The Daily Write: The Teacher (August 23, 2013)

Writing Prompt: The Teacher

Mr. Carr was white with a grey afro and glasses and a horrible, depressing suit he wore every day. He taught math. For us, it was bonehead math. You know, the math for the fuckups who skip school, or come to class high and late. We were the losers, some cooler than others, some smart, some not so much. I was smart, but not in math. Not in 1st grade when my teacher scolded me for not understanding the assignment:

Fill in the blanks

1 __ 345__78__10

I had no idea what to do. I was 6. I had been late to class. The papers were already on the desks and when I got there she told me to figure out what to do. There were no instructions, I had no clue. I asked her and she just told me to figure it out. Figure it out. Figure it out.

One summer when I came up to live with mom and my brothers for a couple months, she put me in special math tutoring. It was at the Easter Seals school for handicapped children which I loved because the math tutor and I met in a huge room with a ramp and giant balls and all kinds of cool toys. After we worked together, she let me play.

But it didn't last. I didn't remember how to do math when I got back to California.

By the time I had Mr. Carr, I was on my way out anyway. I rarely went to school and when I did I was self-conscious and angry. I felt embarrassed to be there, to be seen, to be in that stupid class with that freaky teacher, to not know math, to not be capable of knowing math.

So yeah, I told him to fuck off. And then I ran out of the classroom, out of the school, down the blocks to the park where I looked for someone to save me, get me out of there, get me into a van without side windows where I could hide and get high and wait to grow up. I just couldn't fucking wait. I just wanted to be a grownup in control of her own life. A life where I never would have to do math again. I hated fucking math.

The Daily Write: You can't afford it (August 22, 2013)

Writing Prompt: You can't afford it

My mom was supported by my grandpa, and welfare plus odd jobs. We were on WIC for a long time which to me felt glamorous in the same way of food stamps. To me these were magical talismans representing the golden times with my mom and three brothers in one of her many tiny places. For me it was summer, for her and the twins, it was life all year round. I was a visitor to her world of patchouli and bare feet, wild hair and sprouts growing in jars on the windowsill over the sink.

Going from our dad's cold, undecorated house in California, where we lived fairly simply compared to the rich kids in their giant mansions with pools, from the wealth and superficiality and meanness of those kids all hell bent on conforming, to the world of laughter, dirty feet, unbrushed hair and talk of the revolution yet to come was like going to a magical place. Or maybe it mostly felt that way because I was with her again. On the best nights, the babies would stop crying, my little brother would go to sleep, and she would cuddle with me while singing, the smell of her body like being at home.
 

Bad days and nights were dominated by her boyfriend, who was in and out of the drunk tank, who had bloodshot eyes and long dark hair. He wore a worn leather hippie cowboy hat and shit kicker boots. He put a bottle right in the middle of the midnight birthday cake one year. And he kicked me out in the rain when I was too young to be on my own. I got in his way and he hated me for it. Not my little brothers though. Them, he adored in a cloyingly drunken way that made me so angry. They weren't his kids and he didn't do a damn thing to support them.

His life story was terrible and his looks good. My mom told me he was an artist when he was sober. 

The famous story goes like this:

Little girl and her brother, a year and a half younger, return for the summer to live with her beloved, missed mother and baby brothers.

The neighbor friend tells the girl what happened when she was gone,

"He chased your mom down the street with a butcher knife."

An image I never could get out of my head.

"She ran up the stairs and into my baby's room!"

Something the neighbor friend could never forgive.

The Daily Write: Those Voices (August 21, 2013)

Writing Prompt: Those Voices

There's things I just can't say out loud, or even write, for fear of having them come to pass. Or for fear of stating something so happy that the opposite happens next and bad rains down upon me and my family. Which is to say, I was thinking today about how my daughter has had a mother for an entire 7 years with no interruption except for my occassional business trip to Europe, or the Philippines or NYC. I was almost envious. How strange to be envious of my daughter for having me.

 

I didn't have a me much when I was a kid. My mom split when I was 4. Just took off one day with her old man. She left me and my little brother at daycare. Didn't pick us up. We had all been living together with  my aunt, her husband and her weird friend. Or rather, I think that was the era when my mom lived at that house with all of us in the backyard in a tent with two men who were good friends. Wayne was the darker skinned and bigger Afro'd of the two. He had a coffee house with stained glass and wooden geometric light fixtures hanging down from the ceiling beams on rugged chain. The wood was dark like Wayne, and the stained glass lit from within. He and Carl wore dashikis as was the proud African heritage style of the late 60s. My mom probably wanted to wear them, but didn't. But who can remember such details?
 
I do remember her not showing up. I remember crying wishing for her to hold me. I remember tapping on a black and white television screen trying to get her to turn around and look at me. And later, after she resurfaced, but when we had been moved by my father to live with him, I remember him having me dial her on our push button phone to tell her I started my period. I was deeply humiliated and when she congratulated me I wanted to scream.
 
I don't know what it's like to have a mother. Not really.

I feel sick writing this.

The Daily Write: Wet (August 18, 2013)

Writing Prompt: Wet

I had a new best friend every few months. Debbie was nice, nicer than some of them. She didn't try to intimidate me to get me to do what she wanted. I remember how white her hair was, white and dry like tinder. And her skin, pale almost to the point of translucency. She lived across town. Her parents, like so many of my friends' parents, disapproved of me. I never knew exactly why. Maybe it was our differences. That was probably it.

One time she convinced me to go out for a job picking strawberries in the fields. Poor teenagers - white, Indian, Mexican, and farm workers, only the names we had back then weren't so congenial. We took a school bus out to the strawberries, row after endless row of plants down close to the ground. You had to sit on your knees or crouch down or bend over to pick them, and you had to go fast if you were going to make any money. Hot sun, no shade. This, and the tiny little blisters the size of pin heads on Debbie's lobster red back later, blisters that wept like tears in a line as your ran your finger across them.

-------

Sticky. Head to toe, especially head. My hair, already so fucked up with tangles and frizz. How in the hell am I going to get it clean now? Fucking Debbie has to start laughing, make it worse, grab some from her bucket and get in on the act. Who the hell came up with this ritual hazing?

Shampooed. That's what I got. Debbie too. Only my mom won't notice cause she won't be home when I get there, probably didn't even know I was out in the fields today. Or maybe she was just relieved to have me gone. We haven't been getting along lately. Not since I turned 13. I think she hates me. No for real, you should see the way she looks at my stomach. I think she thinks some alien is gonna pop out and eat her face. She's a fucking bitch, always late to get me, doesn't give me any money, doesn't help me with school, expects me to watch the kids.

Fucking .40 cents a flat ain't gonna cut it either though so those stupid bitches did me a favor. My shit is all stained red and my hair is a tight ass clump of sweet mess, but Debbie, she's gonna suffer. Maybe that's why she's laughing rubbing dirt on top of the strawberries. She's got nothing to lose. Her ass is gonna get whupped, she won't get to see me for a while, and they'll send her back out to another shitty job.

She says she's gonna go work at the cannery as soon as she turns 16. Minimum age and your parents still gotta sign you off - make sure they told 'em it was okay to work in all that noise and misery.

I ain't ever been to juvie even though I'm afraid every day that's where I'll end up, but I'll tell you what. One time me and Debbie went with Judy to visit her sister on the swing at the cannery and those fucking bitches in the lunch room looked like they were going to kick our asses. They were hard cold mean. Miserable. Squinty eyes under all that smoke. Everyone got to smoke just to make it through on breaks. White hair nets. White jackets. Yellow teeth. Hard ass faces.

I don't want to work there. Debbie will be lucky if that's where she ends up though. Anything to get away from her house. I get bad feelings when I'm there. Bad feelings.

The Daily Write: On the sidewalk (August 17, 2013)

Writing Prompt: On the sidewalk

Oof, so heavy. Dark. A shoe falls, no crushes, me. It's the fat man with the big shadow. He comes every day at this time, and then again at night which is sometimes dark and other times light depending on how hot or cold I feel. His shoes change too, but not his thumping gait. He is a monster of a man. Not like the light little tapping lady that skitters along after him. Her heels are delightfully clicky. She brings out my glitter, makes it sound better. And her little prints are so pretty. She has a lot more of them than him. Her shadow is a lot shorter.
  
I don't like the gum. It feels thick and it never comes off, instead it wares into me until it is mistaken for something more solid. The only good news is that once in a while the person with the huge heavy tail that squirts water washes it off. That's the best really, when all the patches of people, their weight, clicks, clods and shadows go away and it's just the one with the water, sloughing off everything that isn't genuinely me.

The Daily Write: "Look at it this way," he said (August 16, 2013)

Writing Prompt: "Look at it this way," he said

Standing beside the fridge, the plastic semi-opaque pint container with a black lid in front of me, another night, another non-dinner. Gluten free pretzels dipped into Trader Joe's tzatziki. I made my son a grilled cheese. My daughter went with friends to The Rainforest Cafe and then a sleepover. My partner was off with a new friend and me, standing in front of the mottled brown granite counter, colors more golden than when we saw the house three years ago, before we painted the kitchen warm glowing orange gold. Everything looks better in a warm glow, except the things that look better cool - like the white hot houses trimmed in cobalt blue on the islands of Greece, or a beach house perfectly rustic and empty in an old issue of Martha Stewart Living, before her name took a secondary place on the masthead.

I pry off the black plastic lid. Damn, an inside clear plastic protective film. I hate those - you have to cut them off, they don't make them with graspable pull tabs. Slimy, I carefully fold the plastic in half so I am gripping only the clean side and throw it away in the garbage under the sink behind me.

The smell transports me to the campground in Ioannina, the campground in Olympia, the campground in Delphi at the edge of the aquaduct that curves down the hillside toward the olive orchards. It's 1988 and I'm sitting on a rickety threshed chair, the four posts holding the seat pushing painfully into my thighs. Ripping bread from a fresh loaf and greedily dipping it into the thick, slightly sour, garlic and cucumber infused yogurt. Greece with grape vines over campground arbors, women stirring huge pots of tomato broth filled with giant white beans, and the shell of a cicada left clinging to a fabric seam on the inside my tiny hot blue tent.

I came to Europe a vegetarian, not a great way to visit new countries. Bread, tzatziki, beans, cheese - these are my staples, until Athens where I discover the most sublime gyros shop. The proprietor doesn't speak English, I don't speak Greek but we both know a little German. "Zwei gyros mit kein fleish" I say and repeat, aware of how strange my request must seem, proud that I dug some German out of my past.

Oh my god, the bread! Not like pita you find in the States, thin and cardboard in nature; this is puffy crisp soft bread basted in the juice of the gyros meat, like fry bread from a pow wow back home. I get one, then two, then tree with no meat, plenty of pungent tzatziki, the perfect accompaniment.

Do you know I still have sleeping dreams about Greece and her gyros 24 years later?

Dinner isn't so bad after all.

The Daily Write: The boss (August 14, 2013)

Writing Prompt: The boss

He walked around the restaurant checking in with the clientele, doing what needed to be done if the servers were busy, and otherwise creating an air of mastery. They called him The Captain, although he wasn't alone. There was a captain at every fine dining establishment from San Francisco to Paris to Milan and beyond.

On his downtime he was less fastidious, although you could hardly have guessed that from observing him at work. He slept in boxers, woke up, and without putting anything else on, opened his door to the luxury apartment building hallway and grabbed the paper, itching his crotch and sometimes picking his nose. Slovenly except for his building had a doorman, a unique luxury in San Francisco, which was by no one's accounts, New York, not even on the best day.

He wasn't an unpleasant man, but he had no time for behaving properly when not constrained by the expectations of Robert, his longtime boss. It's true, he sometimes ate Kentucky Fried Chicken while sitting in front of the TV. He also liked to drink at the dive two blocks over and two blocks down at the corner of lonesome and dangerous.

Although he had done well for himself, running the front of the house in a Michelin rated venue for years, and with no family to suck away his funds, he had no desire to be anything but real when he was off duty. Charlie instead of Charles. Sweatpants or loose old jeans instead of pressed fine fabric slacks, a simple gold chain around his neck instead of the finest silk tie. A real contrast between on and off if he reflected on himself.

Even Robert knew this, and they sometimes joked about it, but never when the staff was nearby. For the staff the expectations of perfection, reverence and efficient silence were in order, unless speaking with the guests. For the staff, Charles and Robert put on quite the show of disciplined excellence.

She noticed all this without telling anyone. She frequented the establishment, and happened to live in his building. He thought of her as a benign presence, having no idea that she studied him day in and day out. Even she wasn't quite sure why she bothered. She supposed it gave her something to do in an otherwise privileged but massively dull life.