The Destruction

In my dream I hear the unmistakable sound of fighter jets. Outside Diane's small shack of a one room house and down her few rickety wooden stairs I watch, both fearful and excited, as one then another emerges from the horizon over the city, flying low enough to graze the ground.

The pilots are singular and robotic. On a mission, focused. They fly toward the ocean with such strange ferocity, I know something unimaginable and terrible is occurring.

Another sound, smaller but just as unsettling. A boater, civilian probably, blasts past us headed in the same direction.

Then the people start coming, yelling and panicked. No one will stop to tell us what's wrong. I think of turning on the TV, but imagining an alien invasion, I don't hold much faith in them telling me anything. Besides, there is no time, judging by the frantic exodus before us.

Finally someone yells, "There's a 100 foot wall of water coming. Nothing can stop it, we're all dead!" Nonetheless, he runs for safety.

Diane and I run up the stairs into the house to pack a few essentials. With less than 55 minutes until it hits, we are stuck trying to figure out what to pack.

"Take plastic bags, water bottles, food and a book!"

We search the shelf for the right book, the last one we may ever read, the one we may read over and over endlessly if we survive.

The Daily Write: The cashier (November 15, 2012)

"I don't understand it myself," she said, tapping her fingers on the worn wooden tabletop just like her father had done when she was a child.

"Mona, it's obviously latent father stuff, I mean, seriously." Rachelle was in no mood to dick around with Mona's pseudo confusion. She knew that Mona knew exactly what was going on.

The restaurant was loud with a buzz like yellow light through a glass of Prosecco, effervescent and warm. Tables of two mostly, with a four-top in each of the three corners in the main dining room. Mona's back was to the dark red velvet curtain which separated the foyer from the bar on one side and dining room on the other.

Mona swilled her wine like a trucker, pushed her course brown hair behind her ears with her pudgy fingers and looked at Rachelle drunkenly. "Look Rachy, I realize you wanted to fuck your father, or wait, maybe he wanted to fuck your best friend. Whatever." She looked around the room as if she were in a swirling fishbowl. "But I have no desire for daddy sex, okay?"

Rachelle rolled her eyes and folded the paper from her straw in half lengthwise. "Honey, I know this is hard for you to believe, but no one in their right mind would want to fuck their 69-year-old crabby-ass neighbor unless they were dealing with some ancient childhood shit."

"Oh for the love of..." Mona picked up her glass and took another drink. "God, I really like this Gewurztraminer. I mean, who knew right? A wine I can actually remember. It's a first." She paused, inebriated. "Maybe you're right. Maybe it's time I did something really bad."

Rachelle looked at her friend with satisfaction. She was sick of all the talk and no action.

"But Rachelle? I've never even been with a man. I don't know what the hell I'm doing."

Rachelle put her palms flat on the table in front of her and lifted her head until she was looking eye-to-eye with her best friend.

"Just go over there with a bottle of wine Mona, and then start asking him questions about his life."

The Daily Write: I'm all alone out here! (November 14, 2012)

Rose dropped Frank off at the gas station. "Dropped off" being the polite term. She eighty-sixed his ass. Once they crossed the state line, it became abundantly apparent that not only was he lousy company, he also had a worse sense of direction than her ex husband. She figured that meant he'd be useless on the playa too. A man who couldn't conversate and couldn't find his way around on a flat-as-hell desert road sure wasn't going to be able to erect a shade structure or lug water.

She didn't spend all the last three months of her quickly shortening life to end up taking care of an old man who couldn't fend for himself.

"Damn, where's that Grizzly Adams when you need him?" she muttered to herself as she exited the last civilization she expected to see for quite some time,  shifted into high gear and opened her up.

Two hours later she found herself tired. Not wanting to get hypnotized by the road, she pulled over, turned on the CB to listen the truckers and reached up to the sun vizor grab a joint. She needed to relax before the excitement of getting where she was going, where she had been going, she figured, almost all her adult life without realizing it.

The Daily Write: Photo #4 (November 12, 2012)

In the pre-dusk daylight, the ancient streets were warm and appealing. Small hills covered in cobblestone, saffron buildings on either side. A very different experience from my first time in Madrid when the rain soaked through my water resistant zebra striped jacket, into my shirt and even bra. I had been determined to visit Chueca to see the gay nightlife, not realizing how lost I would become in the tiny dark streets, nor how confusing the choices would be. Was every tapas bar gay? Were there safe places to visit and those I should avoid? I couldn't make sense of it with the dark dripping water making my hair stick to the side of my face as I tired, in vain, to see over the tops of my foggy glasses. Nor was I expecting it when a dark-haired man peeled himself away from a wall where he had been hidden like a chameleon.

He spoke to me in Spanish, and when I replied in English, switched languages. He wanted to know where I was going, if I was married, if I needed company. I said no a few times, walked away, brushed him off and kept looking for somewhere to eat. The best bars were probably the ones that I couldn't see inside with dark heavy doors and tiny brick lined windows. I wasn't feeling quite that adventurous, especially without command of Spanish, so I finally slipped into a black and red restaurant, dripping puddles onto the floor and the glass table top as I sat down, drying my head awkwardly on a paper napkin.





The menu was familiar but bizarre, Asian/Italian fusion. So against type being served among the tiny tight streets of the ancient Spanish city. I was glad. I had already eaten too much jamón , too many heavy egg tortillas and red, near raw meats, over salted and bloody. Noodles and a mixed drink in the yellow light of a small restaurant were warming, familiar, almost comforting.

Oddly, another woman was dining alone next to me, and speaking heavy Irish-accented English. I introduced myself, glad for the company in this strange netherworld. Her tale was as odd as she - a filmmaker and former lawyer who had recently finished a piece she was marketing to film festivals. She was in Madrid for a huge technology conference being held at some big sports pavilion where there were tents set up in rows for the attendees. She was one of very few woman, there on her last Euros, hoping for a check to arrive soon that would get her back to Ireland. We talked over our meals - about her film, about queer life in the US and Ireland, my family, her girlfriend. Not quite what I expected out of my first trip to Chueca, but an interesting travel experience nonetheless.

I left after dessert, having promised to watch her film clip and send it on to a friend who was a programmer for Frameline, SF's queer film festival. I was relieved to be going back to a hotel and not to a row of precision erected tents and techies.

The next day when I barely got out of Europe due to the Icelandic volcano, I thought about my new Irish acquaintance a lot. She had barely enough money to get from the restaurant back to the conference. I couldn't imagine she'd have found a way out of Spain and back home. She might have been stranded for weeks without money or a place to stay while I was safely tucked into a long coach class flight home next to a member of The Church of Latter Day Saints, who offered me a copy of his Book of Mormon mid-flight.

The Daily Write: I am determined (November 11, 2012)

She wasn't sure what went wrong or how it happened. Probably on account of being white. Being white had so much to do with so many things. And nothing felt more white than when her Black daycare provider admonished her for lax parenting.

"You have to be consistent, no matter what," she said, shaking her head as if the breech had already happened, as if it were a lost cause trying to get the white woman with overly good intentions to get it together and be a good parent.

Of course, such admonishment was deeply embarrassing, so she denied being inconsistent. Comical really. Like denying she was middle class. Or pretending not to be a do-gooder white lady social liberal with a parenting style that leaned toward "whatever is easiest in the moment."

For instance, those parents whose children always stayed in their own beds. Hard asses. They not only must've had endless energy to reinforce the ground rules at 3 am, they must've been the types who could handle delayed gratification. The same ones who, as children, succeeded in the experiment which would later help researchers hypothesize about who would make it far in the business world and who would not. It was all based on their ability to withstand the temptation of sweet treats as observed in a psychological experiment. Although she had not been one of the subjects, she was sure, without a doubt, that she would not have been able to resist.

Now her own child was a pre-teen, wily as he had ever been, easily set off, ungrateful when hungry, unhappy, bored and prone to insisting he get his own way. In moments when he was sweet, nothing could be better. The rest of the time she wondered what her lax white parenting had wrought. Too late to go back in time; she prayed he turned out well anyway.

The Daily Write: My Brother (November 9, 2012)

I've been wondering lately if they have good sex in communist countries. Does giving yourself to the State equal the end of erotic desire? How does it fit in with the rhetoric of The Party? And what of totalitarian regimes? Is sex the only good thing left when everything else is controlled, bloody, gray and you are half starved?

These are the kinds of things that go through my mind as I stand in the backyard of the 69-year-old across the street drinking white wine from a pink plastic cup while he smokes American Spirits and talks about what his house was like when he bought it, how it feels to be leaving after 22 years, and every now and then mentions Bob Avakian, Chairman of The Revolutionary Communist Party. It's not that I'm all that interested in his beliefs, but there is an erotic charge to talking to a man driven by passion for his politics and for righting the wrongs of the world.

Frank is short, gray haired and loose-eyed the way someone who drinks too much tends to be. He doesn't remember my name but he likes to talk. He's a grumbler and a mumbler so I can't always understand what he's saying. When he invited me over to tour his house I couldn't tell for sure if he wanted me to come in, and then he got annoyed that I hesitated before entering. Then standing in his bathroom admiring his tile work seemed so intimate, with the bedroom beyond.

I like that we are developing this friendship across generations, genders and the street. Only, he's about to move and I have no business, as a married woman with two kids, flirting with a man who can't see straight and is 22 years my senior.

But then thing is, I've never been with a man. I'm curious. And I like the ones that have experience, and who pay attention to me but don't, all in one breath. I find his cranky demeanor a turn on. And plus, there is that notion of conquest. Like, could I get under his skin enough to make him forget the politics? Or maybe he would grunt sweet Avakianisms into my ear in a moment of passion. On the the other hand, he may be spent at this point in his life. In which case, I'd still like to get drunk with him and hang out.

Perhaps I am a Commie after all.

The Daily Write: Larger (November 8, 2012)

"Do you remember that feeling of being carried up the stairs in your daddy's arms?" Lynette asked me with her lazy summer voice.

She was twirling the bottom of her braid and wagging her legs out over the edge of the porch of the big old family farm house. The light had left the sky an hour earlier and the stars and lightening bugs were just starting to twinkle.

Besides Lynette's voice, the next best sound in the world to me was the night bugs. Sometimes she and I tried to stalk them, but getting to the root of the sound is like trying to catch a butterfly. Rare.

"I remember it Joe Joe," she said to me, turning for just a whisp of a moment so that she was looking right into me. "It made me feel wiggly, like I was a whooshing tree in an autumn wind."

I smiled to myself at the thought of my big sister as a leaning tall tree. Suited her right. She was like that, with deep roots in the place so far down nothing could ever budge her, but so adventurous and pretty, she could reach up to the tip of the sky anytime she wanted to.

But then she got all still like she does sometimes. And I knew she was going to cry.

"Lynnie, don't cry. He's gonna come back someday." I scooted behind her and pushed my toes into her back, pretending to walk up it like a big spider. Our funny game.

She wasn't the kind to let sadness get her down for too long and I knew she was gonna start talking about something else soon. She was the strongest girl I ever met.

Way across the darkness of what we knew was the corn field were two tiny lights driving down the road to town.

Lynette laughed out loud like she just heard the preacher on Sunday say a curse word by accident. "Looks like old Sam forgot to bring home the sugar again!" She said, slapping her knee.

I was so relieved she was laughing I laid right down there on the rough grey wood of our porch and looked up at the rafters above me and laughed right along with her.

"Come on old young Joe Joe, let's go get us some ice cream," she said, standing up and stretching out like she was a wolf about to howl at the moon. She turned around fast, grabbed me by the waist and pulled me in through the screen door.