Christodora

by Tim Murphy

  “Excuse me,” Mateo calls up to him, his voice still full of burrs, “I don’t wanna disturb you, but I just wanted to say your work is really beautiful.”

  “Thank you,” the tagger calls down, not turning away from the wall. But wait—something about the voice catches Mateo. Finally, the tagger turns to look at Mateo, then leaves his sprays and stencils at the top and climbs down. “Hold on a second,” he says.

  Once he gets down to Mateo’s level, rubbing sweat from his dark brown forehead with the sleeve of his massive, old, pilly Wu-Tang T-shirt, Mateo realizes—he is a she. He is actually a little black baby dyke with a nose ring and a bandanna tied up under her flat-brimmed baseball cap.

  “Hey, brother.” She offers a sweaty palm, which he takes.

  “Hey,” he says, processing.

  “I know.” She smiles. “You thought I was a guy, right? I know that look. It’s all good; I don’t care.”

  Mateo hadn’t expected being called out like that. “Well, no,” he says. “I mean, I don’t care—I mean, I came over to tell you your wall is dope. It’s—” He struggles for the words. “It’s really beautiful. It’s like a dreamscape.”

  “Thank you, brother. Yeah, a dream. I want it to be a place where the eye catches it, where the eye and the mind can rest and fly away for a few seconds. Just walking or driving by.”

  “It’s all done with stencils?” Mateo asks.

  “All done with stencils,” she says. “That and about, fuck, twenty different shades of blue and green and yellow. Some I had to mix myself.”

  “It’s really dope,” Mateo says again. Then he just stands there. What the fuck is your problem? he asks himself.

  She looks at him funny. “You one of the new guys at Triumph House?” she finally asks.

  He can feel himself blushing in embarrassment. “How’d you know?” he asks.

  She shrugs. “I just figured ’cause you’re a new face on the block. I love those guys. They put up half the money for me to do this wall.”

  Mateo nods. There’s something he desperately has to tell her. “I’m an artist, too,” he says.

  Her face brightens. “Oh, yeah? What kind?”

  “Painter. I go to Pratt in Brooklyn.”

  “Shit, man! You’re for reals,” she says. “I go to CalArts.”

  He nods. “I mean, I used to go to Pratt.” He kicks the dirt with his sneaker. “I kind of fucked that up.”

  She smiles again. She’s got the most adorable smile. “Aw, brother, come on, we all make mistakes. You’ll get back there.”

  “Maybe.”

  She picks up a bottle of water and swigs from it.

  “I’ll let you get back,” Mateo says.

  She offers her hand again. “I’m Charlice.”

  “Mateo. See you around here later.” He starts to walk off the lot.

  “Hey,” she calls back to him. “You got spare time to come by and help me out?”

  He smiles. “I might.”

  “Come back when you can.” Then Charlice climbs back up the ladder.

  Mateo picks up a bus heading toward Silver Lake. He feels light and sparkly after staring at the paint for so long; when he closes his eyes, he can see the maritime-hued flurry of paper shreds exploding on the wall. He tries to take the colors in with him to Intelligentsia, where he works up the gumption to go up to his old manager, a pretty blonde yoga-type girl named Kayla, and see if she can give him some hours.

  “Mateo, you just didn’t show up for work one day and never came back,” Kayla reminds him flatly.

  He’s steeled himself for this. He and the guys in the house have had a lot of group sessions about how to face people they’ve let down and hurt.

  “I know,” he says. “And I’m sorry. But now I’m in a rehab house, I’ve got four months clean and sober, and I have to have a part-time job to stay in the house. I can take any shift except the last one because there’s a curfew.”

  “Oh, Mateo.” Kayla laughs lightly and a bit sadly; he’s not quite sure why. Then she sighs, peering at the schedule on the wall. “Can you come in and help Kevyon open Mondays through Thursdays? Can you really be here at six thirty in the morning?”

  “Yep,” he says before he can talk himself out of it. Do the buses even run that early? He’ll figure it out, he decides. The good thing, it occurs to him, is that he’ll be done by noon. He can catch an NA meeting and then go back and help—who’s the baby dyke? Charlice.

  “You can start on Monday,” Kayla says.

  “Thanks, Kayla.”

  “Mateo, please don’t fuck me over again, okay?”

  Kayla’s words ring in his head all the way to the meeting he catches on the other side of the reservoir, then all the way back to West Adams on the bus. He starts getting that bad feeling, starts rubbing his arms. The house doesn’t allow him to have a cell phone until he’s a month out of house confinement—under the theory that it’s too easy to use it to find drugs when someone’s in early sobriety—so he can’t call his sponsor. The feeling is the hot rush that convulses his whole body and makes his brain go scalding white with senselessness when he thinks about that ­moment—that nano-moment—when the needle slips under his skin and he pulls back blood in the syringe. That final moment before he free falls off the top of a building, going “Whooooaaaaaa!” Funny thing is, first time around getting sober out here, before the Carrie incident, he used to love nursing that memory—it was his private balm, his secret treat. Now when the thought slips into his head, it fills him with terror and panic, a new raw horror at what total physiological control it has over him. He starts taking deep breaths, saying the Serenity Prayer in rhythm to his breaths.

  He does this all the way back to West Adams, more or less, by which time the episode has subsided. It had come on because Kayla’s parting remark had pushed him down another psychic wormhole: the wormhole of everyone he’s fucked over. Deep in that wormhole, he’d ask himself why he even thought he deserved to go on with a good, happy life. How could he even show his face to anyone? A fucking needle in his arm was all he deserved. The wormhole was a very bad and scary place to be.

  When he gets back to the hood, Charlice is still working. He walks on over to her. “Hey,” he calls up.

  “Hey,” she calls right back down without looking. She’s made considerable progress in the past few hours, advancing about three feet to the right of where she was before Mateo left. Her work is so dense, Mateo marvels; she moves across the wall so slowly, and the layers of shredded paper, or leaves, or whatever her forms are just keep getting thicker and more interlocked.

  “How’d your day go?” she asks.

  “I got my old job back.”

  “That’s sweet,” she says. “You wanna help me with something? Hand me that can down there with the greens called Satin Italian Olive.”

  He finds the can of Krylon and passes it up to Charlice. “Satin Italian Olive,” he says. “Sweet.”

  “I know, right? And you can pick up that can of Peekaboo Blue and you can deepen the center of those pollywogs right down by your knee.”

  So that’s what she calls her shapes. Pollywogs. They really don’t look like pollywogs to Mateo. But more to the point: he’s never tagged before. Or “written”—that’s what the taggers call it. He grew up with a brush in his hand. So he tells her so.

  “It’s okay,” she says. “The can’s already got the right tip on. Just shake it, hold it about eight inches, and deepen the centers.”

  So he does it, shaking the can, feeling the ball bearing inside rattle around. He presses the nozzle and the spray of baby blue hits the center, deepening the existing hue.

  “You’re a toy, man!” Charlice laughs. “Don’t fuck up my piece.”

  He knows what a toy is, in tagger parlance. It’s an absolute beginner.

  He’s back there the who
le next day, Friday, then Saturday, too. He’s feeling so light, so happy. Then Sunday morning comes. He’s queasy as he eats his cereal down in the kitchen with the guys. He’s waiting for them to show up. He told Kyla he’d rather just meet them at the Beverly Center, but Millimom really wanted to see where he was living. So he goes outside and waits on the front porch for them to pull up in Kyla’s VW. Finally, around eleven A.M., they do. And here they are, two rich, skinny white women looking totally out of place in the neighborhood, walking up the pathway, Kyla with a bag from Trader Joe’s in one arm. From twenty-five feet away, he can see Millimom smiling toward him already, but he can already feel her strain, her sadness, burning through the smile, so obvious in the eyes. His heart is pounding out of his chest and he frantically starts saying the Serenity Prayer to himself. Please, please, please, he’s praying, just get me through this in a chill way. Just let me do this right. He stands up and takes a few steps forward, forcing on a smile.

  “We come bearing gifts,” calls Kyla cheerily.

  “Hey!” Mateo calls back, pushing out the cheer. “Thank you!”

  Suddenly they’re there right before him. For the first time in months, he locks eyes with Millimom, but what he sees there—the hurt, the fear, etched so much deeper than the last time he saw her—instantly diverts his eyes away toward—what? Anything. Kyla will do.

  “Heyyy,” he says again, stepping down. “Hey, Mom.” He embraces her. God, she feels so tiny, so thin, just a bag of bones.

  “Hi, sweetheart!” She embraces him and won’t let go. Kyla gives him a look behind her back that says, Please, honey, just be gentle with her.

  Finally, Millimom pulls back. “Let me look at you . . . You look okay,” she says, as though her worst fears have been allayed. “You look good. They feed you well here, right?”

  “They do, they do!” he assures. He’s all sorts of smiling and nodding and even laughing, a bit maniacally. “I even cook. It’s part of my tasks.”

  “You even cook?” Millimom echoes him. “Wow, I’d like to sample that.”

  “Hey,” he says, “I make some mean burritos.”

  “Mmm,” Kyla says. “That sounds good.”

  There, he thinks, his heart rate subsiding a bit. Maybe the worst is already over. In a second, they’re all inside and he’s giving them a tour of the first floor—the front TV parlor, the kitchen, the screened-in back porch, the rooms where they have meetings and groups. He introduces Kyla and Millimom to the various guys in the house as he bumps into them, and it’s just as he expected, all warmth and cordiality.

  “This old house is gorgeous, isn’t it, Mills?” Kyla says. Mateo knew that was coming, he chuckles to himself. Kyla and Milly have never seen a charming vintage anything they didn’t want to rehab, edit down, and curate.

  After the house tour, after he’s stored away the bag of snacks they brought him under his bed, because he knows they’ll disappear in fifteen minutes if he leaves them in the kitchen, they load into the VW and head off to the Pacific Design Center, that huge, chunky blue glass building designed by César Pelli, to see the solo show of an artist named Amanda Ross-Ho. That was Kyla’s idea, that they all go and see some art, and he’d said he’d read about this show and wanted to catch it. Kyla and Millimom are in the front and Mateo’s in the back as they head north on La Cienega. Kyla’s got KPCC on the radio and is telling Millimom about some actor friend of theirs from a million years ago who moved to L.A. from New York recently, and in that moment, with the pressure off, Mateo thinks that he just might make it through this afternoon.

  When they get to the Design Center, it occurs to him that this is virtually his first time in months being surrounded by art people, almost all of them white, including Kyla and Millimom, instead of the ex-cons he now lives with. The sheer tone of the voices he hears around him—hushed, serious, considered, using vocabulary he usually only sees in print—feels a bit bizarre and off-putting. But even harder, perhaps what he hadn’t accounted for, is to be standing in the middle of an artist’s expensively produced solo show and to be reminded of the whole art-world machinery he’d once had at his fingertips, the world he’d thrown a bomb at and run away from. He keeps telling himself that, yes, Amanda Ross-Ho is nearly forty and he’s nineteen, but still, the exhibit starts to burn him up—a slow burn he can’t even fully put a name to—until his hands are fists shoved down deep in his jeans pockets. What’s frustrating is that it’s hard even to see the artist’s true hand in the work—it’s all installations and pastiches and collages of a bunch of random, everyday shit; half of it looks like something some crazy schizo guy in a cabin off the grid would spend days feverishly putting together. But then again, maybe that’s the point.

  Kyla, walking a few paces beside him while Millimom peruses the other side of the room, seems to sense this from him. “I admire the constructions but still I’m strangely underwhelmed, you know what I mean?” she asks.

  Mateo sort of half nods.

  “I mean, where’s the beauty?”

  “It doesn’t look like she cares about beauty,” he says. “It’s all think-y.”

  “Mmm,” goes Kyla. “All think-y.” She and Mateo lock eyes for a second. Kyla smirks, puts her hand on the back of his neck for a moment, and says, “Don’t be so think-y, ya hear me?”

  Mateo’s caught off guard. “How can you be nice to me?” he asks her, looking down.

  She puts her arm around him. “Because I’ve known you since you were a little boy and I love you,” she says. “And because I’ve been there, Mateo.” Her eyes flash with mischief. “I was a devious pathological little user when I was your age, too, you know.”

  They laugh together, attracting a curious look across the room from Millimom. “You know who else loves you, Mateo?” Kyla asks.

  Mateo knows whom Kyla’s referring to. He lowers his voice: “I just don’t know why she took me in,” he says. “Why didn’t she have her own kid?”

  “What does it matter?” Kyla asks, also sotto voce. “Stay clean,” she says. “You’ll get your answers.”

  Mateo looks down, digs at one sneaker with the toe of the other. Kyla is always saying slightly Yoda-ish stuff like that. She rubs his neck again and saunters across the room toward Millimom, whom Mateo watches. She’s standing in front of the one piece he really likes, which is a massive wall assemblage of white cutout shapes divided into nine square panels and anchored by a bunch of black bottles on the floor. It’s monumental and intricate and, if not exactly beautiful, certainly able to engage the eye for a long period of time. And it looks like it’s engaged Millimom, who’s standing before it.

  Watching her from afar—her arms folded, rocking ever so slightly on her heels—Mateo can’t get over how small she seems. How old is she now? Almost forty-five? What is she thinking about? Her own art? For the first time, it seems, he wonders if, or how, his whole mess of the past few years has affected her own art-making. Did it set her back? There’s yet another thought, in what seems to be an ever-increasing pile of thoughts related to the repercussions of his life, that he just can’t deal with.

  They all end up eating panini in the Design Center café. After Kyla’s last bite, she asks if Milly and Mateo mind if she goes and checks out a few of the interior-design showrooms in the building; there’s a room in her house she wants to do over and she wants to get some ideas. Mateo can feel his heart quickening; he feared this moment was coming. But of course what can he and Millimom say? Kyla picks up her bag and darts away, saying she’ll be back in twenty, twenty-five minutes. Mateo and Millimom watch her go.

  “She has such a beautiful home here, doesn’t she?” Millimom finally says.

  “She does.”

  “It’s so crazy how people have actual homes here, isn’t it? You can have a front yard and a porch and a backyard. For the price of a studio in New York! I’ve always wondered how Kyla could stand it out here all these
years after living in New York. I mean, most people I know eventually move back to New York. But, hey, what can I say, when I woke up this morning and smelled the bougainvillea outside my window, it kind of got me thinking, you know?”

  “Yeah,” he says, “there are some good smells out here, it’s true.” He can sense she’s prattling because she’s nervous. It’s such an old, familiar sound track, Millimom’s self-soothing ramblings, her little debates with herself.

  She sighs, picks up the crust of her sandwich, puts it down. She smiles at Mateo, looks around the whole café, then smiles at him again. He half smiles at her, too, then looks down at his crotch, picking at a loose thread in his jeans.

  “Dad’s sorry he couldn’t come,” Milly finally says. “He’s been feeling super under the gun getting ready for a show.”

  Mateo shrugs. He almost wishes she hadn’t mentioned him. “He’s got his own life,” he says. He feels a little sulky and passive-aggressive saying it, even though what he sort of meant to say is I didn’t expect you guys to get on a plane and fly across the country to come see me in a rehab house.

  “Well, no, no, it’s not that,” she says hurriedly. “He wanted to come. He just really—he just feels like every moment that he’s not in school teaching counts until this show goes up. He told me—”

  “I told you it’s okay,” Mateo slightly snaps. Instantly, he feels badly about it. But damn, doesn’t she know to leave something alone?

  But it’s too late. He sees that all-too-familiar look on her face, as though he just swatted her back. She puts her index finger up to her teeth and sort of bites it.