All those weeks we labored. We sweat. It is a “we” I have not been able to use as a word the same way since. There isn’t a proper translation.
The eighth week of road crew we’d split up in teams under an overpass near Balboa park. The trees and bushes were thick and lush so we had the mercy of shade. Things smelled like water was near, but it was probably the highly advanced sprinkler system that helps keep Balboa park green and sparkly and fit for tourists.
Me, Jimarcus, Sonny the chubby Italian and Ernesto were shuffling trash with our sticks. Jimarcus yelled out hey mahn and pointed to a little path in the shrubs. So we followed him. After we were dumped off in a parking lot by officer Kyle, Jimarcus shared cigarettes when we finished each day that made you feel pretty good. To this day I’ve no idea what was in them. That’s why we followed him. Because at the end of the day he’d ease us.
So we’re walking down this little brush lined path and suddenly Jimarcus stops so Ernesto stops so I stop and chubby Sonny, who is last, kinda bumps into me. There in front of us, peaceful as can be, is a sleeping bum.
I think that’s what some people call him, right?
I’m not sure what a good translation is. But I’m guessing some people would go with “bum” because of how he looked. And smelled. Our bum had an enormous Grizzly Adams beard. His hair shot out untamed and ratted - probably there were bugs in it, possibly worse. And his skin was red and pockmarked and puffy with drink. His nose landscape looked lunar. And he smelled like week-old sweet burned apple piss. Enough to sting your nasal passages and make your eyes water. I’d say he was about 5’8” and weighed maybe 210. His belly a smelly mound.
But what was most striking about our bum, and what made Sonny nearly puke on the spot, is that his pants were down around his ankles, and his exposed genitals were swollen. I mean like huge. I mean elephant man huge. His balls were the size of purpley croquet balls. His dick looked a little like a reptile had gotten loose. And the pièce de résistance? There was a giant pile of human shit about a foot and a half away from him. He smiled in his sleep. He snored. Sonny gagged.
Jimarcus said fuck mahn and Ernesto laughed and Sonny bent over how you do when you are going to vomit and I said “Shhhhhhhh! You’ll wake his ass up!” So we backed up like kids who’ve seen something they weren’t supposed to. The bum? He just slept the sound sleep of babies and puppies.
When we got back to the group none of us said a fucking thing about our bum. Rick would have popped a spring in that geared up little skull of his and beat the shit out of our bum. And look, there was no way we were going to tell the clean-shaven officer Kyle. He would have arrested our bum. We already knew what it felt like to be arrested. Multiple times. We already knew what it felt like to fuck up. To be passed out drunk. To stink. To not want to be alive. To wake up with your face on the pavement. To use words but find your sentences doubling back and betraying you. To stay in a hotel for a week when you hear on TV the police are doing a sweep. To have no one who understands. To be passing - leading a double life. Maybe we didn’t yet know what it was like to have swollen genitals the size of Texas, but metaphorically - some body part out of control - some piece of you gone freakish - kind of we did.
So we just left him there. In a kind of peace. Next to his own shit.
Vagabundo.
The last week of my period of service we had to pull weeds along this giant paved road that led up to some fancy ass facility of some sort up on the hill. In a wealthy neighborhood filled with white people with Mexican and Filipino house cleaners. The “trees” that lined the grand lane were tiny, so the only shade you could get was on part of your face and maybe a shoulder. We went through the giant yellow plastic vat of water in the first two hours - I think it was something like 98 degrees that day. Goddamn those little paper cone cups.
By the last week my body had become used to the labor. I didn’t get blisters and my wrists didn’t ache and I’d stocked up on Vicodin so my back felt like anyone’s. I didn’t get dizzy in the sun and I brought enough food in my sack lunch and I smoked Jimarcus’ cigarettes and Ernesto and I took our breaks together to practice English. I was not unhappy. I had a pretty great tan.
But really, I was going home, to my plush little bouge life. Half of them were going to jail. Ernesto disappeared partway through the ninth week. So that “we” I’m using? Well. It’s just language.
At the top of the hill we got to rest. The shade of an enormous Torrey Pine tree umbrellad out and held us so we could feel the coolness of breeze. We drank water. We ate our pathetic little brown sack lunches. I thought about Ernesto playing guitar, but my guess is he wasn’t.
That day though what I also felt was it’s over. This small thing I did with these men I’ll never see again. Something about that made me feel irrecoverably sad. But I was of course also thrilled to be “done” with my punishment. I closed my eyes and drank a Coke from a glass bottle. So simple. I wished Ernesto were there. Drinking a Coke. When I opened my eyes, I stared at my hands and how not Mexican they looked. My hands, they just looked … dumb.
Then I looked up the hill and saw the giant concrete and wood sign of the facility we had just carved our way up to.
The Cerritos Olympic Swim Center.
I’d competed there when I was 14. I’d won the 100-meter breaststroke. Sometimes I think I’ve been everywhere before.
Conversion
I’VE BEEN THINKING. MAYBE RECOVERING CATHOLICS turn to movies for salvation. I mean, in an informal poll that I took recently, a whole lot of ex-catholics seem unusually moved by film. The bigger and more epic the better. And we still really like sitting in the dark- if they ever get rid of movie theaters you are going to see a bunch of lapsed catholics wandering around in the street looking for a dark box to go sit inside so we can experience catharsis …
Enter the Mingo, stage left.
Andy Mingo in a shitty ass Isuzu Trooper. After my head-on collision, an M FA thesis student of mine at San Diego State University walked into my life like a movie star, offering to loan me one of his cars. By the time I met him in San Diego, I was a woman who had to crash her car.
The first time I really saw Andy was at my SDSU job interview. He very nearly fucked my shit up - sitting there looking a little like Marlon Brando. I’m up there trying like crazy to sound cogent and smart, jawing it around postmodernism like someone a university should hire and he’s zinging me with puffy lips and intense stares and is that a flattened spot just above his nose like in On the Waterfront? I swear to god the line “I coulda been a contendah” crept into my frontal lobe. I distinctly remember thinking, whoa. That guy is trouble.
When it came time for the question answer portion of the presentation, Andy Mingo raised his hand and asked, “What is your teaching philosophy with regard to what graduate students in creative writing should be reading?” All the grad students leaned forward at me.
I said, “Everything. They should read everything they can get their hands on. What they love, what they hate, all of it. You wouldn’t jump into an empty pool, would you? Literature is the medium. You have to swim in it.”
He crossed his arms over his chest. He glared at me. Pissed. It was not the answer he was apparently hoping for.
What I thought was, fuck you, Mingo. How many books have you written, big sexy looking guy? You’ve got a problem with reading? You can kiss my ass.
Miraculously, I got the job.
Every day I saw him in the graduate writing workshop Andy stared so hard at me I thought my skull might fracture. Or something in me, anyway.
After that eventful phone call from Paris that led to my carefully calculated drunk on and drive episode, Andy sauntered into my office and brought me a novel manuscript. A good one. And he offered to let me borrow one of his cars. Mine, was totaled. Like my life.
I borrowed the car.
When I drove his car around I could smell him and feel him. In the seat and on the steering wheel. In the holder thing between seats
where I found cassette tapes he listened to. Bob Dylan and The Cure and Sublime. In the glove compartment where I found a lighter and rolling papers. On the car floor he’d so obviously worked hard to vacuum. The engine ran hot.
The kind of teacher I was, I’d meet the grad students to go over their writing anyplace but my office. I’ve never believed in institutional authority. So I’d let the grad student choose where we’d meet - let them name a place where they felt like themselves - and I would go there to talk with them about writing. With Andy, it was a Mediterranean coffee shop off the beaten track with an outdoor area where we sat under bougainvillea and orange blossoms and spoke of writing.
That sentence cracked me up. Immediately it was not about writing. Man-lust fucks a girl up.
We both wore sunglasses. Since neither of us took them off, I took it as a draw. We both threw out a few mock barbs. Neither flinched. We both executed a couple of low-level sexual innuendos. Dead even. And when I asked him about the references to Italy in his novel, he began to narrate his lifestory - so I came back at him with a bit of mine.
Andy grew up in Reno. And what was coming out of his mouth, well, it was a worthy backstory.
“My mother was a single mother. She taught math. I’ve always hated math. I grew up with a series of father stand-ins… guys with names like ‘Pidge.’ ”
I countered with “My mother was an alcoholic pathological liar. On the other hand, she was a great storyteller.”
“I was once a bouncer at Paul Revere’s ‘Kicks’ nightclub when I was 19.”
“Paul Revere and the Raiders?” I asked, thinking about how when I was 19 I was in Monte’s basement.
“The same,” he said.
“I’ve been swimming with Kathy Acker,” I said, trying quite hard to impress him.
“Who is Kathy Acker?”
Goose egg. Why had I said that?
“My father was in the C.I.A. He died of a heart attack when I was three. Well at least that’s the official story. He was 33, so who knows.”
That was a good one. I had to pause and pretend to drink my latte. “33. That was jesus’ age.” I have no idea why I said that. Why in the world did I bring up jesus? Idiot. Then I said, “My father … my father …”
“Your father what?” he asked.
“My father was abusive.”
“Oh,” he said. “I’m sorry,” he said. “What did he do?”
To tell or not to tell. How did I get so quickly to the heart of my wounds? What had just happened?
“Sexual,” is all I could manage. Then I wished I was a part of the shrubbery or tableware. Idiotidiotidiotidiot. Why don’t you just slit open your own belly like a caught steelhead and spill it out on the table, moron.
“That sucks,” he said. And then, “I hope something karmically fucked happened to him?”
Right answer. I laughed. I laughed kind of hard. “Kind of,” I said. And we were able to move past the blood clot I’d presented between us.
“Excellent then,” he said.
We switched from lattes to wine.
It wasn’t just man thing that impressed me. It was his story. How he’d escaped Reno and moved to San Sebastian, Spain, where he briefly witnessed a series of ETA events - the armed Basque nationalist and separatist organization. How he later lived in Italy where he coached a not very good Italian American football team with guys named Mauro Sassaligo, Ugo Spera, and Giacamo Piredu. How he’d interview members of the Earth Liberation Front, how he’d cyber-pirated Bill Gates Microsoft.edu. How he came back to the states - the Northwest, to be exact - to be a writer. Then he said something remarkable.
“In Italy I read about Ken Kesey teaching at U of O. So I applied to the university creative writing program and was accepted. We moved to Eugene. But the Kesey workshop had already happened. I did meet some cool writing teachers though.”
“Really,” I said. No shit? I got kind of excited but played it smooth and nonchalant. This was my opening to impress. Ahem. “You know, I was in that Kesey year long workshop. Funny, huh.”
“Yeah,” he said, “I know. I think I saw you in the creative writing department hall after that. Did you have one side of your head shaved back then?”
“What?” I definitely needed more wine.
“Did you have…a very unusual head back then?” He was staring at my hair.
Man alive. What are the odds? “Well, yes. Yes I did.” I slugged what was left of my merlot.
“If you don’t mind my asking, why the hell did you do that to your head?”
“Suave,” I said, laughing.
“No, I don’t mean to sound like asshole, your hair is beautiful. It’s just, it looked kind of…”
“Severe?” I offered.
“Severe,” he agreed.
Why did I do that. Why did I. I got butkus. Then it just sort of came out of my mouth as, “I think I did it because I was hurting. I think I wanted to mark that hurt on the outside. I think I wanted to be someone else. But I didn’t know who yet.” It almost sounded aware.
“I see,” he said, “and who are you now?”
Goddamn this guy just goes straight for the kill. Aren’t guys his age supposed to be shallow insensitive arrogants? So I said, “I’m your teacher.” We both cracked up. The kind of laughter that reveals a gaping fault line big enough to drive a U-haul through.
Then it just got ridiculous - I couldn’t stop watching his lips move and I couldn’t shut down the electricity creeping up my spine and then it became impossible to maintain the teacher student charade when he took off of his sun glasses for a moment and I took off mine and I swear he performed some kind of sly guy Marlon Brando like from Streetcar eye hoodoo on me. Still, I gave him my written comments on his work like a professional should and sent him away. But he already knew my weakness.
“ Um, Dr. Lidia? Don’t you need a ride home?”
I know you are not used to women saying this, but I wanted him to drive down into me and eat me alive.
Ecstatic State
OUR FIRST “DATE” ANDY SAID HE WANTED TO GO SWIMMING with me. He knew all about the swimmer of me from reading my stories, which he’d apparently gone home and looked up that night. Also from stories he’d been told. Now that I look back at it, it was a brave move. He wasn’t that great a swimmer. He was great at other things - but not swimming. So that must have taken some man guts. And he was mildly allergic to chlorine. When he dipped himself in chlorine for long periods, his nose ran. Non-stop. Still he asked to come swim with me. No one has ever done that.
No one.
So we swam. In a little Y pool near my rented one bedroom house in Ocean Beach a block from the sea. In the pool he fought the water with all his might. Six foot three and built like a tree his body was meant for land. But he swam with me. Lap after lap. I lapped him a dozen times. Still he swam. His nose ran. He stayed with me in the water. When I finally stopped, he looked me right in the eye. Chlorine smell between us. His eyes were bloodshot because he refused to wear goggles. He was more present than anyone in my entire life had ever been. He smiled. Snot running down his mouth. I smiled back. Fear in my chest. You can’t order a highball in the pool to calm the fuck down.
The second date he took me to a ratty little hole in the wall Ocean Beach gym where he hit the heavy bag and did mixed martial arts things I’d never seen, nearly making me cream my jeans and pass out. I know. How not evolved of me. How not feminist and Ph.D. and university professor. I’m just saying. You could have hosed me down and carried me out on a stretcher.
Then he wrapped and wrapped and wrapped my hands and put the red gloves on me and took me over to a smaller weenier bag and tried to show me how to hit it. Everything smelled like man and sweat and leather and socks. I was the only woman there, and I was not young and hot. I was 38 and he was 28 and it looked that way. But I put my fists up. For him. For him, I tried to find some game. It was going OK, but mostly I bat at it like a girl. Not because I couldn’t bring something harder
, I was an athlete back in the day after all. But I was COMPLETELY UTTERLY STUPIDLY RIDICULOUSLY SELF CONSCIOUS. Middle-aged woman with hot guy in an O.B. gym.
At one point he tried to help me improve my jabs by having me put both gloves up in front of my face - I didn’t realize I was supposed to protect my face, I was intently staring dreamily at his, hoping to look at least minimally sexy. So when he jabbed at my little red paws? I ended up punching myself out. My eyes watered and my nose went numb for a bit. But I stayed. And I hit the bag harder and harder. And when I hit it as hard as I could? It felt good. Um, really good. I hit it and hit it and hit it. I hit it like I was hitting my own past. Then he hit the heavy outdoor bag and knocked it off its metal moorings.
So, yeah. You know those illustrated Karma Sutra books? Here’s a brief run-down: stimulations of desire, types of embraces, caressing and kisses, marking with nails, biting and marking with teeth, on copulation (positions), slapping by hand and corresponding moaning, virile behavior in women, superior coition and oral sex, preludes and conclusions to the game of love. Oh and it describes 64 types of sexual acts (10 chapters).
Upstairs in his house was a carpeted little attic room. And him. And me. And a bottle of wine. And pot. And no clothes. I don’t know what the neighbors heard but I can tell you it must have been a startling interlude from the mundanity of their nightly televisions. One thousand nights in this first night of his mouth on the mouth of me my mouth on the cock of him his fingers inside my wet inside my ass my fingers around his throbbing inside his ass my legs on his shoulders my feet over my head then sideways like scissors then me on all fours then him underneath me riding and riding then him lifting me my whole body a muscle my back on his belly and chest me on top of him on my back his hands working my tits his hands working my clit my back arching up his cock so far up me my spine went loose my legs shook I screamed and screamed I bit his neck I scratched a self into the very flesh of him I pounded my body down onto him I made an ocean of bed. The sleep of lovers.