by Shaw Sander
“On my way to the airport. Effete cooking contest I’m judging in New York. Are you sleeping? Eating? Mon Dieu.”
“Sort of.”
Cora had played on the singing sandy-white beach with me as a Northern Indiana child and we had done guerilla theatre on Chicago’s L, pulling strangers into our private play. Since Cora was exceptionally beautiful, her hair like spun silk, she could captivate any audience. In her Help Me Mister gig, she’d exclaim with joy at seeing an old friend again, the stranger taken aback, insisting she was mistaken, then she’d stage whisper that she was being followed, point to someone shady-looking and beg the innocent pawn to play along. Her puppy-dog eyes were irresistible and the poor schmoo would talk loudly and effusively, riffing on people they theoretically knew, both of them making things up for the entire ride.
In jail for five hours for hitch-hiking on Interstate 94 outside Chicago, the Sunshine lawyer bailed Cora and me out as soon as they’d heard. With our parents’ phone permission to thumb a ride, the cops had to let us go, free to stand back on the Interstate just in front of the “no hitch-hiking” sign. Double-daring fate, we’d stick our toes over the imaginary line, then yank them back in glee, hoping we drove any passing cops crazy. A suburban matron with two dogs in the back of her station wagon stopped for us, driving us all the way home to the Indiana Sunshine Enclave. Cora and I told her every good story as pay-back for the courtesy ride.
One private lightning-storm afternoon on Cora’s waterbed remains burned into my sexual mainframe, words unable to capture the fire.
Bonded for life, she lived inside of me everywhere I went. Never really apart, our lives had simply taken different paths. We were instantly re-attached at every contact, though her jealous lover made things more difficult. Mostly I left her alone but when shit hit the fan, she was my ultimate support. A few words from her could last me for years.
“Try. He will be fine after a while but it will take some energy. You must have been terrified.”
I started to cry, blew my nose.
“I’ll call when I get back,” she promised. “I love you, Annalee.”
I headed back to Peanut’s to help her make dinner before Dew and I had to leave for O’Hare.
“Nothing,” Dew said quietly three weeks into his Seattle stay.
His voice was full of anger. All the signs of feelings-denial were in play---heightened color to his face, eyes wetter than usual, jaw locked and flexing, puffs of cartoon steam virtually coming from his ears.
When they were children, I’d gently tell Dew and Peanut “Your words don’t match what your body is saying,” and then they’d spill.
“Dew,” I asked again, waiting a full ten minutes, after he’d sighed numerous times and paced about, then threw himself into the big chair. “Sure there isn’t something on your mind you’d like to talk about?”
“Everything’s so hard now,” he wailed, cheeks coloring and tears filling his young-man brown eyes. Tucking his knees in close to his chest, he looked away. “That fucker reconfigured everything on my Mac and my whole life is gone. Everything’s gone. Not a single picture or document. A job isn’t materializing. I have no clothes. I lost everything.”
“The magic’s gone? Doors aren’t opening?”
“Exactly. I can’t find a good job, every resume I sent out up til now has the wrong phone number on it so it’s all meaningless. I desperately need a car. I dreamed about my car last night. I was driving up the hill by the Alien Park and going really fast.”
We’d hiked when he was a child to the bottom of “Earthworks,” the concentric circles like an upside-down wedding cake carved into the ground off Military Road. It was completely silent, soundproof, at the base. Both kids were sure it had been made by an alien spaceship landing.
He shook his head. It was all too big.
I moved to sit beside him, un-pretzeling his long legs across my lap. He wanted touch but not full body from me, his mother. If it was Peanut, I’d hold her. His man-signals still crackled with bruised ego, ready to flare to anger again at any moment. Avoiding the emotional landmines, I hugged his legs and rubbed his cold feet.
“Well, I have tools and resources from living here a while. I’ve been walking the fine line between being helpful and staying the fuck out of your way. If you want more help from me, I’ll be happy to help.”
Dew nodded, defeated. Any assistance would feel better. PTSD, heartbreak, grief and misery were blocking his exits from this nightmare. Given a fresh start after years of Midwestern domicile, his second hometown now seemed impossible to navigate. He’d gone on a disappointing interview downtown, then come home without going to the next because, he’d said, Seattle was too overwhelming.
“We’ll find you a vehicle. You can use mine for now. We’ll find you a decent job to start, Dew, and then later a good job. It’s in little steps. Can I explain what I mean here?”
Dew nodded.
“It’s like…remember the collage you made in the psych ward? The big picture of what you want is like that collage, all the pieces torn out and pasted together.”
They hadn’t let him use scissors at the hospital. The collage looked like one from ‘Thief,’ James Caan’s patchwork of Willie Nelson shown to Tuesday Weld, the hostess at Chicago’s Belden Corned Beef Center.
“The job, a car, your girlfriend---how is she? You two talking?”
“Things are back the same as they were.”
“When you were good?”
“Yeah. And better because we talk all the time. But there’s nothing there for me now, just her, and I can’t move back there just for her.”
“She has no interest in coming out here?”
He shook his head and his cheeks got pinker.
“It’ll still work out,” I said. “Just not today. Like the collage. Back to that. She’s in your collage of what you want, a piece, and it all looks huge.”
I waved my arms out in a big sun.
“Now, there’s today, which is tiny.”
I brought my fingers together in a gesture of smallness.
“What you do today, in tiny, tiny increments, will get you closer to that big picture of your collage. It doesn’t feel like it at the time, but when you look back, you will be able to see the chain of events that led to that point. You will get your big picture, your collage, but not today. It’ll all work out, Dew, but it’s going to take longer than you are used to. You were golden, honey, and that has disappeared. Now it takes work, like everyone else. I know that must be hard for you. So. Today. What can you do today to help get closer to that big picture? Email me your resume and I will help you job hunt. Job equals money which equals personal power.”
Cora called from LaGuardia to ask after Dew, so I told her what Ziller had said. Cora laughed her tinkling, perfect laugh as she rushed to get on a plane.
We would never be lovers again, I knew, her life tied so tightly to Sherry she couldn’t get free. A renowned, world-class food authority, it burned me that Cora was pussy-whipped at home, cowed by Sherry, who pushed too hard.
Grateful for small conversations that slipped past the censor, I closed my eyes and swore I could smell her oaky perfume through the phone.
Fiercely wanting her, I knew it would never go away.
I still hopelessly yearned once in a while, waiting for the past to be different.
I stayed up all night repairing the torn up jeans we’d rescued from the garbage, washing them, pressing iron-on interfacing into each threadbare thigh, covering the knees with dark stiff adhesive patches, replacing the missing seat with huge squares of jean material carefully sewn on the inside.
Grouchy with general discouragement in the morning, Dew’s face lit up when he saw his jeans, as if magic fairies had come in the night. He looked at me grinning and said a sincere “Thanks, Mom.”
“Drake, you’re home!”
Finally, he answered his phone, even if he sounded a little tentative.
“Darling,” he croaked.
“It is you. Sorry. I’ve been avoiding contact with anyone.”
“When did you get home? Did you go to Mexico? I’ve been….out of town myself. I’ll explain everything, but tell me all about your trip I’m so tired of me and my shit I could use a good vacation story, all sunshine, museums and parties.”
There was a long silence on the line.
“Drake?”
Something was very wrong. My throat began to close.
“It was bad, Al. I got jumped.”
“Omigod, honey, are you hurt? What did they do to you? Do I need to come over there?”
“No, no, no I don’t want anyone to see me this way. I am a hideous nightmare, truly Elephant Man. My face is unrecognizable.”
He started to cry.
“Don’t make me cry!” Drake told me, trying to regain control. “Just let me talk and maybe I can get through this. I haven’t told anyone. I’ve been back for almost a week. It happened the second day I was there.”
“Go on, if you want to, I mean, Jesus, Drake, are your teeth alright?”
He loved his pearly smile, obsessing over his ivories, always whitening, bleaching and brushing after every meal.
“I lost two of them,” he said, sniffling. “But my dentist says he can reconstruct them. I have twenty stitches in my face, in various parts. I look like Mother of Frankenstein. My right arm’s fractured, I’m in a Velcro back brace, and my left leg is broken from when I fell.”
“You fell?”
“They tripped me. That’s how this all got started. I was walking across this beautiful plaza and there was a long park at the end. The bar I wanted to go to was on the other side of the park and I thought, stupid me, I’ll just cut through the park. These three guys appeared out of nowhere and started walking behind me, and you know how athletic I am, darling, I run like the little white girl I am, but I ran. The park started looking like the evil forest in the Wizard of Oz---‘I’d turn back if I were you!’ Then they caught up to me and tripped me. When I was on the ground they kicked my face and broke my arm, calling me an American over and over. I didn’t understand that part. Do they really hate Americans that much? I thought those Mexican people love our country, since they climb every mountain and ford every stream to get here.”
Shelly’s Spanish suddenly surfaced.
“Maricon,” I said quietly.
“Yes! Just like that!”
“It means ‘faggot.’”
“Oh.” Drake got very quiet. “You mean to tell me I got gay-bashed on my vacation and I didn’t even know it?”
“Yup.”
“Well, Pamela Anderson’s tiny tits! I can’t believe this! Now I feel even more stupid. I’m never showing my face in public again. I’m a laughingstock in the entire Queer Nation.”
Drake started to cry.
“No, no, darling, don’t feel stupid. This way you can feel twice as victimized. Call the Gay News and get a write-up from that butch reporter. You can demand an apology from the Mexican Consulate and create an international incident.”
“I could, couldn’t I?” he sniffed, pulling himself together.
Even through the phone, I heard Drake smiling, the wheels in his brain as visible as Mr. Machine’s cogs.
“So where have you been, darling? Tell me of your world for the past two weeks.”
“Gitta, where the hell have you been? I was starting to get worried. I know you’re popular but your voicemail being full for weeks?”
“I was back east of the mountains,” she huskily answered, her voice thick with tears. “Sam knocked up some dirt-riding hill-ape over there so they got married without telling anyone.”
“Wow. Big news.”
I wasn’t sure why that would make her as miserable as she sounded so I aimed for a neutral comment.
“It gets bigger. Kyle started haranguing Sam. How was Sam gonna party now with a brat on the way, that he’d ruined his life, that he was following his dick, that now he better step up and be a man. Sam has no job skills, really, since he and Adam both got derailed into drinking their lives away with their step-dad, and so Kyle gives him the brilliant idea to join the Marines. The Marines. Not the Air Force or the Coast Guard, something cleaner and out of harm’s way, no, the damn Marines!”
“Jesus. Don’t tell me…”
“Yeah,” Gitta sobbed. “And not only did Sam sign up, Adam signed up with him. Both my boys, they’ll be cannon fodder in two weeks. I was over there trying to make sense of it all, Al. They weren’t raised this way. Is it my fault they got so screwed up?”
“Stop that shit, Gitta. They’re grown-ass men making their own choices. You don’t like their choices but you aren’t responsible for them anymore. When they were seven and put that dead fish in their cousin’s bed, remember that? Okay, that you were responsible for, since you’d used the phrase ‘swimming with the fishes’ at dinnertime. This you have no control over. But you can grieve. It’s a hard blow.”
“I went over there to essentially say goodbye, since I knew they wouldn’t come back here to tell me in Seattle. If I hadn’t gone over there I might never see them again. The one motel there, funky little place with rabbit-ear t.v.s and mildew smell and it was awful. The girl’s relatives are nearly toothless, and there was a washer and I think a refrigerator thrown down the ravine on their property, all rusted, like they’ve been there for years like fucking Mason County. Seven cars on blocks in the yard. You know the drill. So this chubby chick named Rhonda is my new daughter-in-law, carrying my grandchild. She’s 17, Annalee. 17. Pregnant and shining, since she’s reached her goal in life---married to a Marine and having his baby. If it is his.”
Gitta cried harder.
“What do you mean?”
“She kind of…got around. Adam told me he flirted with her but never, you know…did anything, and he said she was popular. He smiled at me funny when he said that. But Sam thinks she’s the greatest thing since the cotton gin. He asked me for the name of that catalog where I got their cool baby clothes.”
“Hanna Anderson. You did have the cutest baby clothes of anyone.”
“It makes me want to puke to think of Swedish onesies on a Wenatchee brat.”
“I assume she’s white, Gitta.”
“Yup, and complete and total Neanderthal. Everyone there is. Still covered with fur, far as I’m concerned. Barely have a grasp of language. Her parents’ house had a huge Confederate flag flying on a homemade pole and there were chickens and mean dogs. It almost made me want to laugh, it was so stereotypical. They hate niggers and the beaners that pick the fruit.”
“Shelly told me about people like that, harassing her through her whole childhood.”
“How is Shelly?”
“Unknown as of yet. Drake got hurt in Mexico, though.”
“What? Is he alright?”
“He’ll be alright but at the moment, no. He’s apartment bound because of facial injuries and he’s in a cast or two. It was a gay-bashing. They took his money, his id’s, credit cards, and left him bleeding on the sidewalk in a Mexican park. He’s lucky to be alive.”
“I can help out, take him some sandwiches, clean his bathroom, that sort of thing.”
“He needs help. I’m taking him some soup and library books tomorrow.”
“Well, anyway,” Birgitta blew her nose. “That’s my story. What were you doing the whole time I was in Wenatchee?”
“Shit stacks up,” Malcolm smiled, as I wept in the wooden booth. He kept an eye on the bar, the front door and the serving floor but his interest in my exhaustion was genuine. “Nothing happens easily, Al, problems don’t come one at a time. It’s not like television where you have one premise, one dilemma, and then you clean that up, ready to go on with your smooth playing field. No, life is hard, babe, and it’s hard for ever’one. Let me stress here, no disrespect, you ain’t unique. Ever’body got shit raining down on ‘em but you don’t see it, is all. Listen, now and hush the crying. I hate that shit.”
Malcolm too
k my hand across the table.
“I don’t mean to add to your pile but this is good news for me and I hope you see it that way so Ima tell you anyway. I got the promotion. We’re moving to Alaska.”
I wanted to sob.
“That’s good for you, Malcolm. I’ll try to be happy about it. Sucks for me but we’re not talking about me for this one little instant.”
“Thank you. Okay, back to you. Things stack up. That’s what drives people over the edge, makes people lose it. Dew didn’t have one thing hit him and his brain kicked over, no, there were lots of factors that all lead up to the event, right? So just know that. The other thing is, you might not be done yet. There might be more added to the pile. Life’s like that, Annalee, my precious. When things get too big, too heavy, the smart thing to do is take a step back.”
Malcolm let go of my hand and held both his rippling arms out in front of him, fingers pointing up in a Yosemite Sam back-off gesture.
“Take a step back,” I repeated, my mind dulled from overload, the pressure too great.
I was back to work, doing everything by rote, a complete automaton. Fortunately, a good deal of my job lent itself to that: route repetition, stacking freight, driving. Dew was struggling to find employment while living with me in Seattle, his world completely disconnected and gone, his future tethered by a very thin string. I had not a moment to myself. Now Malcolm was moving away, Drake was broken into bits, Gitta’s children were facing daily death and Shelly was still AWOL.
“That’s right. Breathe. Set it all down, and don’t make any decisions when you’re in that fight-or-flight mode. Low-level panic and decision making do not mix. Adrenalin is not your friend when things get all heavy, man. And there’s very little that a sandwich and a nap won’t cure, right? You told me you heard that in a meeting. You eating? Sleeping? Letting yourself grieve at the appropriate alone time? Well, good, then that’s all you have to do right now. Chop wood, carry water. It will all calm down and your brain will return to you. Now, how about some hot cider before you shove off?”
