Comrades

The two dogs settled down in the shade of a joshua tree. It was high afternoon. The desert sun was pelting down on the flat stucco houses, its sullen citizens, its animals.

“Goddamn sun,” Hector, the chihuahua said. “It’s too much. We’re dying out here, Tommy.”

“The luster is gone, comrade.” the pug said. “There was a time I was the favorite. I was the fucking baby. I was the king.”

Tommy looked across the dry backyard. A cracked landscape. Stinky yellow flowers dotted the hard dirt. Dead tumbleweeds gathered in the corner of the yard. A scorpion came out of its burrow and settled on a stone flecked with silver chips.

“What happened?” Hector mocked.

“You. Your ass showed up. Got the couch, the air-conditioner. The little pillow and matching blanket. I saw that shit. It was disgusting.”

“That’s a horrible story,” Hector said and closed his big Mexican eyes.

“You’re damn right it is.”

Hesperia was a small desert town, population: 13,362. Faded buildings. A pizza parlor, billiards. A thin four-lane road leading out of town. The sun pulled higher in the sky and moved above the San Bernardino Mountains and primed the desert. The heated stone lulled the scorpion, its silver chips reflecting a dozen joshua trees strung up in ancient desert shapes. The scorpion sighed. And then it whistled a soft river song. A faint wind came out of the west sending the scorpion’s melodies towards rusted flat train tracks of Barstow.

Hector was dreaming that he was in Yosemite. He was scaling Half-Dome and looking out at Red Peak’s Pass. Tommy was having a reoccurring dream where he’s in Vegas and sees a drunken burro shitting money.

Like clockwork the dogs woke up and moved to the shade of another joshua tree. The scorpion followed, toiled in deciding which stone was best, then found one, and began to whistle yet another river song. Tommy fell back asleep and had a nightmare that the owners had another baby, this time a boy named Christopher. The kid was ugly. Big head. Red as a lobster. Hector was dreaming that he was dreaming. Two hours passed.

Then the owners pulled into the driveway. The dogs jumped up and rushed the fence. Their tails whipped back and forth like grass. They drooled. Their eyes bugged. Hector farted and his ears shot up like if he heard a strange dog bark. The husband got out of the car holding an armful of groceries. Then the wife opened the van door. She turned around holding baby Laura, twelve weeks old. The mother grabbed Laura’s hand and waived at the dogs. Laura and her mother disappeared in the house.

The sun was getting softer, the heat was subsiding and it slowly started sinking behind the San Bernardino Mountains and down into the sea. Three doves pecked at the hard desert dirt.

“So what happened to you, Hector? Why are you out here?” Tommy asked.

“The sickest of the sickest things happened, comrade. Human deception. Fads. Shifting politics.”

“Laura,” Tommy said, shaking his head.

“Laura,” Hector said and closed his big Mexican eyes and fell back to sleep.

A Match, Stone

Such a beautiful baby

Look at you,

your legs

The shapes they make

I think you’re a match,

a bomb

Put you in my pocket

Blow my memory away

(Please)

Such a beautiful baby,

your days

The way you sleep

them all away

I think you’re a stone

I think I’d like to keep you

Put you in a cup,

put you on a shelf

Put you in light

Put you for life

A match

A stone

Fire

Bone

Drop you in a volcano,

a tin

Do this all over again

Out of the Pan

My first restaurant job was as a cook. A little dive off of Sahara. I never cooked before but the manager hired me anyway.

“You gotta fucking learn some time. Know what I’m saying?”

Juan was somewhere in his thirties. Half white, half Mexican. Had green eyes and thick black hair like a beaver pelt. Like me, he came from California.

My first shift was a “prep” shift. It was a very simple job. All I had to do was weigh and bag food. Vegetables. Meat. Rice. Mash potatoes. I did this for six hours while one Mexican dude named Arturo listened to a small radio (he listened to the news in Spanish) and a couple of black dudes, “T” and David, on the other side of the line listened to hip-hop through a boom-box with giant speakers.

It was awful. I didn’t understand Spanish and I hated hip-hop. I kept weighing meats and veggies.

“Reno, how was your first shift?” Juan asked chewing on a french fry.

“Good. But the radios need to be dropped in the fryers.”

“Ha! I knew I liked you. Good. Okay. Well, tomorrow your cherry’s going to be busted, man. Don’t panic. Go with it and learn. Can’t panic in this business.”

The next day I worked on the line with Arturo. Arturo had Indian-green eyes and straight white teeth. He was thin and his arms were cabled in thick veins. He was coated in cologne.

“We going to be beezie today,” Arturo said flashing his white teeth. I looked at the clock. In five minutes we opened the doors. My stomach turned.

“We got an ass-load of people at the door,” Juan said. He looked at me. “Say bye to your cherry.”

“T” and David started laughing.

Fuck, I thought.

Then we got a ticket. Arturo grabbed it and hung it up. Then another came and he hung that one up. Then another came. And then another. Suddenly food was sizzling. The fryers were crackling. The cooks were calling out orders to each other. Smoke filled the air. We were getting, what they say in the business: slammed.

“Dropped me two dinky wheats all day.”

“Two dinkies heard.”

One of the first things I made was a taco platter. Three tortillas heated on the flat-top. Sour cream. 4.5 ounces of chicken or beef. Lettuce. Mixed cheese and pico de gallo. Rice and beans. Extra charge for guacamole.

The first order wanted guacamole. So did the second one. Then I made nachos with extra jalapenos. Then more tacos. A phillysteak. A turkey sandwich. A fried-chicken salad. A grilled chicken salad. More tacos. Chips and homemade salsa.

I flicked some ranch dressing on my forehead. I dropped some bread. I burned my thumb on a skillet. My apron was painted in smudges.

“I toll you. Beezie, beezie, beezie,” Arturo said, hanging up tickets.

The people kept coming.

Smoke was in the air.

Grease was in my pores.

The day flew by in a blur.

After the shift Juan told me to sit at the bar, that he was buying me a couple of beers. I was wiped out. I needed a beer.

“So you think your going to stick around?” he asked.

“I think so. I like it,” I said.

“Good. This is a crazy business. But it’s a good crazy.”

He handed me a napkin.

“What’s this for?” I asked.

“For the chunk of dried guacamole on your shoe.” 

Stucco

Behind the faded green duplex

the spider sleeps under the leaf

Where I make volcanoes out of mud

like the ones in Italy

My dad is singing drunk songs,

pounding a wall full of patch-ups

The Chinese landlord smells like vinegar

and mumbles to himself fixing our broken faucet

with the wrong tools

Last week he repaired our cracked front door

by painting over it like Picasso

But he’s no Picasso

He’s a slumlord of a hovel

On American dirt with Italian volcanoes

that someday will drop this place

Just one match away and I’ll make history

And send him to bed mumbling forever

Pull the spark from my pocket

My cat drops the pigeon from his mouth

The spider wakes

The faucet still drips

The roaches bathe

And Picasso watches the smoke rise

From a backyard in Los Angeles

Mamacita

Mamacita

Come down

Let’s play

The moon is high

The fox is out

I want to know

what love is all about

I want to know

how the bee stings

The snake sleeps

The spider keeps

I want to hear my horn

The

Beep

Beep

Beep

Mama

Mamacita

Can’t you see?

I’m ready for battle

My sword is up

All we have to do

is become

All we have to do

is let it go

Snap the spell

Snap the bell

So come out,

come down

There’s no time to pray

Do like those people

in that gringo’s play

Do like we all like to do

Mama

Mamacita

What?

Am I too ugly?

The moon is high

The fox is out

37

A few days before her birthday, Nancy, was thinking too much. Her head was talking to her, saying crazy things. It was telling her just one. Come on, baby. Just one.

“You know, even after thirty-seven years you still hear the voices,” she told the group, the dry windows rattling in the desert wind. “They never leave. While you’re sleeping they’re awake. And when you’re awake they’re awake. It’s not a question of being strong. Anyone can be strong. It’s a question of what’s sacred. And this—this here is sacred.”

Nancy looked over the group: the clean, the soul-dead, the ones about to break and go back out again. Some would make it. Most wouldn’t. They told her years ago she would see them die. Some clean in the light of god. Others torn up, too young. No prejudice, they said. No, fucking prejudice. She took a drink of water, a hint of whiskey flashed through her head.

Hi, Nancy. Remember me?

“Don’t do what you’re used to doing. That doesn’t work. If it did you wouldn’t be here. So keep your house clean. Put things in the right place. This is a stain. A stain on a wall that will never be rubbed clean. Ever. But it’s just a smudge. A big one. But still a smudge. So own it. Make it stand out in what are rooms and rooms full of better things.”

They clapped. They told her congratulations. They ate chocolate cake and sipped black coffee.

Nancy leaned against the faded building smoking a cigarette. The wind swirled around her, the black outline of the mountains loomed behind her.

“My doctor used to tell me to stop smoking,” she said looking at me knowing I’d be out there again. “But he knows how these things work. If it’s not one thing it’s another.” 

About God

When she got the news she had just come back from the pharmacy. She’d run out and the last couple of days were bad. The wine didn’t help. Neither did sleep. They weren’t what she needed.

“That phone never worked,” she said and then told her mom how she found out.

She was already feeling better when she answered the phone. Her face fell loose almost immediately. Her back was warming over.

“Hello,” she answered, her eyes slipping away, catching a fuzzy glimpse at the yellow grass through the window. “Oh, Robert.”

You never get used to someone dying. You don’t get through death like you get through a shift at work or a high school crush. Some things have a short life span. Like the life of a fly. She snapped the phone from the wall and wrapped it tightly, trying to choke it off.

That summer she not only gave up smoking but also broke up with Craig. Not because he didn’t believe in God, or was fucking another woman, but because she realized what was inevitable. Didn’t want to roll into the years to see it happen. Those long slow winters. Those dead yellow summers. Didn’t want to get the news one day that something bad happened to him.

“I hope this is not about God,” he said, turning over his truck.

“It’s always about God.” 

I Could Fall In Love (with an Ecuadorian woman)

I could fall in love

with an Ecuadorian woman

I could tell her nice things in English

Like she’s pretty, she’s sweet

That she’s fine

Fine as wine

That she’s mine o’ mine

I will call her Sandra

Lisa or Karina

And I will look into her eyes

and ask her to kiss me, kiss me

Because I’m in love

Because I’m alive

And we’ll walk the streets of Quito

Machala

Tena

Manta

Lago Agrio

We’ll walk the streets

In love

And I’ll say those things

Things I couldn’t say

in Tahoe, Flagstaff, L.A

I could fall in love

with an Ecuadorian woman

And we’ll dream of ghosts,

flowers,

revolution

We’ll eat dirt

Eat our sins

I’ll drink her rivers, eat empanadas

Locro

Caldo de Pata

Down chichi

And wait for her

to come home, home

I could fall in love

with an Ecuadorian woman

In Spanish

Spanglish

Jive

English

I really can

Monster

What a witness heard was this: Wheels screeching. Then a momentary silence. Then tree branches cracking. From her apartment window she could see car headlights down by the river. A small creek, not much of one, but one that many years ago housed a dead man. His body stuck in the sand, he had one hand reaching out from the murky water and onto the bank.

He had a bullet hole in the center of his back. Rumor was the shooter was the husband of the dead man’s girlfriend. He’d been missing for three days before he was found by a kid looking for frogs.

* * *

The witness saw a figure cut in front of the headlights and out of sight. She could hear music coming from the river. The cops arrived and found a car with a man in the passenger seat. His face was torn up but he was still breathing. His wrist was snapped and the hand was laying flush on the top of his arm. He was young, somewhere in his twenties. An empty bottle of brandy was found in the backseat. A plastic container of pills was found by the car.

His state I.D read: Jamal King

But where was the driver of the car? the cops wondered. They found shoe prints but there were numerous shoe prints for the river was not only home to spring peepers and possums but also to vagrants. The witness watched the ambulance arrive and retrieve a body.

* * *

Percy Bate, the mother of the driver, said her son had “gone the bad way” long ago. Selling dope. Doing dope. Drinking. He didn’t believe in god. He changed his name from James to Monster—got it from an infamous LA Crip.

Monster was a monster, shadowing the way the L.A gangster earned his name: for being a merciless fighter, hunting for humans and beating them down until they were done. Busted jaws. Knocked out teeth. Opening up fleshy gashes over the eyes, under the eyes.

The night Monster lost control of his car and sent it sailing into the river he was drunk and high on vicodin. The vicodin was Jamal’s who always had his pockets full of colorful pills. Some got him going fast. Some got him going slow. He liked vicodin. Brandy and vicodin.

Monster didn’t know the skinny two-lane road that zigzagged its way to South Carolina. Tall pine trees flanked both sides of the road. It was dark and even the car’s high-beams weren’t enough to cut through the black of the woods.

The music was playing loudly. That last vicodin severed Monster’s reactions completely. They went off the road going forty-six miles per hour. The car hit the water with heavy thud that sent Jamal’s face into the dashboard. He snapped his wrist trying to brace himself. His hand stood up and then slowly fell back and settled down on the top of his arm, his palm parallel with the roof.

Before he lost consciousness he reached in his pocket and tossed out some pills. Monster pulled his body from the steering wheel. His torso was crushed on its right side. Monster ran his hand over his dented body which now resembled a spoon. He looked over and saw Jamal’s bloody face, the hand that was in an impossible position.

Monster got out of the car and started running up the creek threading through the water. He followed the river for almost a mile before he fell dead in the back yard of a minister of a ramshackle Protestant church of one hundred and twenty-one members.

James Bate, aka Monster, dead at twenty-six.

One creek. Two people dead. A gunshot. A godless man dying on the property of a minister. This is the stuff of urban legends. Ghosts seen by the creek. The Vanishing Hitchhiker. Giants alligators in the sewer.

Circles

After she dropped out of high school she got a job with a traveling carnival working the carousel. Chipped horses with glossy dead eyes. Round they went under the snapping white lights that illuminated happy strange faces. Round they went through the years, spinning like a faded roulette table, like a top. Winter. Summer. 1961. 1978. She gathered tickets, ripped them, and tossed them into a scuffed bucket that followed her around the country like her shadow. At night she sometimes dreamt that the horses took flight, torn from the rusted metal ride and gliding to a place that had no name.

“But they just go in circles,” she wrote a friend in looping handwriting. “Circles.”

Among the sounds of joyous screams, heavy metallic clanking, and the smell of hot popcorn and corn dogs, she watched the horses go round and round going through small towns and big cities. Spokane. Shawnee. Phoenix. Greensboro. No husband. No children. No car. No home. She ripped the tickets and dropped them into the bucket. Somewhere in Texas a little girl gave her a ticket and sat on a horse that was blazed in faded gold. She was the only rider.

“Make it go fast like the other rides,” the little girl begged. Her face was young, fresh, small freckles sprinkled her nose.

She watched the girl go round and round laughing and twirling her head around, taking in the haunting lights of the carnival.

“Faster, faster,” the little girl yelled.

It was a humid night, the sticky weather, gluing the season to skin and the perpetual orbit of memory. The ride came to a slow stop and the little girl got off the horse and handed her a ticket.

“That’s for you,” she said, and disappeared into the small crowd. She looked at the ticket, looked at the collection of numbers that were stamped on it.

“Lock it up,” her boss said, walking up behind her. “The carousel is dead tonight. Stop the horses. Work the funhouse. Tomorrow is another day.”

But she didn't. Instead she ripped the ticket, dropped it in the bucket and got on the carousel, wrapping her thin legs over the horse the little girl just rode. And round she went. Spinning through the weather, spinning through the years, under the flickering white lights and the smells of stale cotton candy and flat soda.

“Circles,” she said and closed her eyes.

Fuel or; What They Don’t Know

Raymond sat in his car smoking a cigarette. A crucifix hung from the mirror. He watched for the man’s car to pull in. He called earlier, told Raymond the room number, told him to be ready. He sounded out of breath. Raymond knew this sound.

           

The man pulled in, whipping his van into a parking spot. He got out carrying a bag and a briefcase. He was wearing sunglasses and a suit that fit him tightly. He looked over the parking lot. Raymond noticed him and sat up. His stomach stirred. The man saw Raymond’s car and went into the office with relief in his stride.

He came out and walked quickly to his room, which on his request, was in the back. Raymond was to wait ten minutes and then go to the room.

Ten minutes.

Raymond lit another cigarette. He watched as a family loaded up their car with their luggage. The husband’s face was knotted up. Raymond noticed the front tire needed air.

Raymond knocked lightly and the man opened the door. A pall of cologne moved out of the room. Raymond stepped in. On the small table was a bottle of Crown Royal. It was half empty. The man’s face was dry-red.

“Great to see you,” he told Raymond and ran his slumped eyes over him. Raymond smelled booze on his breath. “Want a drink?”

The man sat on the bed.

“Come here,” he said and tapped on the bed with his hand. Raymond noticed the man’s wedding band—a tacky gold thing stamped with diamonds. Raymond got a flash of Jesse’s face—the beautiful angular Indian face, not aware of Raymond’s secret ways. Raymond walked to the bed unbuttoning his shirt.

“I need the money first,” Raymond said. “I have bills. My fridge is empty. My car needs gas.”

The old man took out his wallet and handed Raymond two hard one-hundred dollar bills. Then he handed him another hundred.

“This is a tip,” the man said. “‘Tip’ is an acronym. It stands for ‘To Insure Prompt Service.’ Did you know that?”

The man twisted down his wedding band so the diamonds were facing the floor.

Raymond didn’t say anything. He took the money and slipped it into his pocket. He walked to the table, twisted off the cap and took a long hit. The booze heated his young chest. He inhaled deeply, blowing the whiskey out of his nostrils. The room went soft and broke his conscious. Jesse was gone. He hit the lights and moved towards the bed. 

Frogs

He swore on his mother’s grave that he would never get married again. He wasn’t good at marriage. His track record said so. Three marriages. Three divorces. But unlike his friends and family, Charlie didn’t focus on his failure to keep a marriage going. He was a hopeless romantic—always saw love as a soft roll of film unwinding across the screen in pinks and reds.

His first marriage lasted three years. Margaret decided she didn’t want to be married when she stopped denying she was a lesbian. The second marriage lasted five years. Things were fine until Lorrie started screwing everybody in town.

“Don’t ever get married again,” his mother said, pouring herself another drink. “You married a dyke and a whore, Chuck. Enough is enough.”

He was married within the year.

Charlie was also a hoarder. Anything he could get his hands on he brought home. The garage was packed with junk. But he had a thing for frogs. Especially, Kermit the Frog. Kermit coffee cups. T-shirts. Framed pictures. Books. The house was littered with stuffed green frogs.

Kermit the Frog ended his third marriage. Sandy could deal with his obesity, the double chin, the big ass his mother gave him. She could deal with his kids that she thought were ugly—resembling their mothers too much. She could handle his smoking. But she couldn’t handle the hoarding. And she couldn’t handle the stuffed frogs, sharing a bed with five Kermits staring at her with dead blank eyes.

“Kermit,” she said, loading up her car. “I can’t fuck you anymore with him watching.”