by Shaw Sander
“I put in for a new job,” Malcolm told me, sliding into the booth as I tucked into my Chinese chicken salad. “In Anchorage.”
“What? How can you leave me?” I asked, setting down my fork.
What would I do without this pretty man to dream about? His restaurant was on my favorites list and his advice had gotten me acclimated toward the other side of my byke world.
Men were now drawn to me like magnets everywhere I went. I swore they could smell other men’s scent on me and wanted to mark me with theirs, which Malcolm said was completely true. I felt primal, as if there was a hidden prehistoric sub-script of male and female to which my genetic material urgently had to respond.
“It’s a long shot so it prolly won’t happen,” he assured me. “But the wife wants a change and I could use one myself. Thought I’d apply and see what happens. Roll the dice.”
“But who’s gonna guide me along?” I teased, trying to cover my devastation with kittenish big eyes.
Friends this true-hearted weren’t easy to find in middle age. He was a straight man with whom I could be honest who gave me unvarnished straight-guy advice. How rare was that?
“Go on, girl, you got it now,” he smiled. “You are leaving me in the dust, man. Been on five dates a week for three months now? Lessee, that’s…” he appeared to be adding in his head, his eyes rolled upward and face arranged in a thoughtful pose. “…a lot. It gives my brain lots of pornographic material to replay when…when the time is right. I like living vicariously through you.”
“You and everyone else. Get brave and get out there yourself, if you want. I don’t understand why you aren’t polyamorous.”
“I’m married, Al. Bernie can’t hack the jealousy. We tried some shit like that. I jerk off a lot. I look at cyber-sex. I read things. But I stay within the legal bounds, know what I’m sayin’? I’m not looking for anyone.”
His eyes burned brightly, staring at me.
“But…what if you weren’t looking and it found you anyway?” I asked point-blank, my face expressionless as my heart pounded.
“Well, then. It would depend on the circumstances.”
His thumb started rubbing his fingertips, as if he was thinking of something dastardly. As if he was rubbing a nipple between them. It made me squirm.
“I have a perfect wife. She’s a lady on the street and a whore in bed. And I have made her do some nasty shit…” Malcolm looked away, staring at the bar.
“Do you regret doing that?”
“Sometimes. But sex is in the brain, I discovered, not in actual place and time, so she doesn’t have to go through that anymore for me to experience it in my head. Understand?”
“Yes, I do indeed.”
I was having sex in my brain at that very moment.
“I don’t do that shit to Bernie anymore, either, because I don’t want her all wrapped around the axle. And because good shit is harder for her to remember than bad shit.”
“What do you mean?”
I started eating my chicken salad again, the sex over for me once he started talking about his wife. She was a real person, a woman like me, and I didn’t like her on the receiving end of anything humiliating or bad, either. I didn’t know her but she deserved dignity, too, just like every woman.
I sighed, going in my brain from fucking her husband on top of the bar like a wild animal to female solidarity in under three minutes. Goddamn Sunshine upbringing.
“Everyone has good shit that happens to them. Birthday presents and kisses and congratulations over good things, right? But there can be that one traumatic event, one horrible, scary thing and it could have happened when they were three fucking years old. But that one bad thing stands out bigger than all the good things all put together and that one bad thing shadows everything they do, everything they choose for the rest of their fucking life. They spend hours in therapy trying to exorcise that one bad thing because bad things imprint more strongly on the brain. Our neurons just burn the shit into the cells.”
He made a searing noise with a sharp intake of breath through his teeth, pointing at his eyes. Boys and butch dykes make sound effects, I thought. I’d tried and always sounded stupid. Malcolm continued, audio illustration over.
“Burning the brain, burning it behind the eyeballs so everything the eyes see is now through the filter of that one bad thing. No one says ‘Oh, I like cupcakes because I had a good experience with them when I was three.’ If you said that people’d think you’re fuckin’ crazy. But if you say ‘Oh, I’m scared of dogs because I had a bad dog experience when I was three,’ everyone nods and understands. The bad experience is bigger than the good experience and burns its way into the brain. Cupcakes don’t get burned into the brain.”
“Agreed. And well put. You speak so well,” I grinned. Malcolm had turned me on to Chris Rock, who parodied white folks amazed at Colin Powell’s grasp of English.
“Fuck you,” Malcolm smiled.
“Oh, now, don’t go starting something you can’t finish.”
“Oh, I could finish it, AnnaLee, don’t you worry. And I’ve got technique,” he said, leaning in close across the table “…since I ain’t got no gi-normous dick like the motherfuckers you’ve been finding. Men with the big dicks don’t need technique. Now, average guys like me---and I’m not ashamed of it, just honest, ‘cause I’m average size, you know, I’ve looked in the showers and all---average guys like me, we need technique. I’ve got the moves, baby.”
“I’m sure you do, Malcolm. Lemme know if you change your mind.”
Thanksgiving was around the corner. I wanted to make a little dinner with Drake but Drake wanted to stay home and study, he said, for the first test in the Teaching English Abroad Program. He’d signed up at Seattle Central, sure that his ticket out was a teaching job in the Mediterranean where he could cruise hairy-chested men and get paid for it.
“You can study the other three days, just come over this one day, please? You could invite the new boyfriend.”
“Oh, all right. But the boyfriend’s history. He’s simply too young. He has roommates, for god’s sake. But you always do make a delicious spread. Can we have apple pie, please, Mother May I?”
I laughed and thought of the childhood game, my favorite being Umbrella Steps. Mother, may I take three Umbrella Steps? Permission granted, I’d pirouette with my hands over my head, fingertips touching.
“I’ll bring ‘Love! Valour! Compassion!’ I got that this week and ‘Breakfast on Pluto.’”
“Bring them both.”
Shelly called me, her voice crazy with glee saying the first shipments had begun to arrive and Mr. Personality at the architectural firm wondered what the hell was going on. She’d had a delivery at his office the same time as the mailman and Mr. P. had been throwing a shit fit as five magazines and seven boxes arrived with his name on them.
“I didn’t order this crap,” Mr. P. had yelled at the mailman who’d simply shrugged. It was beautiful, Shelly said, the way the mailman didn’t give a shit.
“They have your name on them. I’m just doing my job,” the mailman had responded and walked away, while Mr. P. fumed, his desk piled high.
“I wish you’d have had me when you were a hippie,” six-year-old Peanut had sighed, winding her long red-gold braids around her head. I loved how my small childrens’ minds worked.
I’d been telling her about going to The Farm in the summer as a kid, following Ina Mae Gaskin around and smooching the little newborn babies. We’d gone to Saugatuck, Michigan, too, to loaf around Ox-bow School of Art and followed musicians like Fraser and deBolt and TRex along the west coast. There were Sunshine tie-dyed shirts and flowered skirts and ankle bracelets, I would tell her, brushing her bowl-cut bangs away from her perfect face. Children were considered wizards. Everyone had long hair, knew yoga and ate dense homemade whole wheat bread slathered in oily peanut butter. Our geodesic dome had been ordered from The Whole Earth Catalog. My favorite book had been Alicia Bay Laurel’s ‘Li
ving On the Earth.’
I’d shown the children both books at Elliot Bay Bookstore.
“Would you still be you if I had?” I asked, tugging her brain to work. I loved this beauty in Snow White pajamas and Cinderella sheets. “Your daddy would be someone else and I would have been 16 instead of 30. I was different then.”
“I’d have stayed with the Sunshine People. You could still be one, Mom. We could still go. C’mon, it’d be fun.”
Her front teeth were missing as she grinned at me. I had no desire to gather with the tribe in a redwood forest or scrubby desert for a solstice festival. I liked clean sheets, clean clothes and a paycheck. Besides, they were a thing of the past, the group all but disbanded, scattered to earth’s every corner.
“You dream about the Sunshine People, okay? That’s the only place they still exist.”
I kissed her goodnight and went upstairs to Dew’s room in our ramshackle old house.
“Mama, why don’t we live with Angel anymore?” Dew asked, his big eyes vulnerable and sad in his baby face. “Now am I from two broken homes?”
“They’re not broken. There’s no such thing. Relationships don’t fail, sweetheart, they just get finished. People go as far as they can with each other. I’m so sorry you and your sister get put in the middle of your mother’s changes.”
I kissed his forehead.
“Angel moved on, babydoll and found someone else. We’ve got this nice house of our own now and will make it go from here, just you and your sister and me here. No one can take it away. Every summer you’ll come back and it will be the same. There’s nothing broken about it. You have two places to live, is all. Your daddy loves you and so do I. Never gonna change no matter where you live.”
At the apex of our breakup, Angel had snarled the deal-breaker at me.
“I don’t hate kids,” she’d said, curling her lip and getting ready to slam out the door. “I just hate your kids.”
I’d found the little Zenith cottage, called up my FedEx retirement fund and bought the place. It had been abandoned for a few years, the windows broken out but the tucked-away location was ideal for growing children to run around and me to write. Most of all, it was so run down I could afford it by myself.
I mortgaged for twenty thousand more than the asking price since it needed so much repair it scared the children.
When the kids had first walked in, an abandoned piano filled with mice sat cobwebbed in the living room. The windows were so thin they rattled when planes landed at nearby SeaTac Airport. The rickety attached-garage door handle rolled the door sideways like an old-fashioned barn. If I tugged too hard it popped off the track. Knee-high weeds comprised the yard and the “garden” with five untamed fruit trees needed months of work. But it had two bedrooms, a nice loft upstairs, a decent kitchen and it was walking distance to summer day camp and the 7-11.
Yet without the fore-thought and vision of an adult, it looked completely haunted. Holding his sister’s hand as they had gingerly stepped inside the first time, Dew looked around and then straight at me.
“Do we have to live here?” he’d said.
“Just wait, babies, by summer it’ll be looking really nice. You’ll like it here, honest. It’s still in the same town as all your friends and I’ll fix it up, you’ll see.”
The construction crew had completed a finished garage with a remote opener, insulation, triple-pane windows and paint inside and out. One of the painters bought the piano for a hundred bucks and hauled it away. I’d cleaned the carpets, wallpapered the kitchen, put glow-in-the-dark stars on the ceiling in Peanut’s room, a Jeremy McGrath poster in the loft for Dew, and a futon in the livingroom for me.
We got over Angel together in that little house, a house so perfect it was like it had been made for us. I’d roto-tilled the garden, planting corn and tomatoes to, apparently, share with the raccoons. Dew sat in the back of the Subaru wagon in the garage with the new garage door open shooting his BB gun at the big apple tree. Peanut buried her dead goldfish under the monkey-puzzle tree in an elaborate funeral, weeping over her handmade grave marker.
I had gotten each child a kitty cat and they carried their new pets around, inventing kitty games with paper grocery bags, foil and string. We would talk to each other through shadow handpuppets on the wall at night, Dew choosing Feluga the Beluga as his one alter-ego, while Peanut and I rotated our hand-personalities like new outfits.
That was the summer I’d started writing down the tales I told to the children. Peanut and Dew clamored for bedtime stories and they preferred the ones I’d created. I’d felt awkward and uncreative as I told them, making it up as I went along but their little faces were so rapt I’d press on. I’d try out new material on them and then after they slept pound it out on my Royal Manual typewriter.
Two characters seemed to roll off my tongue and stick: Babushka the Mouse and her friend Aphrodite the Giraffe.
I’d made the characters children in the stories recalling, before he’d gone away, my own father’s storytelling with his three stock players: George and Beezy, two hippopotamus brothers, and their monkey friend Cheepee-Weepee who was always swinging down through the trees. They’d go on wild adventures, getting into scrapes and barely escaping with their lives to come home to mothers who washed their mouths out with soap for lying. I’d borrowed heavily from my dad’s material, cribbing the pirate ship kidnapping, the underwater submarine trip and the ride along a rainbow’s arc.
I eventually bought a Writer’s Market and began reading on my lunch hour about how and where to submit material.
“It smells like my patchouli oil in here. Why is your Barbie dressed in tie-dye?” I’d asked Peanut. “And what is that in her hand? Art? Is she an artist?”
Peanut showed me the small square of paper she’d colored black with a big blue and white planet in the middle.
“It’s a Whole Earth Catalog. She’s Sunshine People Barbie now.”
“And the stuffed animals?” I’d asked, pointing to the ring of soft toys piled around Barbie.
“The rest of the tribe. They’re at a happening at Mount Reindeer.”
Chapter Four
“What’s it like to never have to worry about your physical safety?” I asked Malcolm over the chicken crepes. I thought they needed more curry but the sauce was creamy and comforting.
He smiled at me, sliding his arm up onto the back of the booth opposite me, turning sideways.
“I don’t know,” he answered slowly. “I only know my reality and that’s jessa way it is. I don’t have your reality of being watchful all the time to compare it to so mine just feels like mine. That’s like asking a bird how it feels to fly. He’s never not flown so how would he know how to describe it? It’s just ordinary experience to him.”
“You fucker. I so envy you. You never have to watch your back…”
“OOOOO, now wait a minute…”
“I don’t mean like a black man, I mean like a woman. Black women can understand me here.”
“I’m sure they can. Twice over.”
“I just can’t imagine walking down the street at two a.m. in fucking Chicago, confident, in my own head, not having to think about strangers leaping out from between parked cars to force me into a dark alley and rape me.”
“The reality of that? Grim, I imagine.”
“I wish I could just set it aside for a while. I want to be the predator. I’m tired of being prey.”
“I’ll teach you to shoot, if you want.”
“No, thanks, babe. I’d just be scared-er…is that a word?”
“You’re asking a black man if a word is a word?”
“But you speak so well.”
I smiled for the first time that day, it felt like.
Sometimes the pouring rain, the pounding job, the abject loneliness felt too big to carry. I wanted someone else to be on the other end of the folded sheet, my evening couch, the late-night bed. I wanted not to be afraid anymore.
“Yeah, I’
m a regular Colin fucking Powell. Only I’m Oakland black, baby, black all the way down.”
“I might have met you in Oakland if I’d stayed, back in the day.”
“When were you down there?”
“I met LeRoi and lived with him in the Tenderloin when I was sixteen.”
“No shit? The Tenderloin? What the hell was a sixteen-year-old Midwestern white girl doing in San Francisco, for one, and in the Tenderloin for another? Who’s LeRoi?”
“I hitched there to try to find Cora, my first lover. She was long gone, though. I met LeRoi in City Lights Bookstore. He kept me, paid me to fuck him and his friends. It wasn’t half bad. I made good money then lost it all in Vegas like that.”
I snapped my fingers.
“No shit? Yeah, we very well might have met on the street back then. I used to go into town and cruise the prostitutes when I was 16, roll down my window and let ‘em lean in and shit. They knew I was underage and they didn’t care. They were nice to me.”
“I’m sure they were. Studly young man like you. See? You get to be the strong stud even back then. Not fair.”
“Life’s not fair, Al.”
The only time I’d seen writing produce results was in Chicago.
My chef love Cora was about to lose her job and I had to do something to help. I had an ulterior motive, too: Maybe if I was a hero I could tear her away from the butch who kept her down. If I could write well enough to save her, she’d choose me.
The city had torn up Halsted Street in the blistering hot summer, bringing in bulldozers and jackhammers and huge cement pipes, ruining the street and sidewalk in front of the fledgling restaurant where Cora had recently gotten her dream job. Finally the head chef after years of serfdom, she was loving life until suddenly the street sewer project took over.