rarely a good thing. I wanted to verbally communicate only what was necessary which, in the case of a vow of silence, is nothing at all. I wanted to settle myself down, since I’ve been feeling fragile for the past few days for various reasons. And not allowing my body to reverberate with my own voice seemed like as good a way as any. Until Trudy got loose and loused it all up.
6. Someone I used to work with closely died yesterday. He was a good man, an outstanding employee, and a true visionary when it came to technology and communication.
7. Oh no! LoveShack just came home with some weird news. Sigh. Gotta jet.
from the sprigs* archives: double my pleasure (or, ‘the one where i use a lot of clichés about the weather’)
August 28, 2008
(photo credit :: Ten foot penis by j.a. holland)
Well, crap. I wanted to post something light and funny from the Sprigs archives today so I could get away from all the death and sad that’s in the air. But then I started reading this piece and remembered that Heath Ledger is in it, which means this piece is now full of death and sad. Fine. I will post this. But then I am going to lie down and wait for tomorrow to happen.
* I wrote this piece Nov. 18, 2005. It appeared on my first blog, Sprigs, which most of you have never heard of.
Today, I was with an acquaintance of mine at a bookstore. We were perusing the magazine section when he turned to me and said, out of the blue, Let me ask you this. Does the thought of two men together turn you on? This is not a typical question for this acquaintance to ask (after all, he is only an acquaintance), so I was a little taken aback. Until he explained that he was asking because the movie Brokeback Mountain (which he’d seen featured on a magazine cover) was being marketed to women.
Now, I don’t know what rock I’ve been under for the last, well, however long people have been talking about this particular flick. But I have clearly been under one. It is simply unconscionable for me not to know one of my favorite actors, Jake Gyllenhaal, will be getting hot under the buckle with fellow hottie Heath Ledger. I think my grabbing the magazine off the rack and tearing through it to get to the article on the movie answered my friend’s question: Yes, I am turned on by guy-on-guy action.
I didn’t always know this about myself, though there had been some signs. For example, I owned a couple of gay-and-lesbian poetry anthologies in the early ’90s, and I would sometimes become a little flushed when reading the poems written by gay men. But I didn’t realize I was attracted to images of men getting busy until …
Hold up. Let me set the scene for you. It was 1995, Kansas City, the dead heat of summer. The temperature was hovering at around 110 degrees, which, thankfully, included the heat index. It was so hot, you could have fried an egg on the sidewalk.* However, it was also so hot that nobody in their right mind would have entertained the thought of actually walking out into the blistering sun, finding a suitable patch of sidewalk and dropping an egg on it. Instead, people were sensible. They remained in the air-conditioned goodness of the indoors. Kansas Citians aren’t dummies.
I was living in a third-floor apartment with my friend/roommate, a gay man. We were not fortunate enough to have air-conditioning. My roommate was out of town, so I had the stale, festeringly hot place all to myself. But I couldn’t enjoy my solitude because of the oppressive heat.
I had to take my clothes off, not because I was feeling sexy but because they made me feel like I was wrapped in electric blankets. I got a bath towel and soaked it in cold water. That was a trick my roommate had taught me a week or so earlier. Poor man’s air-conditioning, he’d called it. I laid down on the faux-leather sofa in the living room and covered myself with the wet towel. It felt great. For about 10 minutes. At which point the towel was dryish and warmish, so I had to repeat the entire process. I would be trapped in this endless cycle all day: wetting down my towel, lying on the sofa, wetting down my towel, lying on the sofa.
I needed something to do, but without cable TV, my options were limited. I didn’t even have the energy to read a book. (Plus, holding my arm up to read would be work, which would produce heat, which would be completely counterproductive to my goal of cooling off.) My gaze fell upon my roommate’s gay-porn collection. What the hell? The TV was right there, and I wasn’t going anywhere anyway. I popped in a tape.
You might think this sounds pretty pathetic: naked girl covered in wet towel watching gay porn. But it wasn’t pathetic at all. Nope, I wasn’t pathetic watching that first tape. Or the second. Or the entire collection. Twice.
At first, I told myself I was just watching for research purposes. But that story doesn’t really hold up when you are on your ninth or tenth tape, although I did come away with some new moves I could try out on LoveShack. (Yes, I was dating LoveShack way back then. I wonder where he was that day. Lying on the sofa at his place watching lesbian-porn videos? Probably.)
I know what you might be thinking: I just watched all those videos because I was loopy from the heat. Not so. I was, in a word, turned on. (OK, that’s two words. But I wanted to avoid the word “horny” because I have an aversion to it. The word, that is. Not the state of being horny.)
Sadly, I was also literally too hot to do much of anything about it, an irony that was not lost on me at the time. (I think LoveShack got more than a spoonful of lovin’ from me later that night, though, once the temperatures dropped a smidge.)
Now, don’t start drawing any weird conclusions about this post, like thinking I am really a gay man trapped in a bisexual woman’s body. That’s just ridiculous. And please don’t leave here with the impression that I go seeking out gay porn. That’s not the case at all. In fact, I haven’t seen a gay-porn film since then. Watching a whole gay-porn video library in one day is enough to sate my desire for a good long while.
But today, a decade later, when I heard Jake and Heath were going to make out in Brokeback Mountain, well I knew it was time for another gay-movie fix. Even if I will be fully dressed in an air-conditioned movie theater. And even if it isn’t exactly gay porn.
*It wasn’t really hot enough to fry an egg on the sidewalk. Apparently, pavement has to be at least 144 degrees for that. Even at a sweltering 110 degrees, the pavement wouldn’t have been quite that hot. But the image worked in the post, so I used it. I’m a liar like that.
what can i say now that’s not as indistinguishable as two instruments hitting the same note at the same time with the same vibrato?
August 27, 2008
Dear Dave,
Since we’re being honest, I’ll offer this:
Vibrato has always made me sad.
Manipulating air, bending
a perfectly serviceable tone
for no reason other than to inject
something uniquely human.
Why must we put on such displays,
approach our music as if every piece
were a dirge that we should heave
and huff our way through, taking up
and expelling oxygen in bursts,
the way our mothers breathed
when they pushed us into the world,
begged to be rid of us and, once they were,
relaxed back into natural respiration.
Because vibrato is impossible on the clarinet,
it comes closest to the squawk of a goose.
And if you blow into the nose holes
of a goose that’s been felled, or so I am told,
you can play it’s clean brittle song.
* * *
Lirone has joined in on this conversation here. Dave and I encourage others to do so as well. What we’ve been doing is linking back to the poem we’re responding to in our salutation. If others join in, please do the same for the poem or poems you are responding to in your salutation. That way, everyone can follow the trail of the conversation.
This is my blog wherein I, Dana Guthrie Martin, write things and stuff. Most of the time, writing and I hobble along in a sort of three-legged race where there is no finish line. (more...)
Write like me: That’s the secret message of every workshop, isn’t it. — Sam Hamill
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beg, borrow, but don't steal
This work is licensed under Creative Commons. If you don’t credit Dana (by using her full name and preferably by linking back to the appropriate post) for however you copy, distribute, transmit or adapt her words, you are being bad. And naughty. And she will have her servant monkeys hunt you down and cut your hands off so you can never copy, distribute, transmit or adapt anyone’s work again and call it your own.
(Unless, of course, you were to use your butt cheeks to manipulate your keyboard with the copying, distributing, transmitting, adapting and whatnot, but Dana fortunately has only met one person whose butt cheeks are that talented. He could play a major third on a piano using nothing but his ass. She kids you not.).
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flick, flick, flick
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i cannot be bought
