When I look back at the art I made in college I feel like a hungry dog gnawing its own tail, or like, how I did in High School, when I would to eat the skin off my cuticles and tell myself I could skip lunch. These nostalgic escapes have yet to inspire a fresh, creative fervor . . . but they do pass the time. I must not be hungry enough yet.
I used to tell my dad I was hungry, and he would say, ‘eat a banana.’
I would say I didn’t want a banana, and he’d say, ‘Well, you must not be hungry enough yet.’
My mom was more lax. We’d go to Nico’s Taco Shop for carne asada quesadillas, then, maybe, to a mall. We’d run up the down escalators, even if there were people on them. She said we were giving them a thrilling reminder that backwards can still be forwards. Mostly though, we were playing.
Mom seemed pull on life like a bowstring and Dad usually got shot in the ass. I dreamt of Dad last night. In the dream we’re cleaning the kitchen together, taking toothbrushes to the sap-caked teeth of Mom’s chainsaw.
I wake up to a day with a 4 - 8 - 4 – 8 beat — my hours slotted into a play - work - play - sleep cadence. ‘Play’ isn’t really play though. It’s just a word to follow ‘work’, like ‘chocolate’ follows ‘peanut butter’, or ‘mom’ followed ‘dad’ until his ‘death’ followed his ‘life’.
I turn off my devices two hours before I go to sleep, so I can re-vice in the morning with a sense earned gusto. This morning though, I lay in bed and stared at my reflection in the black glass and decide to wait an extra hour. Maybe I’ll start Finnegans Wake, or finish Infinite Jest, idling my pre-work playtime in ball-pit of words enriching and useless.
I start cleaning my kitchen instead, seeking solace in the unenriching, but useful. In a few hours I’ll clean the kitchen at Chaitanic for minimum wage plus tips. It all has me interrogating this kitchen cleaning cadence of a play - work - play - sleep. It’s leaking into my dreams. I’m a harmonizing to state of undifferentiated kitchen cleaning. It feel like the answer to a Zen koan.
It’ll be slow today at Chaitanic. It’s another one of those hazy days that you know is red lining the AQI. Working a slow day at Chaitanic feels a lot like digging a big hole and filling it back up again, only the hole is a complex system of stainless steel, single-use plastic, oatmilk, and industrial chemicals that turn my hands arid. Hours of work on either side of a dozen orders from people who should be at home next to HEPA-filters set on ‘HIGH’.
Mom and I used to dig huge holes at the beach. Dad always made us fill them back up. He said a jogger would fall in and sue him. Mom said that once too, after he died. She said it and started laughing like a women feeling it all and choosing laughter. I didn’t understand, but laughed too. We poured the dust of Dad into the hole from a old cigar box. She cried, and I didn’t understand but cried too.
We started digging holes lower on the beach after that, racing the afternoon tide that would do the filling work for us. This may have been the first time I worked smarter-not-harder. But they never say that about play do they.
My device buzzes across the kitchen counter. I catch it with a dish-wet hand as it falls. I hadn’t turned it off after all. I never hold the button down hard long enough, three seconds is so much commitment.
It’s Mom. She's texted me a picture of an old newspaper clipping of her at the beach. The headline reads, ‘Area Girl Breaks the Record for Most Aerial Baton Twirls’. Her slim, gymnast body takes space like a man’s body takes space. The baton held aloft in her hand makes her a capital T. Her leotard is gold. It’s a black and white photo, and I know her leotard is gold.
‘What have you done with your life?’ she texts in jest.
She has never told me about this record, but that’s not a surprise. My Mom’s made a kaleidoscope of her life. It dances as undisciplined vignettes of an exploded whole, growing more mad and enthralling with twists of time. A beautiful oblivion robust the Earth. When I see her, I pretend I’m looking in the mirror.
I text back that the current record now stands at twelve, two more than her ten twirls.
‘Yeah yeah, inside some protected LA climate dome. I threw my wand at Malibu beach, toesies dug in my own lost future, Courtney Love blasting out Dad’s JBL Partybox. No one can beat me now. Hey, hey, I knew what to do. I drove away from Malibu.’
She’s right. Malibu beach is long gone.
My head jerks towards a motion out my window. A man in gym shorts is standing at the gate. He holds his own device in his hand, a Chick-fil-A bag hangs from his other. I crack the window. He sees me and shouts, ‘You 2271?’
I shout, ‘That is next door.’
He coughs and shouts, ‘thank you.’
I shout, ‘your welcome.’
His shorts are tan and his shirt is red, but it’s too small and his belly pokes out the bottom like Pooh Bear. I’ll never see him again and that feels sadder than it should.
I think of that pill I see ads for before episodes of old animes, the one that treats pollution induced depression. It covers ‘harmful endocrine disrupting particulates’ in lipid coats of many colors. An hour after swallowing, you hack up a funfetti wad. It lands on the earth like Dippin’ Dots and melts in the rain. The stains on the sidewalk are everywhere. They look like old bruises.
Mom sends me a video of a toddler toddling around a sunlit living room.
‘Friendly visit from kindred-soul Jill, granddaughter in tow.’
I text back, ‘Cute’
‘When toddlers fall they fall straight down to their bums, collapsing in like the Twin Towers. But it doesn’t change everything, it's just lovely. They look over at you to see if collapsing is an ok thing to do. It is for you, sweetheart, but old ladies fall like dead trees.’
Mom works in wildfire management, chopping down the charred stalks of Poderosa and Sugar Pines covering miles of Nevada County. They roll over the mountains like a veteran’s cemetery, standing proud and grim as their own tombstones. Like them, Mom refuses to retire.
I went out to work with her on my last visit. She got me my own hard hat and dainty leather work gloves.
‘You are petite, just like your father.’
My father was 6’ 4”.
On the ride home I nibble the sap of my knuckles. I like the astringent taste. Mom slows down as we pass a spot of nothing and points out my window, her arm is under my nose. Her sweat smells like the beach.
‘Last August Jill caught a rescue ride right there. She broke her hip, well, crushed it more like. The tree she’d just cut clipped a loose bough on its neighbor as it fell. Sent the thing swinging at her like a tomahawk. It busted her phone too, so she had to drag herself through a mile of muck to the road back there. She flagged a ride with an off-season weed trimmer, and lay in the back seat and smoking the first joint she’d smoked since Trump’s third term. Her nurse called me and got to the hospital as fast as I could. Turned on her cracked phone and called her son — he owns some fancy toast cafe down in Auburn. She asked me how I got her phone to work. I said, ‘Jesus Jill, it was just off.’ I just have to press the button for three seconds. Jill’s got commitment issues.’
‘Why did her nurse call you?’
‘Jill and I’ve been dating for a year.’
She has never told me this, but that’s not a surprise. My hard hat was a gift from Jill that Mom forgot to tell me was a gift from Jill. It’s pink & teal, and has a sticker on it that says, ‘Malibu Barbwire’.
‘Jill’s son is handsome, you know,’ Mom says.
Mom’s neighbor killed a chicken yesterday. He gives her the bones in exchange for a bit of the broth she’ll brew up with them. They’ve been simmering all day in an amber crock pot with ginger, turmeric, and galangal she gets from her, ‘Local Root Boy’.
We remove the bones, skim the shmaltz, and chop in onions, carrot, celery & sweet potato to tunes of George Harrison. I ask her what else it needs.
She says, ’something profane.’
We walk to Speedy's Corner Quik, and buy two packs of Top Ramen. I throw the flavor packets in the trash, but Mom picks them out.
‘Don’t throw those away,’ she says.
She puts them into an old cigar box. A flapper girl in a wide straw hat lays on a pile of tobacco leaves across its lid. She kisses the flapper on the butt and sets it back down on the shelf next to a picture of Dad wading in the ocean.
‘That’s your inheritance.’