by Odie Lindsey
“But,” I said.
“But women are more human than that, you know? Women want. They’re empowered and sexy and smart, and, hey? They’ve sure got us by the balls, right?”
This isn’t an important film. Not a period piece or art film. Not even a chick flick, really. It’s a romantic heart-tugger written to attract hyper-consumer, disposable-income teen girls. It’s as dense as popcorn, maybe lighter. A squishy wartime anecdote. Looking at the Producer I wanted to scream that he was missing it all. Adulterating the fantasy, sodomizing innocence. Yet because I am so tired of this exchange, so tired of how these things starve out, I just said, “Yeah, by the balls. I’m with you, and I’ll revisit immediately. Rewrite’s not a problem. In terms of basic plot, though, I think I can still keep the kiss, only add—”
He stabbed his finger into the black orb. “Marcy? Marcy, hop down here for a sec, will ya?”
SUBPLOT: Though vital is defined as time inside the stucco offices of Hollywood or Beverly Hills, affordable is Roscoe crossing Sepulveda, in the Valley. It is a confederacy of low-rider VW Beetles and drag-modified Japanese cars. It is bilingual title loans and barred windows, and windowless bars whose daytime clientele loiter in the parking lots, smoking joints, their backs against the pastel-colored beaches of mural-covered walls.
On the street in front of my rented duplex, near Roscoe and Sepulveda, statuesque black boys swagger by after school, their white uniform shirts slung over their bare, muscled shoulders. Among other glories, there is brilliance in the way they launch a seamless “fuck you” or “bitch ass” bark into the meter of their conversation, precisely as they pass me by, in order to showcase aggression, to let me know who owns the space.
At Roscoe and Sepulveda exist endless chop shops and immigration consultant offices and Kountry Kitchen restaurants and titty bars and grit on the curb, and sublime Mexican food and hot, dry heat, radiated by street signs and strip malls and gas stations with no car washes.
MARCY, in a black Italian suit, was quite sexy in that vague, TV way. She bit the side of her thick bottom lip and gave this snappy introduction that I will no doubt remember later, wondering where, amid the blur of boy sluts and beggars, poseur glamour and chrome, I heard it. The Producer provided her a six-second coverage of my entire story, before asking, “So you tell me, Marse. As a woman, are you satisfied by a flimsy kissing bout?”
In the notch between his question and her answer I thought of my pocket watch. Imagining the cadence of its second hand conjured my grandmother’s yawning drawl. In memory, she told me, again, the story of she and my Poppum’s first hours of love, just before he shipped for Europe, and later the Pacific theater. “We’s just a sliver past twenty,” G-ma said, noting the fitted grasp of their palms, “like a rhyme.” She told me that the night before he deployed, the Carolina moon shot through the trees, and lit up the ground in a jigsaw of leaf shadow. Unable to afford a phonograph, she said they waltzed to the croon of cicada, to slow, sidereal measure, the July humidity held at bay by the salty coastline breeze.
My grandparents, as their forebears had been, and as their children would be, were created by pending and consequent separation. They were sprung from a chasm generated by conflict. By man by woman by war—the end. There can be no other southern narrative.
As Marcy spoke I could almost feel the sublime, sticky heat of home: How it slicks your body, driving you to the honest edge of tolerance. How it begs you to dive down, beneath the cold convicted waters of the dead green Atlantic. True heat is at least substantial and wet, at least passionate.
“Osculation,” Marcy said, pulling me back. “I understand where you’re trying to go. The whole, like, woman-on-a-pedestal vibe? But listen to me—now. And remember this if you remember nothing else: that’s chauvinism, man, not chivalry. Period.” She stared at me for impact, then continued. “In reality? From the standpoint of both woman and viewer? After two acts loaded with the thrust of a countdown romance, I’d better be getting the love fucked out of me.”
My dear god, I wanted to fuck the love into her the instant her rose lips rested—but just as quickly realized my selfishness, and once more reiterated my opinion. My code.
That’s the fundamental difference out here. They have simply forgotten the past.
I drag to a stop at the multi-pumps outside a Gas-N-Save, prepared to part with this new, last ten bucks. The script falls quiet. The reflection of the watch hits the windshield. Pizza thaws, beer drips. A clutter of loitering little vatos in wife-beater T’s prop up on the far end of the store wall, burning cigs mixed with weed, their chests bowed out.
I walk over to prepay but freeze up when an enormous gold 1970-something Cadillac convertible squeals onto the lot. The velocity and violence feel like an ambush.
“HEY? Look, kid,” the Producer said. “Normally, I’d thank you and tell you I’d be in touch—and basically flush you out of this office, with more concern for my freakin’ ficus tree. But I like you. Really do. Your style’s strong and you’ve got germs of good ideas. So, hey? Let me impart some key advice. Get a grip on your audience. Translate your talent into something more modern.”
He excused himself briefly. Touched the black orb, and he commanded (to an assistant? to Marcy?), “On second thought, put a hold on the Argyle. Fuck the fusty Chateau.”
He kept calling me kid. He’s my age. Went to college with my cousin.
“What was I . . . ?” he asked. “Oh, yeah. Hey? I know what you’re thinking: This asshole’s asking me to sell out.”
“No,” I said. “I wasn’t.”
“Yeah, I know. The big bad sellout of your ideals. Christ, how often do I hear it? I’ll tell you how often. Every day, all day.”
“Really, I wasn’t—”
“But listen. You’re not selling out if you cater to what people want. Are you? Are you selling out if you’re sharing real emotions with a real audience?”
How can this be? I’m sold. So sold. Oversold. I couldn’t possibly sell more on this thing.
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.
There had been no showers in the desert for weeks at a stretch. There had been bitch baths in the tent, by flashlight. The sand scoured the folds of your body, was gritty in your waistline and nostrils, anus and lungs. Here, my white briefs were folded into thirds, and placed atop the cool closed lid of the commode. My towel and talc were at the ready.
At some point I was redeployed. Given back to lower Alabama, to the blanket of wet heat, the punctuation of air-conditioning. I then spent years in school because I couldn’t determine anything else with traction. Money is such a limp conquest. Bitch baths are when you wipe yourself clean with a rag. Joy was the girl who had sent letters of dull optimism while I was at war: tiny circles dotted her i’s; she promised to meet me on the base tarmac when I returned, etc. The loofah was a queer little bundle of lime-colored plastic netting, dangling by a soft rope from this hook on a suction cup. She bought it at a bath store in an outlet mall off I-10, and I made fun of it. And her.
And the university offered me a part-time thing immediately after graduation. Male department bigwigs asked me about the war during the interview, and I said only that I didn’t know what to say, and they nodded back at me and were silent, as if I were withholding something magical. Yes, they offered me this adjunct teaching thing, alongside this other job thing, where I show up at alumni fund-raisers and talk to rich or important men, my hands constantly scooping peanuts. Or rather, I don’t talk while the men nod and reflect on me and on war. I eat peanuts, peanuts.
Bo-ring, Joy says, her index finger like a pistol at her temple.
I stood beneath the piping-hot water and thought of these men, their nose hairs protruding like spider legs, their theoretical empathies and deconstructionist blurbs, and something clicked: though I was already clean, I decided to grab hold of that loofah, douse it in her verbena body wash, then lather myself.
It felt good and slick and yet grainy, explosive. Shhh, I thought. I hated that Joy was right, shhh. I then thought of the gay cowboy movie she recently made me watch, and wondered whether or not I had, would, or was turning homosexual. To counter this I started to hum to mumble to sing the lyrics to an old song by the Stone Temple Pilots, the one whose guitar riff sounds like a rape, before finally stumbling into thoughts on yesterday’s Ellen, which featured a southern trust-funder who made a documentary about being rich. He wanted to be not-rich, like, culturally, but without having to lose his actual money. He confronted his rich father about this with a video c
amera. I am a man, a man, the song says, maybe. I know you want what’s on my mind. I was so alone in that shower. The verbena reminded me of a Faulkner novel.
When your unit is preparing to redeploy home you have to use power washers to cleanse every single speck of Holy Land from all equipment: tanks, Humvees, tents, etc. Every goddamn speck, they order, as you stand there, your sweat evaporating before it even has a chance to lick the skin, the water pressure so intense it peels paint; so intense that when it touches you, when it barely glances the inside crook of your elbow, it gives you a third-degree burn. Happens so fast that it doesn’t even hurt—and then the skin is gone, and it does hurt, big time. Anyway, given all the other tasks you’ve had to swallow, cleaning sand off of armored personnel carriers seems anticlimactic, fucking stupid.
I brushed the loofah across my abdomen and thought briefly of my embarrassingly small TIAA-CREF retirement portfolio, and then of this quirky kid, Alex, who makes semi-decent grades in my Contemporary Issues class. He’s a frat boy, wealthy and light-brown-headed, with those madras shorts that all southern boys sport. I pictured his soft, swoopy bangs, and again worried that I might be homosexual, and looked down at my penis as the water spouted off the end. It did not stretch forth. I then worried that maybe my penis wasn’t stretching forth because of the severed ear that Alex brought into my office hours—but not because I wasn’t homosexual for him. I then decided to purposely think about the gay cowboy movie, and, conversely, about Joy fellating me, up and down, in tandem with her hand, and how fond I can be of this. There was no response to either. There was a ton of foam in the loofah net, in proportion to the small amount of verbena soap employed.
