Back in the day when I was a high school writing teacher and member of TMN, I started a collaborative writing project called Item 8. I was 27.
The small apartment smells a little from the windows being closed against the humidity. I don’t have any place to put the butts from the ashtray and I really don’t want to waste my time doing domestic things anyway. Time seems too valuable for that. But the job of cleaning now has become overwhelming. I hate living in an apartment and not on the road because messes remind me of stagnation. I am stagnating and the garbage reminds me, the ashtray, and the clothes I have to smell before wearing. This is wearing thin. My writing is going just fine, but I am not following Eastern Daylight Time, but Hawaiian Time. I have been away since bright and early at 2:30pm and shall go to sleep in an hour or so, around 4:30am. Its certainly the typical hours for work in downtown Honolulu. Maybe Los Angeles. Okay, LA, but I’ll never admit to having to do anything with that place.
Seattle then. A place called never never land. A place so unlike Washington. Washington looks so deeply into the mirror. Washington is like a teenage girl. She notices every flaw and every ounce gained; she worried about everybody’s opinion and fears rejection, always believing herself (no matter how gorgeous) to always be the homelier. New York is her older sister, the prom queen, the forever more popular to the studious insecure Washington.
Seattle just is. Whether the mecca for new technology or sustainability; or, as it is better know, for the romper room of the Generation X (and also the Generation Why as well as for Old Hippies and middle-aged Punkers). Seattle just is. The people explore their own trendiness with great seriousness and commitment. Whereas people from the seventies laugh off their bell bottoms and feathered hair, Seattle youth of the nineties (much more so than their Suburban “Club Soda” brethren) shall be unable to secret their past shame in the attic, but shall be wearing it across their backs in inky faded wings. Or in a tribal tattooed arm band, in the scar of a clitoral piercing, brands, scarification — this is commitment, this is power.
But here, Washington looks at herself in the mirror and doesn’t want to be one-hair out of place; she doesn’t want to stick out; she doesn’t want to be snickered at by her friends. She doesn’t know what she is missing, the freedom of showing off the downy gleaming blond hairs of the tummy, the ellipse of the navel; to show the movement and form of the breast; to let the length of the body move under sunshine, under rain, beneath the incessant tirade of base and guitar. Pressed and exposed; excited and rosy from the blood coursing in the veins, breaking near the surface of the cheek.
And the ashes are constricting my chest. The smoke is no good for the chest. Seattle is cast under cloud by day, but at night the mist is nicotine and clove. Seattle is a Camel town. New York is Marlboro. Washington is a Marlboro Light town, by default to New York.
The pale flanks of Seattle, tight from starvation. Striations of muscle, the glint of the rings, the glitter of the disco makeup, the high camp. The bell bottoms taken for a steal at a flea market, from the folk’s attic. The nosebleed platforms and ubiquitous coffee jitters.
Dimpled erotica painted on flesh with needle, wrapped like tentacles along the arm and down the back. Once, my head way held tight during a freedive. By a giant octopus, I shit you not. It took hold and its eight tentacles, each as big as my wrist. The suckers reeled down my arms and bare back. On one breath, I fought it. I used my knife to tickle it away and it disappeared in a cloud of ink.
I had been hunting for him so it was a fair loss, but when I arrived on shore, there were terrible welts where the genius had taken hold. They were red and indelible for quite some time, having broken the blood vessels, creating bruises.
The Mark of the octopus from that day were as flowing and dynamic as the patterns dancing on the flesh of the Seattleite. Half-shirts, tank-tops, halter-tops, no shirt at all. The dancing of the image on the flesh; the tinkling of rings and jewelry. The clicking against the teeth as the boy absentmindedly plays with the silver barbell in his tongue as he pulls you off a shot of espresso.
Where can you get a good cup of coffee at 4am on Capitol Hill?
She wonders at the different worlds. She has been this weekend in the world of a family, 66 names of children, grandchildren, greatgrandchildren painted on a wooden box made from an old hutch cabinet, a box of 94-year old ashes buried by a family with stories and songs. They’d left the shovel leaning against the boxwood, scooping dirt into the grave with bare hands, a last gift. All the stories are true, but they aren’t all the stories, actually, and afterwards the cousins sit until 4 in the morning telling the rest in those soft working class Boston accents.
She craves them now, those accents she tried to hard to lose, folding around her like an overwashed comforter, tucked about sleeping babies on the couch. Instead there is the blinking cursor and the ringing phone, and outside the window the last of the summer tourists, sharing the Washington sidewalks with lawyers and bureaucrats and bagladies and t-shirt vendors, 3 for $10.
“Chocolate City” t-shirts. “3 for $10,” Hope reminds me. Thin transparent cotton dishrags with “Washington Blues.” Sadly, Bart Simpson is suffering a decline. His “Don’t have a Cow, Man,” used to be a classic, used to make young children smile when your returned home from Washington. Such a wonderful momento along with the foil packet of astronaut freeze-dried icecream one dad kept hidden after the boys had eaten all their before even leaving the Smithsonian. That one packet shared together at Walt Whitman rest stop way up I-95 on the way back to Queens.
The freeze-dried ice-cream reminds me of my father’s ashes as I emptied them from an oak box into the midnight blue sea off Waikiki. The freeze-dried icecream reminds me of the ashes held tight by a Boston family for all to share later, when everybody has all but forgotten.
My words, each paragraph being a separate posting, alone, for 14-posts before anyone joined me.
But then they did and it was amazing.
