IF.
If you met someone who chose to live of, but beyond, the façade of dogwood-flowered, South Battery coastline; of, but beyond, the high-heel click on terra-cotta patio and lime-rind-and-seersucker; if she chose to move beyond historic district fund-raising and neo-southern cuisine. . and who instead sought out the cracked concrete back porch of a Gullah-owned shrimp shack; who found inspiration in a shrimp burger with a side of under-the-table, Styrofoam-cupped American beer — would you leave her?
Could you? If she knew how to overthrow the manicured ritual of a Kiawah Island wedding weekend, where paunchy young men in Brooks Brothers knits drain designer beers at every emerald putting green, while their counterpart women, women whose southern lips have grown thin from years of décor-smiling, sit bunched up in air-conditioned villas, sipping premix mojitos? If. If she could be of this culture, yet scoff it all off for a midnight drunken joyride over marsh road? If her brown hair flew out the window, fanlike, as the two of you traded hard opinions of Paris ’68, of F. Scott v. Hemingway, or for that matter of the Only Ernest that Really Matters Anyway — Ernest Tubb? If your collective ceremonial garb was balled up on the backseat; if you had nine bucks between you for beer, gas and adventure? If you wound up chilly and huddled together on the predawn beach, wrapped up in a cocoon of musty, wedding-band quilt?
Could you leave her? And if you could, how on earth would you get over it?
GAS-N-SAVE is out of Winstons, so I buy a pack of generics. Give up the ten bucks and get the balance in fuel. I scan the door-side magazine rack while the clerk rings me up. The cover of a woman’s journal pimps a vibrant nineteen-year-old actress whose name we all know. Her pout and airbrushed flesh support the headlines “Sex Quiz: Rate Your Mate” and “Seductive Lingerie for Bedroom-Bound Babes.” I wonder if I need to start reading these things, to grow.
At the pump adjacent my car a young pachuco and his girlfriend — the passengers of the golden Cadillac convertible — yell at each other. He is wiry and postured, wearing baggy khakis, black kung-fu slippers and a white muscle shirt. Not American, perhaps not even a man; I look at him and critique this stereotype, as if he’s been snatched off the street by Production.
She, however, is radiant and original. Uncommonly tall. The sun is sheeny in her cascading black hair. Her skin color is somewhere between chocolate and butter, and I imagine her of royal lineage (Oaxacan being the only identifier I am familiar with). The syllables her wine-colored lips splay, the intermittent “fuck you’s” and “bastard’s,” as churned within glorious Spanish, crescendo over him with feminine mastery.
“HEY?” the Producer asked. “I mean, really, kid, why do you create?”
“Who knows anymore?” I replied.
“To connect, right? Right?”
“Yeah, sure.” I’d had enough. By that point I no longer bore an awareness of anything, save the platinum letter opener he used to pick at his fingernails. And the fact that I wished Marcy would come back.
“‘Yeah, sure,’” he mocked me. “That’s what all you cred-heads say: ‘I write in order to connect with people,’ or ‘Because I want to share in our universal human emotion,’ or some other humble horseshit. But, hey? Interview over, these darlings don’t really care about the Everyman. They’re too intellectual, too precious with their ‘art.’” He paused for effect, then pointed at me. “Now, THAT, kid, is selling out.”
“I’m listening to you. Now you listen to me. This script is—”
“Quit trying to be high-minded and slick. Focus on telling a story.”
THE pending violence between the Mexican couple is too real. I dive into myopic action: remove the hose from the pump, select the gas grade, unlock the gas cap, insert the spout. Remember a pitch I overheard, somewhere, about a band of Communists in the twenties who stormed the offices of the Los Angeles Times, slaughtering everyone on site. I think of the unassailable truth locked inside Marcy. Beneath the saline monuments in her chest she knew the idealism I was pitching, and she knew it wasn’t some elitist avoidance of sex or combat. Because I do know chicks. I do I do I do.
Maricón! Puto! You’re no man, you limp pendejo motherfucker.
I don’t dare look at them. Rather, I force myself deeper into memory as the gas fumes embalm me. I fix my eyes on the pocket watch, and inhale, and daydream.
At my going-away party, she said, “Don’t get all Los Angeles on us.”
“Impossible,” I replied. “You exist, here. So I’ll never really leave.”
Malapalacas con grapacomundos y fucking stupid cohbomayaca!
There, on the edge of the party guests, she hovers. She sparks and crackles and is a thousand times warmer than the California sun, but without a whisper of its dry suffocation.
Órale, homies, the Mexican woman says to the young vatos, and starts mocking her man. Look at the cabrón who thinks he can handle a real Chicana. Thinks he can—
The pachuco slaps the woman in the jaw, and I am right back in the Valley. Full of fire and love and bad timing and southern manhood, I have a good idea about what to do now. I know exactly what to do now.
He flicks his cigarette into her black hair, calls her a whore.
“Hey?” I shout at him. “Get away from her, man.”
Like a gunshot he’s on me, the first blow knocking stars into my vision. He strikes and smashes until I fall, the grated parking lot ripping my chin. He then mocks my accent while kicking my ribs—Get-uh-way frum her may-un! The vatos cut up in the background.
A kick to the head launches me beyond the liminal; I am home now, with her. I savor her electricity, respire her scent. Tangled up in a patchwork quilt, we watch the daybreak lighten the black-green Atlantic. We kiss, forever, beneath the dry rustle of palmetto leaves. Then I leave her. True story.
Ferric saliva, alongside a “Hurry the fuck up, girl!” drag me back to Southern Cal. My ribs hurt so bad that I shiver. I try to stand up but my knees buckle, so I just kneel on the oil-stained concrete. Wipe the blood from my mouth, spit.
I look up to see the Latina steal the last of my possessions from the car. She runs to join her partner in the golden convertible. They look at me and burst into laughter.
“Later, bitch!” the woman yells at me, then kisses her man deeply. As the car peels out, she slings my pizza like a Wham-O. When the Cadillac meets the street, she hurls my script in the air. A litter of loose pages arch and flit in the couple’s wake, tumbling high against the backdrop of endless L.A. strip mall.
Blending into the streetscape, highlighted by chrome and asphalt, I know this Mexican woman is no criminal. Rather, she is lovely, ethereal. Primed with personal agency. She steals my pocket watch and conspires to humiliate me, yet I can’t help but smile, and picture her a shade away from rediscovering some innocence, deep, deep inside.
Because I know about chicks.
Clean
THROUGH THE BATHROOM door I thanked Joy very much for her critique, and then stepped into the shower, which was scalding. No response came. I tucked my left arm behind my back, clasped my right wrist, and clenched. Forced myself to endure the temperature while staring down her beloved loofah. (This was all, of course, following shave and defecation, both of which had been peppered by Joy’s grooming suggestions.) Yes, I got in, tucked and clasped as always, and began to boil myself. After some minutes, my body vibrating like a tuning fork, no fistula for release, the water at last became sufferable, at which point I exhaled, clutched the bar soap, and began to clean.