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: 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.
from the sprigs* archives: topped off
August 22, 2008
(photo credit :: Fish by Jannie-Jan)
*I thought I should follow up my last Sprigs archives post, in which I allude to the bar my father built in the back of our van, with the actual post about the bar my father built in the back of our van. I wrote this piece Nov. 9, 2005.
So about that bar my father built in the back of the family van. I’ve already established that we were a drinking family. The adults in the family, anyway. And a little thing like driving wasn’t going to get in the way of that. Shortly after he purchased the GMC Explorer from the dealership, my father went to work tearing out the clothes-hanging-and-storage area at the back. He replaced it with a custom oak bar he built in his workshop.
On the left was a stainless-steel sink that drained into a 5-gallon plastic bucket. The idea was to fill the sink with ice upon departing for a road trip. You could stash small containers of alcohol in the ice. You could also use the ice for mixed drinks. On the left side was a compartment for the larger liquor bottles and glasses. The entire bar was accessible from inside the van if you knelt on the back couch, and a wooden cover could be thrown over the top in case the cops pulled you over.
Most of our road trips were only a couple hours each way. We’d drive to the same lake over and over again for weekends and vacations. My father loved to fish on that lake; my mother put up with it because my father loved it; and I didn’t know there was any better way to spend my time.
I did like the feel of being on the water. I’d sit at the front of the boat in my two-piece swimsuit until my skin turned a funky color, kind of a suntan-meets-sunburn thing. (This is the color my entire family turns when exposed to ultraviolet rays. Amongst ourselves, we look golden tan. But among other people, we look like burnt-orange crayons.)
As an aside, I fished only once. The catch made me so sad — writhing and staring blankly with a hook in its mouth — that I cried and cried until my father removed the hook and set the fish free.
The cops never did pull us over on the way to the lake, not with my father on the CB the entire drive. Breaker 1-9, breaker 1-9, he’d say in a southern drawl. Then he’d identify himself by his handle, The Cracker Jack, and ask if there were any pigs he needed to look out for.
The first time I heard that term, I didn’t understand why there would be animals on the highway or why it took a number of middle-aged men with crackling voices to keep tabs on these animals. But that was none of my business. My sole responsibility during those road trips was to mix drinks. I would travel from the front of the van to the back and from the back to the front, serving drinks like highballs to my father.
I would hand him the drink. He would thank me. Then he’d let me talk on the CB. I had come up with a handle, too. I can’t remember what it was, but it had the fluff-and-tickle ring of something a young girl or a hippie porn star would craft.
As my father sipped at his drink, pleased to know there were men on his tail keeping their eyes peeled for coppertops, I talked to the men and held their attention. Their voices would change when they spoke to me: Their pitch would rise, their drawl settling into an almost melodic rhythm. Most of them were professional truckers, and I wonder now how many had children at home that they didn’t see for days and weeks on end.
At my father’s side, I felt as if I was in the presence of a minor god. He would surf from one frequency to another on that CB, assembling a ragtag team of truckers to watch his back, front and sides the entire drive. He was a persuasive orator capable of making a man do something that just a moment before he had no intention of doing. He could have talked those men into turning around and driving the wrong way down the highway if he’d had the notion to do so.
And he was smart: Putting a little girl on the air really clinched the deal. These truckers didn’t want any harm to come to such a sweet thing.
Where the rubber met the road, he ruled, and I wanted to be just like him when I grew up. But for the time being, I was content simply to be in his company and learn from him as we inched along the interstate. I picked up the CB lingo, which I learned to use with authority. (That really made the men chuckle.) And I kept my father’s drink topped off, just like he liked it.
from the sprigs* archives: spines
August 18, 2008
*I’m working on piece today that I hope to share here tomorrow. I’m also doing a bunch of poetry-related stuff, namely coming up with grand ideas on how to manage Postal Poetry with my new partner in that endeavor, Dave Bonta, and working on a post for Read Write Poem.
In the meantime, I thought I’d share another post from my first blog, Sprigs, which I wrote Nov. 8, 2005. A few of the paragraphs are kind of long and I could probably do some editing on the piece, but whatever. I’m not doing that. I am just posting it, k? OK, fine. I fixed the paragraph lengths.
Last Sunday on PostSecret, a new postcard was added that confesses: “I never read to my children.” This got me thinking about my childhood and about our bookcase that had no books in it.
My parents weren’t big on reading in general, and they certainly weren’t big on reading to me. But carpentry was one of my father’s hobbies, and having built several sheds and two bars (one of which was in the back of the family’s van, but that’s another story), he was running out of things to build. So he started in on a different kind of project. It wasn’t something to park your lawn mower in, and it wasn’t a place to display your wine glasses in front of a mirrored surface. But it seemed important anyway, even if it wasn’t quite as practical as his previous do-it-yourself projects. So it was settled. He was going to build a bookcase.
Because he was a man who did everything big, it was no surprise that he built the mother of all bookcases. Suspended from the long wall of our den, it spanned the entire length of that wall. In the center, he positioned the room’s most important asset: a television set (which I must say is a most-appropriate choice for a bookcase). Back then, there weren’t flat screens, just large, unwieldy box sets. He insisted on a big TV for that big bookcase, but the bookcase wasn’t deep enough to accept something so deep.
So my father was left with only one option. He had to cut a hole in the wall of the house so the back of the TV could poke through. (There was a utility room on the other side of the wall, so the hole wasn’t too big of a deal. But it was a little strange walking into the utility room and being greeted by the backside of the television. It was as if the set as constantly mooning the room’s entrants.)
Once he’d finished the piece, he put my mother and me to work gathering up knick-knacks from other areas of the house. We then loaded these items onto the thick oak shelves of the new bookcase. One item we gathered stood out from the rest: a twisted-wire tree that came in a kit. You had to twist the trunk and branches into shape and, if I recall correctly, hook the end of each wire around a metal leaf to make the tree appear full and, well, leafy.
My mother and I bought it on sale at Anthony’s so we could build it together. It was one of those projects that seemed like a good mother-daughter endeavor when we first embarked on it. But soon after we’d removed the contents from the box, we knew we were in trouble. The tree pictured on the box looked perfect, like that fruit-bearing tree in the Garden of Eden (without all the religious baggage). But it would have taken an act of God to make the tangled metallic mess spread out in front of us into any semblance of the image on the box.
In the end, our tree looked like something straight out of hell. There weren’t enough leaves, and the branches were deformed. We twisted and twisted those wires, but simply could not make it look like any tree we’d ever seen, except perhaps a tree that had been struck by lightning one too many times and needed to be cut down for safety’s sake.
This project wasn’t only hard on the twisted little tree; it also brought tensions to the surface between my mother and me as we bickered over how to remedy the problem and make the tree a pleasure to behold. She thought we could turn it so the best angle would be displayed. I argued there was no best angle; we should return the monstrosity and get our money back. But it was a clearance item, so we were stuck with it.
We put it on a shelf, along with some other equally pathetic tchotchke. These items were lost against the mass of the TV and the dark wood of the bookcase. The bookcase needed something more, but what?
It came to my father a few months later: encyclopedias. He purchased a set of 1979 Encyclopedia Britannicas, all bound in faux brown leather with blue and maroon bands on their spines that indicated in gold lettering what part of the alphabet you were about to dive into.
They filled out the space rather well. They weren’t books, exactly, but it was a start. They even made the mangled tree glimmer a little more brightly. And even though I never saw my parents look anything up in those encyclopedias, at least I knew they had the option. I always hoped they’d crack open a volume between mowing the lawn and hitting the liquor cabinet. Hell, maybe one day, they’d even read an entry or two to me.
from the sprigs* archives: what was(n’t) up
August 14, 2008
*Sprigs was my first blog, which most of you never laid eyes on. I wrote this post Dec. 14, 2005. It’s part three in a three-part series about meeting LoveShack. Part one can be found here and part two can be found here. I am sharing the series because Deb asked me how LoveShack and I met, and it’s (obviously) a long story.
In the mid-’90s, Westport was a trendy Kansas City hangout. People would flock there at night to frequent the bars and clubs. If you were lucky, you could watch a piss-drunk guy whip out his dick and urinate in front of you on the sidewalk. Those of us who didn’t want to get pissed on would hang out at tamer Westport establishments, like Broadway Café (which was more of a coffee shop than a true café).
It was a comfortable evening in September of 1995 when LoveShack and I sat at a table outside the café, him with a coffee, me with a crumbly baked good and probably something fizzy to drink. (I hadn’t yet become addicted to Coca-Cola.) We watched folks pass: the students; the drunks; the women dressed like sluts in hopes of snagging a man; the men walking along, eyes fixed on the asses of the women who were dressed like sluts.
We were having a lovely time. We were in love after all. We’d professed our feelings early on, had been having great sex, and had practically moved in together, though we still maintained separate apartments. I would grab my English homework, a change of clothes and miscellaneous toiletries, then head over to his place most nights, where we would stay up late talking about nonsense, watch late-night reruns of Seinfeld while he brushed my hair, and have sex — did I mention we were having great sex? — before falling asleep in each other’s arms.
Since we’d been together six months, I thought it would be neat to reminisce about when we first met: how awkwardly I’d asked him out, the log roll, and how — when we were fleshing out the specifics of the date down at the deli — I’d accidentally blurted out, I might just jump over the counter and then jump you, after which I’d been mortified.
Yes, this seemed like a good time to have a laugh about all of it. As part of this discussion, I turned to LoveShack and asked, Why did you ask me to leave so early on our first date, anyway?
There was silence. (Not silence, really. LoveShack was silent, but the people passing by were pretty rowdy.)
He asked me not to get mad if he told me.
I promised, even though I hate promising not to be mad about information that has not yet been shared with me.
* * *
I need to back up a little here. Calm down. I’ll get to it, but I should first set the scene to help you make sense of what LoveShack is about to tell me. This is, in part, a story of how different two people’s perceptions can be. Here is how I would reconstruct the day I asked LoveShack out:
(You’ll notice I’ve left out all traces of my awkwardness.)
A sexy woman dressed in a provocative but not compromising way enters the deli. She moves gracefully across the room, takes a seat. If this had been an old black-and-white film, she would have asked the man behind the counter for a light. But it is 1995 and she doesn’t smoke, so she orders the log roll instead. As she nibbles ever so femininely at the roll, she bats her eyes at the man, then locks in on him as if to say, You are mine, in a take-charge, but still feminine, way. She charms him with her deep, lusty voice. She is assertive. She knows what she wants, and she wants him.
And this, apparently, is how LoveShack saw things that day:
(You’ll notice I’ve exaggerated this scene slightly for effect.)
A sexy woman enters the deli. She is well-manicured, every detail flawless. She moves gracefully across the room, almost too gracefully, as if she’s spent time rehearsing these movements. She’s so fluid, she seems unnatural. Before she takes a seat, he notices she’s a little taller than the average woman. She orders the log roll and, as he hands it to her, something feels off. (Why had she gravitated toward this particular dish? What did it signify?) As she tries without luck to cut into the roll, she stares the man down intently. She is quite possibly the most aggressive woman he’s ever encountered. If this had been an old black-and-white film, she would have offered him a light. She was that take-charge. He notices how low her voice is. It seems a little raspy, somewhat affected.
Our difference in perception is important. It establishes why I was so shocked by LoveShack’s confession.
* * *
So where were we? Oh yes, I turned to LoveShack and asked, Why did you ask me to leave so early on our first date, anyway?
There was silence.
He asked me not to get mad if he told me.
I promised, even though I hate promising not to be mad about information that has not yet been shared with me.
I thought you might have been a man, he said.
I responded, You what I might have what a what?
* * *
Most of you have not seen me in person, so you don’t know how ridiculous this thinking is. Nobody else has ever accused me of being a man. (Not that it would be an accusation, really. There’s nothing wrong with being a man. I’m just not one.) I will try my best to explain LoveShack’s bizarro thinking, some of which I touched on in the exaggerated scenario above. It boils down to two things, really:
1. He’d just seen The Crying Game.
2. He thought I was too feminine to actually be female.
I don’t really need to explain the first item. It speaks for itself. So let’s break down the second item. We will herein examine all the evidence LoveShack presented in support of his hypothesis that I might have been a man:
A. I was moving in a self-conscious way.
Sure. I was trying to be sexy. What man wants a clumsy woman? Was it affected? Of course. Was it something I learned as part of my overall plan of changing my gender from male to female, something I mastered between getting breast implants and learning how to tuck my penis between my thighs? No.
B. I had a low, raspy voice.
OK. I can see his point on that one. My deep, sexy voice is a little drag-queeny. I’ve learned my lesson. I will never use that voice again.
C. I was a bit tall for a woman.
True, but he is a little shorter than the average man. That didn’t make me think he was a woman in drag.
D. I was aggressive, almost like a sexual predator.
I admit I have a pretty wacky sex drive, and it leads me to do some intense things. I will also admit I think more like a man when it comes to sex, eschewing foreplay and cuddling. (Cuddling: barf.) Finally, I will admit I came on a little strong with LoveShack. But still, that doesn’t mean a penis was responsible for my actions. I am this way all on my own, little old estrogen-laden, card-carrying-female, vagina-having me.
This next one is kind of embarrassing. But it’s essential to the story, and LoveShack says I have to include it.
E. Ahem. My pelvic bone was ever-so-slightly noticeable.
Keep in mind, I was very, very thin at the time. My hip bones jutted out, my ass had no padding. From head to toe, I was all kinds of boney. And this meant my pelvic bone was, as I said, a teensy bit discernable with the naked eye, even through my clothing, which made LoveShack think … you know … I might have had something taped down, down there. I did not, for the record, have anything at all taped down, down there. I had only standard-issue girl parts.
* * *
That’s it in a nutshell (no pun intended). LoveShack had a twinge of a feeling that I might be a man. And on our date, especially when we got to making out, he was afraid he might encounter something he didn’t want to encounter. He even brushed his arm against my crotchal region at one point. I thought that had been a mistake. But during our conversation outside the café, he divulged that he was testing the area for signs of unusual activity.
LoveShack is a very normal, balanced human being. I feel the need to impart this fact, given what I’ve shared with you. Also, he is open-minded, which he proved by going out with me again, even though I might have had a log roll down my pants. But I had no such apparatus and, as soon as he got laid, his fears were allayed. Of course, I could be post-op. Just kidding. I promise I am not.
(But I do have an invisible penis, which is a story for another day. Or for never.)
from the sprigs* archives: no more moves
August 13, 2008
*Sprigs was my first blog, which most of you never laid eyes on. I wrote this post Dec. 13, 2005. It’s part two in a three-part series about meeting LoveShack. Part one can be found here. I am sharing the series because Deb asked me how LoveShack and I met, and it’s (obviously) a long story.
I talk a lot. That probably comes as no surprise to those of you who’ve been reading my posts. I write like I talk, only the writing is a little better because I have the ability to review, edit and fill in details I’d usually forget or gloss over in conversation.
I’ve been told I give very complete answers to questions, which is why job interviews are a nightmare. I find it difficult to limit responses to between 20 seconds and 2 minutes each, the recommended time range for answers to interview questions. Two minutes tops? That doesn’t cut it. I end up giving half answers, quarter answers, tenths of answers — and interviewers are left to fill in the blanks.
My longwinded nature makes for long posts, and I appreciate your hanging in there with me as I flesh stories out. Take my post yesterday. It started as a meme I’d seen on some other blogs, including Octopus’ Garden. I’m sure you’ve all seen this meme.
The idea is to write about what you were doing 10 years ago, five years ago, one year ago and yesterday. I started thinking about 1995, 2000 and 2004. These were important years in my life. I might even call them pivotal years. So I was off writing and, true to form, I started in on a very complete answer. Before I knew it, I’d written 1,300 words or so about a couple of days in March of 1995. I am not really finished with the meme yet, and as long as I find this project entertaining, I think I’ll keep chipping away at what I was doing in 1995.
So here goes.
It was March 12, 1995. LoveShack picked me up for our first date in his rundown Honda Civic that had been in a huge accident while its previous owner was at the wheel. The car had been deemed a total loss by the owner’s insurance company, and LoveShack offered to buy it for a few hundred dollars. The car wasn’t very pretty but it still worked fine. He never really treated it with respect, though, because it was literally a reject of a car (with the salvage title to prove it).
So he trashed it. That is, he treated the back seat like a giant trashcan, throwing all manner of things back there, including apple cores, paper, soda cans and chicken bones (turns out he wasn’t a vegetarian, even though he worked in a vegetarian deli). I am not a person who keeps my own vehicle immaculate, but this was over the top. I could barely handle the smell of the car’s interior — dust mixed with organic and inorganic decay.
But I overlooked it. We all have our shortcomings. And his fingers wrapped around the steering wheel provided a huge distraction from the unbecoming state of the back seat. He drove me back to his apartment, which was spotless. Aaaah. This is the kind of cleanliness I could really get into, I thought. The place was decorated well, but not too well. He and his roommate had a shabby-man-chic look going. He had a room devoted to guitars and music, which I found irresistible (not the room itself, but the fact that he had musical talent and a room dedicated to musical expression). I’ve always dated musicians.
(With the exception of my first boyfriend, who didn’t play an instrument and couldn’t hit a single note on pitch. Not a one. His renditions of Beatles tunes made for really interesting listening. Like I said, we all have our shortcomings.)
LoveShack and I went in the kitchen and started making dinner together. We’d decided beforehand that this would be a nice first-date activity. While he was getting the blender set up, I saw that his hands were shaking. He told me he was nervous, which I’d gathered from his hands shaking. He continued: He hadn’t dated a lot of women; he’d just come off a long relationship; he wanted to make a good impression on me. God, his divulgence was so endearing, I wanted to jump his bones right there in the kitchen.
But I resisted that urge until after dinner, when we’d made our way to the loveseat. He had a copy of Gray’s Anatomy on a nearby bookshelf, something left over from a college class he’d taken. Sensing we were about to kiss and suddenly nervous myself, I hoisted the reference book off the shelf, dropped it in my lap and began thumbing through the pages, landing somewhere in the section on “female organs of generation,” which made me feel even more awkward. It was like having an advertisement on my lap that said, Hey, lookie here at what’s awaiting you under my dress.
He didn’t notice the book. He was taking off his glasses.
He was leaning toward me.
My nerves must have made me take a deep breath
as if I were going to be underwater
for who knows how long.
Then his lips were on mine, and we were off.
I was no longer nervous. He was no longer nervous.
Our organs of generation were throbbing in unison, and I was ready to strip down naked with this shy musician I hardly knew, to let his hands play me like an instrument.
(This is not terribly characteristic of me, by the way. I usually dilly-dally when it comes to sex. My first boyfriend and I waited almost a year before doing it. Having said that, I do have to admit that the amount of time I wait with a partner seems to be about half the time I waited with the previous partner. Good thing I married LoveShack; if that sex-waiting-period trend had continued, I would eventually have been sleeping with people before even meeting them.)
(OK, the analogy I made in the last sentence doesn’t really work, but I don’t care. I think it’s funny, so I am keeping it.)
So here’s what went down that night: nothing.
NOTHING!
Nothing went down. Nobody went down.
Everything appeared to be going great. In my head, I was listing all the reasons I could not sleep with him on the first date. I was also making a parallel list of reasons I could disregard those reasons and sleep with him on the first date — without seeming like a slut. LoveShack and I had worked our way into a horizontal position on the loveseat, and I was sooooo ready to put out when he curtailed our activities by saying, I think we should call it an early night.
I got my stuff together, and he drove me home in his crappy car, whose putrid stench seemed much worse than on the ride there.
Blogger’s Note: I’d love to keep talking about this, but I’ve already rambled on so. I guess I’ll have to take this topic up again tomorrow. There is a very interesting reason LoveShack took me home so abruptly. You will never guess what it was.
from the sprigs* archives: fingered
August 12, 2008
*Sprigs was my first blog, which most of you never laid eyes on. I wrote this post Dec. 12, 2005. It’s part one in a three-part series about meeting LoveShack. I am sharing the series because Deb asked me how LoveShack and I met, and it’s (obviously) a long story.
It was 1995. I’d just separated from my first husband. I had seen LoveShack on several occasions, even before my husband and I split up. He worked at a vegetarian deli I frequented. I have to confess that, although the quality of the food was highly variable, I went back again and again in no small part because of LoveShack’s warmth, courtesy and the look of his delicate, long fingers as they held whatever dish he handed me.
I would close my eyes and imagine those fingers trailing along my breasts or neck. Or even better, running along my scalp, making their way through my hair. If he can handle a stuffed squash that way, just think, I thought, what he could do with me.
I moved all my things out of the house my first husband and I rented, then I did what needed to be done to give my newly leased apartment that lived-in feeling: I set up a place to write, plugged in my television and got my stereo hooked up. Once I was all settled in, it occurred to me I was free to date whomever I pleased. I hadn’t been in this position for three years, since my husband and I had been married for two years and we’d dated for a year before that.
Suddenly, being able to date again intrigued me. I decided to make a list. Not an actual list, but a mental list of suitable candidates. First, I wanted it to be a man. (I don’t know why. That’s just the place I was in at the time, I guess.) I came up with a short list that included a guy from my Shakespearean Drama class, the delicious guy from the deli (that was LoveShack, but I didn’t know his name at the time) and a couple of other men who populated the list briefly but whom I quickly crossed off for one reason or another.
So it was down to Hot Shakespeare Guy and Delicious Deli Guy. I took a good, hard look at Hot Shakespeare Guy in class the next day. He definitely had potential. On the up side: thick wavy hair, nice build, English major, writer, silky voice. On the down side: I’d heard he liked to play golf, but I was trying to keep an open mind.
I made my move after class. OK, truth be told, he made the move. He’d been sending me signals all semester, but nothing had materialized until that day. He must have picked up on the fact that I’d been checking him out. We started talking after class, and everything was going well until I noticed his fingers. They were short and kind of fat, like Vienna sausages. Not at all like Delicious Deli Guy’s hands. I imagined Hot Shakespeare Guy pawing at my naked body with those things, as if I were his putter or nine-iron, but I didn’t want to write him off. Not yet. Not just because of Vienna sausage fingers.
But then he started in about Shakespeare. He didn’t “get” why we had to read a bunch of crap by some dead guy, he said. Now I was concerned. I began to back away from him. He continued talking, telling me he was a modern writer, after all, and what did Shakespeare, or any other writer who wasn’t contemporary, have to do with modern writers?
It was clear this man’s defects went well beyond the chubby little stumps he called fingers. He was one of them: a dead-writer hater. You know the ones. They’re the writers who only wanted to write, write, write and not be bothered with actually reading the work of other writers, especially those who employed words that might need to be looked up because they’d fallen into disuse over time or who used meter and rhyme to advance their stories.
This warranted a reaction. Rather than continuing to back away from him, I shifted gears and moved closer. I was all riled up. I let him have it. I can’t remember exactly what I said, but it was something that started with How dare you, ended with poser, and had the phrase call yourself a writer tucked in the middle. Then I made my dramatic exit through the ornate, oversized doors of Haag Hall, not even looking back once at the glorious head of hair I was leaving behind.
A few days later, I made plans to visit the deli for lunch. I would arrive in something sexy but not slutty, intoxicate Delicious Deli Guy with the pheromones I would shoot into the air like a human pheromone atomizer, and that would be that.
In reality, I was undone by my nerves the moment I arrived. I ordered something completely inedible, a dish called a “log roll,” which appeared to be a whole zucchini with only the top and bottom sliced off. True to its name, it was as hard as a felled tree. My disposable plastic knife and fork were no match for it. This dish vexed me. It was impossible to be delicate while handling such a tough vegetable entrée.
I felt the pressure to perform. If I couldn’t take control of something on my plate that resembled a hard cock in length, girth and, well — hardness — what would Delicious Deli Guy (erroneously) assume I’d be like in bed?
I had no choice but to put down my utensils, slide my log roll to the side, and turn my attention to the looking-and-acting-sexy portion of the program. My main course that day wasn’t the log roll, after all. It was Delicious Deli Guy. I made small talk with him using my seductive voice, and I found every excuse to look him directly in the eyes.
Within minutes, he had disappeared out the back door of the joint, leaving me alone with his co-worker, who took the opportunity to ask me out.
Dammit! My charms appear to be working, but on the wrong man, I thought. I declined the co-worker’s offer. He seemed dejected. Under other circumstances, I would have been more sensitive to the co-worker’s feelings, but I had to do some recon, and quick. (This was a love-or-lose situation.) I asked what his friend’s name was. LoveShack, he told me. I asked if he was seeing anyone. No, he isn’t. Huh. I couldn’t figure it out. Why weren’t my moves working on him?
LoveShack came back in the deli a few minutes later. Turns out my eye contact had made him nervous. He didn’t know what I wanted from him. Is there some schmutz on my face or shirt, he wondered. After checking himself out in the restroom mirror, he went out back to smoke a cigarette and take a breather from the intense whatever-the-fuck I was doing to him. When he returned, he was skittish and barely looked at me. I took my cue, paid for my blasted log roll, and left.
My plan had not gone as smoothly as I’d hoped. But I couldn’t let it go. There was just something about him. He hadn’t said anything offensive about dead writers, he didn’t play golf, he worked at a vegetarian deli, and he had fingers I wanted to suck. When I got back to my part-time job on campus, I grabbed a phone book, looked up the number for the deli and called him. Here goes nothing, I thought.
I don’t remember our exact conversation, but it went something like this:
Me
Yes, is this LoveShack?
LoveShack
Um, yes.
Me
This is the girl with blond hair, the one who ordered the log roll for lunch today.
LoveShack
Oh, was everything OK with it? I’m sorry. It wasn’t very good, was it?
Me
(lying) Yes, it was great. (slight pause) Do you remember who I am?
LoveShack
I remember you.
Me
Oh. (noticeable pause as I muster nerve to blurt out next sentence) Well, I was wondering if you’d like to go out sometime.
LoveShack
Sure.
Me
(shocked and ecstatic, and coming off totally uncool) REALLY??? You would? Greeeeeat!!!
I know we talked more after that, but that’s all I remember. I don’t even think I told him my name before asking him out. This was the only time I’ve ever asked someone out on a date, and that story shows why I should never be allowed to ask anyone out again. LoveShack was very patient with me through that whole awkward mess. He is a wonderful man, and he makes a phenomenal veggie sandwich. I still get jealous of bread when I see the way he takes it in hand.
from the sprigs* archives: punch-drunk love
August 10, 2008
*Sprigs was my first blog, which most of you never laid eyes on. I wrote this post Feb. 23, 2006.
We were in Home Economics, which meant I was in a pretty bad mood already, since I was terrible at sewing and couldn’t even get the fabric for my simple kitten and camel patterns cut out correctly, at least not without several attempts and a number of scoldings from the teacher — an old chunk of a woman perfectly suited for homemaking tasks like cooking and sewing. And perfectly happy to let you know when your seams were too close to the edge of the fabric or you forgot to lock your stitch.
Getting the thread through the sewing machine was a chore as well. Once I got that done, the whole spool would turn into a tangled thread-wad when I commenced with the actual sewing. Also, I would inevitably sew the wrong sides together or poorly distribute the stuffing inside the creature, so that it looked as if it was afflicted with a bodywide case of cellulite: understuffed in some areas; busting the seams in others.
After half an hour of struggling with sewing, the teacher would have us clean up our mess, a task I detested almost as much as the sewing itself. Then she would usher us into the kitchen for lessons on cooking, which I also detested (perhaps to an imperceptibly lesser degree). The other girls, and even the stray boys in the class, took to it all with ease, while I struggled to correctly read the level of the liquids in my measuring cup.
Any time I began to feel I was making progress, the taste and appearance of the dishes I prepared reminded me otherwise.
It was in that kitchen that the incident transpired. (We’ve established what kind of mood I was in, so you know things aren’t going to turn out well.) My best friend Dena and I were talking about the upcoming Sadie Hawkins Day dance, an annual event in which the sixth-grade girls asked the boys to a sort of pathetic little shindy held in the gym. (Actually, I shouldn’t say it was pathetic. I wouldn’t know, since no boy would deign to attend said event with me. I’m just playing the odds here in assuming that any dance held in a gym must by default be pathetic.)
Dena figured out I liked this boy named Brent. And boy did I ever like that boy named Brent. He had perfect feathered hair, was skinny as a rail and, as if that weren’t enough, he was funny, too. He was, in short, a 12-year-old Conan O’Brien (sans the over-the-top self-mocking silly-dances performed five times a week on NBC). Problem is, Brent didn’t like me, which I had just recently learned after asking him to the dance during Spanish class. He turned me down, accusing me of having old lady hands and saying he didn’t want to be seen with anyone who had hands like that. (He was right. I do have old lady hands, always have. But that doesn’t affect my dancing ability or my capacity to love, now, does it?)
So when Dena started teasing me in front of the entire class of budding chefs and seamstresses, I freaked. I know she was my friend and all, that we rode our bikes to and from school together every day and that she even let me lock my bike to hers on the rack using her lock, which was very generous and all. I in no way mean to discount her meritorious qualities. But still: I freaked. I couldn’t let people hear her teasing me. I imagined the entire school getting wind of my unrequited affection and my not being able to walk through the halls, play on the berm at lunch or sew a deformed stuffed animal without them chanting, in unison, Old Lady Hands loves Brent! Old Lady Hands loves Brent!
Before I knew it (and before my human brain had time to register and override my animalistic brain), I’d punched her, squarely, in the gut.
(At the risk of editorializing, I want to take a moment to point out that I was not, generally speaking, a bad girl. And I really didn’t go around causing trouble, despite this story which I admit does not depict me in the most flattering light.)
I couldn’t believe what I’d done. I was like one of those otherwise rational, compassionate and peaceful heroes from a comic book who harms someone without intending to, in the heat of the moment, driven mad in triplicate by passion, fear and anger. I was Batman under The Joker’s influence, running my Batmobile over innocent bystanders in my delirium.
But there was no Batmobile, only my left fist. No inadvertent slaughter, only Dena folding in half at the waist beside the kitchen’s laminate island, like a long roll of dough flopping over after unsuccessfully being balanced on end by some insouciant classmate.
Later, as I sat in the principal’s office answering the questions she spooled out in monotone, I knew my life would never be the same. I wasn’t a girl who got taken to the principal’s office. I wasn’t a girl who hit people, especially not my very nice, if somewhat publicly taunting, best friend. But as soon as I confessed to the principal about Brent and my feelings for him, her face softened. She understood.
Perhaps at one time in her life, some lanky boy had taken root in my principal’s heart. Perhaps she laid into the girl who teased her about him, made the girl crumple, ended up in her principal’s office, and was never able to get on friendly terms with that girl again. I bet from that day forward my principal had to ride her bike to school and back alone, buy her own bike lock to keep her baby blue three-speed Tamara bicycle safe, and keep whatever her heart ached for tucked away in a poorly sewn pocket, where nobody else could ever see it.
* * *
Now I’m outta here: Off to see Deb in Portland. w00t!
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...)
The poem on the page is only a shadow of the poem in the mind. And the poem in the mind is only a shadow of the poetry and the mystery of the things in this world. — Stanley Kunitz
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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
