Lollipop

 If this kid asks me one more time if I want to “lick his lollipop”, I am going to take it from him, and put it somewhere he will have to have a nurse help him find. I am too drunk for this. I look past him at Rena, my ride-or-die-bar-fly who is sitting at the end of the row, hitting on Lollipop’s friend. When we make eye contact I mouth the words, “Can we go?” but she ignores me and turns back to the latest in a long line.

I shake my head and hop off my barstool, pushing past Lollipop to stumble over to the ladies room. It is a Tuesday night. I have no idea how we even ended up here again tonight when we swore we wouldn’t, except for that it was the typical place to be when we had nothing going on the next day and we’d been day drinking all afternoon. How bleak, I tell myself in the mirror. Get your shit together! Movement at the edge of my reflection has me whirling around to see Lollipop, leering at me from the doorway of the restroom. When he holds up the lollipop and begins to speak I lose it. I think he falls into the trash can as I shove him but who knows.  I am on a mission.

“Rena!” I half-shout. She takes her time turning around. The man she is glued to glares at me as she peels herself off of him and I am reminded of an octopus.

“Whaaaaaat?” she whines at me. She is only held up from being a drunken puddle on the ground because she is straddling this stranger, and if I was a better friend I would peel her the rest of the way off and drag her back to her house. But she goes into these bars with this exact plan in mind and I do not have the energy to talk drunk her out of this tonight.

“’I’m leaving,” I inform her. “Are you coming with me?” She shakes her head and melts back into the man in the corner so I turn, having to push past Lollipop yet again, who has miraculously recovered from the trash can. The octopus brothers.

I am beyond angry when I stumble out of the bar onto the sidewalk. I am on the one of the busiest streets in our city and I am dressed like happy hooker. On a Tuesday. I am in Rena’s shoes, at least a size too small. My skirt is riding up and my knees are fat in this artificial sidewalk moonlight. I am morose over my fat knees, and lamenting whether I deserve them for being a bar fly out on a Tuesday night when out of nowhere a white van driven by the devil flies into my line of sight and into my right hip. I am flying through the air.

I immediately come to, because what if a cop just saw that, and pop up from my spreadeagle there on the pavement, struggling to gather my senses, and the contents of my purse. The contents of my purse are scattered down the sidewalk and into the gutter. This van has hit me so hard I have popped right out of Rena’s shoes! I rake my items back into my purse and snatch the shoes up with one hand, stumbling as I now turn to give the driver of this van a piece of my mind!

The van is just sitting there, the tinted window rolled up, the driver watching me as I lunge closer to him. “Oh it’s on now buddy!” I yell at the van as I stomp my bare feet toward it. I am getting angrier the closer I get, that this moron has the audacity not to even pretend concern at the fact that he mowed me down, right there in the street. Right there in front of everybody! And then it dawns on me.

He's not going to roll down the window and ask me if I’m okay because he doesn’t exist. There’s nobody sitting behind the tinted window in the driver’s seat. I’ve just been knocked out by a parked van. At the car dealership next door to the bar. And as it dawns on me, the streetlamp now seems to have focused it’s beam on the van, mocking me. “Hey”, a voice calls from out of the shadows. I whirl around. It’s Lollipop.

Blue Moon

  

Although it had stopped raining hours before, the cobblestone was still wet, covered in abstract reflections of the street lamps shining down on us like rivers of yellow and green. I hugged my arms around myself tighter, stealing a glance at Patrick. I wanted to burn this scene, the music, the way he looked in the moonlight just then, into my mind forever. By this time next week I would be home, groveling for my parents' mercy in the wake of the destruction that is coming home after running away with your boyfriend.

I tried to concentrate on Preacher, the street performer, the accordian master we’d met on our journey on the streets, in the underground of Seattle. A mime was his best friend and late under the moon like this the mime would sit next to him while he played for the last stragglers of the night. This night it was us. This night the song was Blue Moon. I didn’t want to hear the lyrics. They felt intrusive. They felt like goodbye. And I would tell Patrick goodbye and we would go their separate ways, though I had suspected for some time that he knew we would be parting. 

I wondered in the still silver of the night as the tinny notes hung in the air around us where my path, the one I would walk without Patrick, would lead me. I wanted to promise myself that I would remember Patrick for this night and this night only. That this night would be the night I remembered when I thought about this time in my life, when the nights were somehow longer and I was alone. 

But this was the not the night for wondering. I would not ruin this moment by whispering promises to myself. There would be time for promises later. I wanted to live this one last moment. I could never have this back. Once we left it would vanish like an illusion and I knew I would be left wondering if indeed it had even been. The last verse of the song faded into silence and I linked my arm through Patrick's. As we strolled back to our car, the drops of rain grew larger.

Winter

You come to me during winter

Like a snowstorm in the night

Filling barren vastness

With flurries glistening white

A quiet kind of silence falls

As night gives way to dawn

Revealing with its waking rays

The storm that's come and gone

Until at last it sinks again

Over horizon's hazy peak

And you steal across the darkness

To breathe against my cheek

And swirling all around me

While the moon glows overhead

I embrace your icy touch

And follow where I'm led

Then suddenly I realize

Once more I stand alone

To watch as sunshine melts the snow

Revealing the unknown

Soft Peach Velvet

Patrick is beating me again. Trying to. The awkward style of the front seats in vintage cars make it hard to land a good punch. But Patrick is spindly, all arms and legs, and he has me down across the seat, stradling me, as much as the low roof of the Mercury will allow. I'm not even screaming this time, I notice. My brain forces me to congratulate myself on how calm I am being, and the part of me that stands outside of the car waiting for it to be over, recognizes how absurd that is.

My hands are hovering above my face, flitting to and fro like peach colored butterflies in sunlight, fending off blows to my head. I can’t feel anything, just soft, peach, butterfly kisses against my skin. Numbed, blessedly, by the blur of the butterflies in the sunlight streaming through the windshield.

I manage to wrench a knee beneath his groin but he flies out of the car faster than the momentum I am capable of and I struggle to reconcile what has just happened with the rush of the butterflies that left the car at that exact moment, squinting into the sunshine.

He is sucked backward, away from me, a man pulled suddenly into a vortex, until he lands squarely in the dirt where we are parked. A familiar face looms into view, widening and filling the space of the open car door. It is Mudd, one half of a duo of young boys fresh off the bus from Minnesota, out to make Seattle the capital of their American Dream. Mystic, his lover, is hunched over Patrick in the background.

“What the fuck! Are you okay?” Mudd reaches out, hesitates, and looks back at Mystic for direction. I struggle to a sitting position and swipe my hand across my nose, looking for blood on my sleeve. I am fine so I straighten my back deliberately, regally, I am in control. “You wanna take him off my hands for a little while?” I ask quietly, not looking at him as I adjust the rearview mirror.

I know exactly what I am asking Mudd. What it will entail. And so does he. A treasure hunt. With the last of our hard earned Labor Ready cash. A treasure he can hide is his veins. I debate whether it is worth it. This afternoon has been so hot. So achingly hot and full of dread. The ocean has that smell of rotten kelp and wasted dreams again, permaeating the park. Permeating everything. I decide that it is worth it.

_________________________________________________________

Mystic and Mudd have been "treasure hunting" with Patrick for hours now. It is dark, and I am sitting in the car, swollen and stiff, reading under yet another street lamp. People at this park know us now, they leave us alone. We are part of a twisted dirt family. We have brothers and sisters on these streets. There are other Kings and Queens here. Other Butterflies. In the dust we hold each other’s hearts when we cannot hold our own. We preach a street code. I preach it the loudest. It affords me the ability to sit under the streetlamp so I can read. 

I hear them before see them. They are jovial, happy, coming across the grass in trio, proud warriors returning from the hunt. They have scored. Mystic and Mudd reach the car first, draping  themselves languidly across the hood, rolling over to watch me through the windshield. Patrick leans in through open driver’s window. “Hey.”

“Hi. Have fun”? It is a loaded question and one I stopped trying to get a straight answer to back in California. He grins and cocks his pretty head to the side, contemplating me. I shake my head and turn my attention back to Mystic and Mudd propped up on their elbows acting the innocent boys, the ones who simply can’t believe you would suspect them of stealing the chocolates and how dare you madame! I shake my head at them too, smiling only a little. I owe them the rare peace that was my afternoon, alone with my book, under the shade tree we are parked in front of.

Patrick opens the door and slides in behind the steering wheel. Mystic and Mudd take that as their cue and slide off the hood, waving to us as they disappear toward the U-District. Patrick rolls up the window and turns to face me. I slowly set my book aside, and focus my attention on the moth that has slipped into the car unnoticed. It bounces around the rearview mirror, chasing some reflection of faraway light and as it glints in the haze of the streetlamp, I can see the soft velvet of its wings. Soft, peach colored velvet.

Chemical Reaction

A chemical reaction to the headiest thrill

Sometimes I could love and sometimes I could kill

Lost and unknowing yet somehow so sure

I blink and chance passes by in a blur

I need you I hate you I don’t know what’s right

I don’t know if you can spend the night

Skin touching skin I don’t want it to end

Slipping inside, a lover, a friend

Abandon all hope and abandon all care

Ye who enters as I claw at the air

And as we lock hands and our heartbeats slow

You look over at me and I still don’t know

Jackson Street

It was cold and raining when he threw me out of the car on Jackson St. near Seattle's Chinatown that night. The street we had been on was mostly residential, but I knew what was just around the corner...just a stone's throw away. I'd been there many times. Usually during the day because I was very dedicated to the Labor Ready on the corner of Jackson and whatever the hell street that was in order to prevent being asked to stand on a corner with a cardboard sign.

My boyfriend was extremely convinced this method was the easiest and quickest way to make money because he had seen a tv special somewhere where one homeless person with a sign was followed home to a multi-million dollar mansion. He thought this was maybe the best-ever easy money scheme but I would not cooperate. If I had no other control in this runaway adventure of ours, at least I could put my foot down and insist that we had values we would not sink past. We would fight. We would hold true. Never mind the fact that I was on my way to a homeless shelter.

We'd been fighting for most of the night. Memory escapes me now...it could have been any fight in the world. It was probably about those damn cardboard signs he wanted design. But by a mile or so away from the Baptist Church basement they turned into a shelter if you got there by 11pm, he had had it. And so I found myself on the sidewalk in a neighborhood that bordered Seattle’s Chinatown.

I heard the singing before I saw it. It was a half wailing, half chant in the foreign language of the extremely high. She was almost naked except for a thin banding of cloth around her waist where her dress had rolled down her breasts and up her thighs into the middle. She was singing to a light pole, grinding against it. Throwing a powerful thigh up against the unforgiving rawness of the wood; cooing, crying. She was singing a love song, desperate lyrics of need and feral longing. I looked down and hurried on. My heels made a click-clicking on the sidewalk that reminded me of Junior High School teachers, oddly comforting, and I squinted at the concrete in the moonlight through the rain, trying not to catch the tip of my stride on an uneven slab.

I’m not sure if I heard something louder than her singing or my clicking footsteps, or if I simply felt the presence that made me turn around. I know my skin was prickling and I had a sense of dread, like when you don’t want to see something and can’t stop. I turned around to see a gang of men. So similarly dressed, so banded together, so late at night, they couldn’t have been anything else. I can still recall the gray and black bandanas stuck in their pockets like you see on bad after school specials.

Where were the police? I wondered. On a street like this on a Friday night the police should have been around every corner. But this was a silent foggy street. I was all alone. With 15 gangsters behind me. They were so many they didn’t all fit on the sidewalk, and they milled up on the yards of the houses we were walking past.

My legs turned immediately to lead, like stiff unbending poles, but somehow I managed to force one foot in front of the other. The night went silent. I could not hear the sound of my heels clicking. I could not hear the men. I could only hear the white hot of my blood rushing through my frontal lobe, seeming somewhere so far off in the distance, like a tv buzzing white noise in the middle of someone’s dream.

It’s not true what they say about your life flashing before your eyes when you are about to die. Instead it’s a rush of crystal clarity for everything around you. The shining apple red of the stop sign. The way the pavement gleamed slick in the moonlight from the rainfall, brighter somehow than I had ever seen it. The blades of grass on the lawn across the street from the intersection I was getting ready to cross. I wondered if I would even make it to that lawn and focused harder, determined that the last thing I should see would be something of beauty. And in that moment, those blades of grass were more beautiful that any night sky in the whole of my life.

I felt myself lurch off of the curb and my breathing quickened. I could feel the air change, the vibrations quickening to a pinnacle. I could almost feel their hot breath against my neck and the tiny hairs rose up in response to meet it.

A flash of something caught my eye. The streets in Seattle are very steep and this intersection sat at the midway point on a hill. Above me I could see the next intersection, and the big red van that lurched out from behind another stop sign, its headlights shining as it slammed on its brakes at the exact moment it noticed me.  In one hysterical moment I felt frozen to the pavement, unable to move as I contemplated who would get to me first. I couldn’t see the driver behind the blacked out window of the driver’s seat, but I felt the stare.

But then the van slowly began to roll through the intersection. I watched it disappear behind the row of houses at the top of the hill and just like that the spell was broken. I whirled around again as I reached the other side of the street, fists clenched, heart pounding, ready to do or die. The men were gone. I stood frozen, wondering if it had all been a dream. A blast of cold swept past my neck and down my spine and I rushed on toward Chinatown.

How To Stand

I would rather spend a lifetime trying and failing, again and again, then cast myself upon an existence of mediocrity. For in settling, simply to avoid the challenges of finding the great reward, and having to stand strong against the chaos and opposition that reward may embody, would prove a more unforgiving failure, than that if I had tried. The only certain reward in settling is regret.

I am willing to sacrifice and to risk, in order that my reply may be- "to live"! if I am ever asked what I have learned when I am eighty. Those who dream may crash to the ground over and over, but those who live with their feet planted firmly on the ground will never reach the sky. I am not afraid to fall. For it is only through learning to fall, that I have taught myself how to stand.