Month: December 2004

When he reaches the swings, he merely stands, remembering a girl. She had flaxen hair then, an old word, but accurate. It was midnight when he met her. He was eleven, brave with scraped knees and beginning to believe he was tall. His family had just moved from another city, halfway across the world to this strange neighborhood with foreign flowers lining the walks. His father had built the set from a box brought home from Canadian Tire, the place where they were to get him a bicycle, dad said. It was a hot day, with lemonade and the famous toolkit creating the swing-set like magic from scattered bolts and bars. He had gone to bed sweaty and happy in new Star Wars pyjamas, imagining the kids he would meet.

A sound woke him, it was dark, a blue dark, heavy lit by the moon though the unfamiliar window. The sound came again, blurring oddly from his dreams of being an astronaut into reality. He sat up, kicking his covers off to crouch on his bed under the window. He put his fingers on the sill and peered out between his dirty hands to the yard below. She was there, riding the wind like the purest form of american ghost. A ribbon in her golden hair, amphetamine white kneesocks under a chequered dress, she flew, legs swinging bent then straight to the stars. It was long minutes before he could move again, before he could breath.

He’s out front that house right now, if he looked up he would see the window he watched her from. He hurts inside, thinking how he watched her until she saw him, how she climbed the trestle under his window to whisper to him, “Never tell”, before running away into the perfumed night. His mother is upstairs now, dying. Her skin has grown thin and sickness eats at her from inside. He didn’t have the heart to tell her it was christmas.

Somehow he skipped the holidays this year. No sleigh-rides up the mountain, no reindeer, no red suits or plum pudding, just silence. He’s sitting out front the house, dark shaggy hair with a green t-shirt and stained blue jeans, one hand idly picking at the blue paint peeling off the wooden steps. The rest of the building is white, an old two-bedroom house put up sometime in the seventies in that brief period when striped awnings were chic. To the side is an old swingset, rusty and disused. He looks at it, remembering how the metal would scream when children tried to pump their legs to the sky. That was years ago. It was a horrible sound, like rabbits crying. He stands, scanning the empty street. There’s no-one to see him pick his way through the uncut grass to the angular bars, the neighborhood seeming to collectively decide that this is the hour for turkey dinner in front of the T.V. He feels taken out of time as he walks in silence. He can hear the grass fold like paper under his feet and on the wind is a snatch of bluegrass from one street over, something he knows but cannot place.

My fingers have been twitching, an odd scattershot itch. I think it’s that I’ve been wanting to write. Clatter on a keyboard and let the words spill forth, it’s like the future has been building up, the descriptions piling to topple down with a tin pan clatter. I want to mention the deep appreciation I have for the fellow who painted the bukkake moneyshot graffiti on the face of the too skinny haute couture model on the Venebles Street billboard. I want to share the unbearable wingspan of the local pelicans that stunningly remind me dinosaurs existed, were real, every time they fly. There’s just been no place for writing the past few days, no time set aside for this blessed interaction of flesh and type-writer. I feel tension draining from me as I sit here, curled up in bright green with the laptop on the top of my bended knees, as if poison is being drained. It’s a new feeling, a laid out refusal to accept that I need to do this battling with apparent need. It’s always been a filler-space activity, not anything to seek out. What is the pedigree of such a thing? I’ve been stepped up from hobbiest to hack or from a frying pan into a sinking ship. I’m losing my label coherency, the slick metallic honey taste of certain words are slipping from me. I like it though I don’t know what to do with it.

Lately there’s been a lot I don’t know what to do with and I like that too. I was whored in front of me at the two parties I went to this week, before leaving. People have been arriving, situations springing full grown from the head of Zeus to challenge me and clash shields with the everyday obscurity of my everyday life. If I make it seem dramatic, it may be that it is, but only in that people fill their lives with warm theater, with kisses and muttered imprecations, with saying in the dark, “I need you”, “you make me curious”, “I thought, once, that you had died”. There’s no telling the weary from the wise on a cynical day, but that’s fine with me. Crashing desolation matched with wet comfortable silences make me happy. Signals we can’t duplicate outside out moments with that invisible non-existent fourth wall are inevitable and precious. It’s nice to have an audience with you, so you can talk about it later, though those moments stolen private are the best. I’m getting used to having a secret, but it makes me feel a little blind.

I was discussing such things with the boy yesterday as we drove back from the silliest ice-skating I’ve ever taken part in, a tiny outdoor round and round in Pershing Square, a rather seedy area of downtown Los Angeles, set to a tinny mix of Isaac Hayes and swinging hits from the fifties. The ice was so cut as to be snow, textured like skating on a river thick with leaves and ruts. In my search for the proper terms and responses, I brought up the possibilities inherent in my parallel monogamies and we promptly got lost, he pulling off the organic running freeway miles past our turn. Nails down a chalkboard conversation, the roads conspiring to lead us to nowhere, streets named after companies, Fed-Ex Lane and Tesla Road, not conveying a congenial discussion. Apparently there’s lines been drawn that I was never aware of. They still haven’t been made clear to me, but I have some hopes for further communication. All is not lost, though to some it might seem as such at first glance. We drove a ways, growing more lost with every turn, following detours where the signs petered out just as we hit focal points with our voices. Common sense has nothing to do with jealousy. There are good reasons I worry about my boy. I felt that hate-flare once a long time ago, but once was not enough to understand it. I don’t mind to share, I need to learn what the sit-com relationship desires.

So today it is christmas, the shops are shut and the traffic slowed to a treacle crawl. Another thing where I don’t know what it means. We went up on the mountain and looked down over the miniature city that is Laguna Beach. I can’t claim it was very interesting but for the scrub and teen-carved sandstone. I like evidence of humanity, names and sitting-inna-tree love vendettas left for the elements to erode into history. I’ve been cold today, maybe a little ill with the on-set of the full moon without iron in my diet. This is California, I expected a bit more of the health food fad, but as such, I’ve been missing out as well as on the pretty sunsets. Soon I’m going to assume they don’t exist in the wintertime and scuff my feet in the sand less expectantly. The birds here will make up for it, huge things and tiny. I saw a sandpiper for the first time this week, it’s little legs flashing into a blur beneath its body as it ran away from the waves. An adorable thing, nature playing with design. It’s a bit of an odd release, to understand that I know the names of these things, these odd creatures of face and form I’ve never seen before in person.