The Chronology of Water (22 page)

I’ve never been treated less like a woman in my life. I remember telling a colleague of mine - one of the only people who knew that by day I was out there with my posse while at night I had a fancy visiting writer job teaching budding young MFAs how to make their words more wonderful and she said: “Do they say lewd things to you? Do they do anything … you know, weird around you or to you? Aren’t you scared to be around those people?” I just stared at her. I tried to picture what she pictured. A bunch of male mostly minority small time criminals - those people - and a blonde woman who … who what? Who did she believe I was? She taught World Lit. and drove a Beamer.

Who I was. I was the convict with the best English. The day Jimarcus asked me what I did for a living, and I told him I taught English at SDSU, he laughed.

“Hey mahn, check it out. We got a Professor with us,” he broadcasted one day when we were scraping crap off of the walls of the county elections office.

A slow laugh made its way through the chests of the other men. And smiles. They’d smile like nothing you’ve ever seen
before. All that dark skin opening. They slapped my back or put a hand on my shoulder and shook their heads, laughing, laughing. They laughed in a way that somehow felt good. “But you with us now, sistah?” Jimarcus would say, shaking his headful of dreads. After that they all started calling me “Doctor.” You know what they wanted? They wanted me to teach them how to talk more like everyone else. They wanted more English.

On road crew my hands blistered so badly from hacking down sea grass with giant dull-bladed loppers near Sea World I couldn’t hold a cup of coffee.

On road crew if there was heavy lifting my scoliosis spastic back hurt so bad when I got home every night I’d go straight to a bath and lay in it and cry.

On road crew we spray washed graffiti and painted it over with mindless gray paint. We laid tar. We carried concrete and wood and glass away from condemned buildings. Once Rick cut his arm and punched a hole in a wall. He got extra days for that. I surmised Rick was also in anger management classes.

Our assignments were mostly cleaning up the world so people can pretend it’s not dirty, chaotic, out of control, a giant world-sized compost heap.

Once we cleaned toilets in day use area parks. You haven’t lived until you have to pull tampons and needles and condoms and cigarette butts out of a john. Yellow plastic gloves just don’t seem to quite make you feel better.

I got the closest with Ernesto. Ernesto played classical guitar. I never heard him or saw him play but I watched him air guitar it when he described it. I’d ask him about it on breaks and at lunch and he’d Spanglish it out to me - what I didn’t need language for was how beautiful he looked talking about music. Or his hands. After awhile he began to ask me to translate things. A word at a time. “Dr. Lidia. What is English meterse en líos? What is English un llamamiento a la compassion?” To get into trouble. To call for compassion.

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.

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.