| May. 19th, 2006 @ 03:07 pm (no subject) |
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Here I am. 19, and taking a bath. The last bath I will ever take as a teenager. Tomorrow, that fateful birthday reserved for tearing at the cocoon of childhood and emerging into the blinding dismal world of adults. Maybe all that clawing and ripping is how I dislocated my shoulder. That's why I'm in this bath anyway. Soaking in mineral salts that turned the water a murky green. The bath is in the greenhouse, but you wouldn't know that. It sits in a corner dominated by cactus and fig trees. There is a window that looks out on an overgrown rock garden. But instead of looking down on flowers from the window they look down on you, making you feel like I dwarf who slipped and fell into a puddle. They are gargantuan monsters to rival any rainforest weed. And the ants traversing their stems are sloths crawling from limb to limb.
I wasn't even going to think about that though. Greenhouses. The greenhouse is a room made almost entirely of glass. It lets the sunlight in and warms the room so the plants can grow. Right now though it is night so there is no sun, which is good because in the daytime I always have to worry about the UPS man seeing me through all the windows as I climb into the tub, and accidentally running his truck into the creek. Usually you can see the stars at night if you turn the light off. Suddenly your bath becomes an aquatic observatory, and you an astronomer swimming from star-island to star-island. But not tonight. Spring rains and dark clouds obscure the sky, so I have the light on. Here I am, 19, taking a bath, looking at my own warped reflection in the glass. That is how I began to reflect on my life. That is how I am going to start my story. I am going to write all of this down when I get out of the warm water.
But the facts don't add up right. You don't know it, but right now it is mid-may. My birthday is in late September. Thanks for bringing that little white lie to the surface. Thanks for shattering my premise of a confused girl hovering on a terrifying cusp. Thanks a lot, you can call yourself a righteous crusader for fact. That's why I could never be a writer; if it's not you it's always my subconscious getting in the way. It has the annoying habit of nagging at me until truth just seizes the controls from my stunned paralytic hands and commences to contradict my words. That was how I was going to start--almost 20 in the bathtub. I guess I have to start again.
I really am in the bathtub, thinking about what to do after college: street performer, drug lord, assassin... Next year at this time I will have donned the proverbial cap and gown of higher education and freedom to starve in the corporate world. I will have been sent on my way with farewell speeches about rising gas prices and the rise of a military nation with high hopes for the future. But I'm all lost.
The water on my leg is beading up perfectly, like drops of rain on a petal. Somewhere in the back of my head I know that it is vitamin K that waterproofs human skin, but check up on that before you quote me. I think that if you can tell the future through Palmistry you should be able to tell something through kneecaps. Mine are rosy now from the hot water. The color of the cheeks of a rotund Venetian after consuming too much wine and marinara. Venetian, Venice beach...all right brain, we'll roll with it.
I wanted to go to grad school at Columbia University in New York. Maybe for creative writing or journalism. Maybe I would go over seas and get shot trying to bring the truth to you, the American public, that only stuffs another handful of potato chips down their throats and changes the channel, or hands the newspaper to the bum loitering beside them on the train hoping he'll wipe his ass with it, and that action will distract his nervous fingers from the itch they are feeling towards their leather briefcases. But then he happened.
He said I had crazy eyes, and that I would love Venice beach. And so I fell in love. Somehow I imagined Venice beach bouncing slowly to chilled out surfer music, with a series of hippy head shops along the boardwalk. But now I remember a map I saw once. It's L.A. man, the buildings stretch all the way down to the sand. I'm not sure if they are houses or stores, but some of them have pools in the yard. I know that thanks to satellite photographs. If you zoom in enough on those things you can probably see someone’s neighbor picking his nose and flicking it on your Azalea bush. Oh well, IO probably couldn't understand surfer lingo anyway. After my bath I want to write all these thoughts down. I really need a tape recorder so that I can just talk and catch all the confused nuances of my thoughts. Then I could clip and cut them into a transcribed masterpiece. That would be an interesting practice, kind of like interviewing myself without the questions and faulty answers that make the studio audience boo. I hope I remember all this when I get out.
But back to him. You know how plans change, so quickly and unexpectedly. It's like high speed car chases where your leading car takes a surprise turn down an alley and the following car would have to be attached to a yoyo to duplicate it, but somehow they seem to pass it and spring back, sliding past the dumpsters in hot pursuit. So, I thought maybe I could go to grad school in L.A. Catch the man and some sun. But we already established one little problem, the fact that I can't write. So I have to nix that idea. Anyway, with the world as it is I would get my Ph.D. and end up working as a secretary hopelessly correcting the conversational grammar of high position colleagues while they gossiped at the water cooler. No thanks.
If not a secretary I might end up writing some satirical editorial for one of the lesser-known newspapers. At worst my articles could be shredded and dipped in flour water to contribute to some sniveling brats first paper Mache sculpture; or lend itself to the papering of a house, painted over, and later found, a hundred years gone by, when some new owners lustily decide to refurbish the interior. At best it could appear in a doctor's office waiting room. There, trembling for an imminent diagnosis, an old man's hand would waver between Sports Illustrated and my paper. He is attracted to the full color photo of a tackle-bedecked fisherman holding a sparkling, wheezing bass. His fingers stroke the cover, sliding to its edge to prepare for lift off. But wait! He spots my article on the front page and picks it up instead (god knows why). He reads and a look of constipation crosses his face (no doubt difficulty in ascertaining the source of the ironic humor) followed by bewilderment (no doubt at my audacious references) and then a small chuckle burps from his lips. It escalates into a hardy, but very short-lived roar. After all he notices the nervous side-glances of the other patients, and the mothers pulling their children closer. Then his name is called on the loudspeaker, "Mr. Donaldson." He heaves himself to his feet to shake the hand of the young doctor who is emerging from the door to the back. Unused to sugar coating the doctor bluntly informs him "You have cancer." The old man bows his head and the doctor sees he needs a follow up comment to this pronouncement. "It's not serious now, but you're going to die." Just think about that, my words provided one moment of innocent mirth before her received that terminal news. My good deed for the day is successfully completed, 'Janice, page God and make sure that he was watching.'
All right, so my career as a writer looks bleak. What about chef school? I always like to cook. If I got good enough I could open my own restaurant and play checkers in the back with my illegal immigrant laborers, while wearing horn rimmed glasses that make me look sophisticated for when I have to emerge to receive the cordial 'compliments to the chef', but really just act like goggles to keep hot sauces from splashing into my eyes. My patrons would consume squash soup with a garnish of sour cream and I would bother them constantly with tales of woe from my own life. You wouldn't know it, but that reminds me of Peru.
In Cusco, up a windy, high altitude cobblestone alley (avoid purgatorio at all costs, the name speaks for itself, the stench is unbearable) there's a little restaurant called The Witches Garden. It's run by this foreign lady (she may be French Canadian, she told us but I forget. I have nothing against Canadians, even though they kicked us out of their country once. That is completely true, I promise. It might have been because of my dad's long beard, or maybe the guns...I don't know). Anyway, the whole time we were eating she sat beside us and told us all about her daughter's indefinable condition, and how she had to be sent back to wherever they were originally from to be treated by specialists because "the doctors here are shit." I don't blame her. I wouldn't trust myself to smile at a dentist in polite conversation. More than half the people sport mouths full of metal--and they aren't purposeful grills. She told us that all the natives were primitive--all they wanted to do was get drunk and fuck (I sprayed squash soup across the table as I laughed). I was proud of South America for holding up the Latin reputation of romance. Good for them. Nothing better to raise morale really, except maybe raising pigs. No, no. Raising skirts always takes the cake in that debate. So I can't own a restaurant. I would end up a whiny old maid talking about somebody else’s bowel discharges over a dinner table that I wasn't even invited to sit at. I can't remember if we left a tip or not.
None of that is the point really. I just hope I can remember it to write it down when I get out of this bath. My toes are stroking each other in a sopped, wrinkled dance to the imagined orchestra of rain on the roof. I noticed they are wrinkled. 19-year-old toes become 90-year-old toes after an hour of waterlogged thought. So I will wash my hair. I like putting my head under the water. It is easy to stroke my scalp. When I have kids and take them to the island beach on the Atlantic, complete with it's own biosphere of ecological curiosities, I'll be sure to check their heads for ticks. My mom used to do that. She feared lime disease I think. But she forgot to tell my sister and I not to pick the yellow flowers. I did, of course, as a gift for her. It turned out they belonged to a cactus whose revenge for my severing of its reproductive organs was to bite me back with invisible teeth. Mom may have been able to pull ticks out of my hair, but she couldn't see the cactus spines. I'm not sure if their incessant burning in my fingertips or the pain in my shoulder now is worse. Probably each was at it's own time. Time is what we make it, but in that time each physical moment seems to matter more than those in the past or those to come. I have this pill to make the pain go away. I'm glad I remembered that. Some drunken girl at the bar gave it to me in exchange for a shot of heady vodka. I didn't really want it if it was going to make me act like her. I think she told me the story of Roxanne slamming her head into the wall 10 times in a row, each time thinking it was the first. She was scared because Roxanne was loitering in the adjoining room. I promised to knock her out if hands were laid. Maybe she thought she was buying my protection. Anyway I 'll have to wait until I get out and write everything down to take it though, or else my head will cloud with a syntactically impenetrable fog. Maybe it will help me sleep.
I get out of the water and crawl upstairs. As I am drying myself off I scan the room for paper. There is a notebook by the bed. It has only notes from the first day of Literature and Critique class (the first time I met him) and an old poem about gumbo. Plenty of paper. I can write till dawn if I want. I want to start writing now, but I have to brush the tangles from my hair first. It's not the paper I am worried about, but the level of ink in the pen. Like blood I know it will be the first to dry up, ending the life of my thoughts. Oh well, thoughts are immortal if there is someone for them to be spoken to.
I want to start off my story in the bathtub. Include some kind of cunning symbolism of washing off one life in preparation for another, but so subtly that you won't notice. And I won't tell you, because you would say "Ah! There was a purpose for that!" and I can't give away the secrets. It is better for you to figure them out for yourself. And better yet if you don't question anything at all. I want to start with a little deviance from the truth, that's really what fiction is about--merging reality and imagination, fact and lie, until it becomes inseparable to the reader. You would never know I lied if you didn't know the facts of the truth. I want to set the scene on a more turbulent place in the character's life. It's going to be an engaging, dynamic character a day from 20 and a lifetime from peace. After all she is swallowed in the fog of dreams. Trying to set your sights on unsighted goals is a tricky and infuriating process. Maybe she will splash the water in defiance, or leave stray hairs dangling in the drain, or flick the curious slug that crawled up on the side of the tub from the fig tree to watch her. Or maybe she will 'accidentally' spill water on the loyal dog waiting patiently at the base of the bath for her to emerge. She is jealous of its simple life, but she will do this only so that she can then apologize. And all this time she will be thinking of him.
All right, I am done brushing my hair, my pen is here, my paper yearns for its caress, I am ready to begin. |
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