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.

Imaginary Friends

My daughter could see ghosts when she was young. I attributed the creepy solo conversations to a child's imagination at first, add to that my daughter is an only child. The first time I actually started to think it was something other than kids being kids, was when she was getting ready to turn three. She had been spending days at my sister's daycare in a neighboring town that winter while I worked so when she asked me that day if Jean could come to her birthday party, I said sure honey, where does Jean live? thinking that Jean was of course a daycare friend. But my child pointed a tiny creepy finger up the stairs to her bedroom door and said, "In my closet"!!!!! 

I started to recall all the other little incidents that I had been ignoring. The time she was answering the static on her baby monitor like a conversation only she could hear, in a language only she could speak. The time she said Noni had visited. Noni was my great grandmother who died when I was a child. I'd never even mentioned her name to my child. When one of her first words was Timmy, the name of my dead uncle. 

The very last incident I remember happened when my daughter was 5. Old enough to begin losing that veil of secret knowledge babies are born with that keep them connected to that other side. We had been driving back to Colorado when I found out that I no longer had a place to live but that's another blog post. It was 10:30 at night and I was at the Nebraska Colorado border with no money, no where to go, and precious cargo asleep in my back seat. 

I called my friend whose father had a cabin at Lake McConaughy. It was Friday night. If the Gods were with me at all, he'd be there, ready to start a big weekend of fishing and drinking til he couldn't stand anymore. I waited on the side of a pitch black empty highway, waiting for a call back, waiting for a miracle. 

We got to Bob's cabin just shy of midnight. It was a two bedroom mobile home covered in fish decor, right down to the lightswitch covers. I carried my daughter down the hall to the spare bedroom. Bob had left fresh sheets for us. I tucked her in, hoping that like every other time, she would wake up in a strange place and take it in stride, and be fresh for adventure in the morning. One of us had to be. 

I stumbled back down the hall and sank into the matching lazy boy next to Bob. We talked about how the children from my generation all had our heads up our asses, how unfair life was, and what I planned to do now. We talked about the terms of a small loan to get me back on my feet in another city, in another state, and how hard it would be for me to find work as a single parent, how hard it had always been. We talked until 2:30 in the morning, when my daughter opened her door, came out into the hall, and stopped short. 

"Mommy" she said, rubbing her eyes. "Can you tell the big man to get out of my way?"
I scooped her up, tucked her back in, and rejoined my friend's father in the living room. 

"Know why I got this place so cheap?" he asked me as he lit the cigarette he'd been rolling. I sat back. "No. Why?"

"Because the man who owned it got into a fight with his wife and was on his here when he wrecked his car and died." Bob blew out a cloud of smoke. "Seen a picture of em back there on the wall after his wife sold me the place. He was a big man." 

The other day, something made me remember all of this. My daughter, now nine, was in her bedroom building giant Lego cities. "Hey hun," I said to her back. "do you remember when you were little, the townhouse we had when Old Man John lived next door and Donna?"
Without turning around, "I kind of do. Why?" 

"Do you remember a girl named Jean?" 

My daughter turns around, staring up the ceiling to remember. "Yeah...the girl with the purple eyes."

Who knows a good Priest?

Sunrise on Venice Beach

The night we slept on the beach was the first night in the weeks of that trip that nightmares hadn't woken me before five a.m. I woke feeling light and fresh. The sun had just begun to creep the horizon behind us, giving the sea a pink hue in the distance, and the air was cool and crisp. The sound of the waves seemed to rock my entire body from the inside and I smiled. I slid out from under the damp blankets, grateful that the condensation hadn’t reached my clothing. My bare toes dug into cool damp sand and I pulled my sweater tighter. 

Patrick didn't stir as I stood as stretched and I glanced back down at him, struck by the way he looked in slumber. Gone were the angry lines that coursed his features, no trace of the harshness that seemed to plague our waking lives these days. I knew it could be seen in me, even in slumber, for I could always feel it upon waking. But this morning it seemed to have abandoned Patrick in search of greater wars. I fought the urge to reach down and stroke his cheek, afraid to wake him and discover once more what demons would join him in the daylight. 

I puffed out my breath and skipped off toward the surf. A lone family was setting up early in a bid to beat the morning onslaught of other tourists, half a mile from us, the only other people for as far into the distance as I could see. Two little girls in matching swimsuits had already set about the important business of collecting shells and I smiled, remembering a photograph I had of my sister in I in our own matching swimsuits, frolicking in the waves while my mother stood by laughing, holding the hem of her sundress out of the surf. 

I kicked at the tide, bending to gather my own broken shell chips and tucking them into the hem of my sweater. At the lifeguard tower I stopped and dropped down into the sand, staring out at the sea. The blackness of it scared me. How the top of the water turned to crystal with the peaking of the sun now and how if you looked very closely it was still as black as death. I lined the shell pieces along the sides of the ramp-way, placing them small to large, a colorful contrast against the teak wood. 

Patrick came and joined me then. He sat beside me, blessedly quiet in this reverent silence of mine, and picked up a pink shell, turning it over to examine it. The only shell that had been mostly in-tact. I looked up at him and smiled.

"I wish it could always be like this," I whispered, and as I leaned into him he put his arm around me and we watched the sea turn red then purple then black again as the sun continued to rise.

The Tides of Change

Nothing is ever the same as I remember it being when I go back to it. It's like the time has worn smooth the glittered edges and I wonder then if it was only ever that bright, that potent, in my own mind. How strange to fight so hard for something so beautiful, something that called you so hard, pulled you like a promise of salvation only to find it so changed and foreign. 

From the moment the whisper of this trip had been on my lips I had been determined that I would see the ocean. I had to grasp that fleeting feeling I'd known briefly all those years ago in my hands and hold onto it. It was freedom. It was power. It was intoxication. It was something I would sacrifice everything to get.
And I had. And I was here now. I could feel the freedom and the power. 

But there was something else too. Something that smudged the perfectness that was in my memory. In lieu of everything I had sacrificed, suddenly the water didn't seem so ethereal. It wasn't a religious experience. It seemed almost dark, foreboding, mocking. Like the very waves were taunting me, raging war with me, daring me to find peace within its angry churning surface. 

I studied the horizon, watching the sun set and wondering why the path of fading sunlight cast across the surface resembled more a finger pointing at me in accusation, than it did a walkway to the possibility of dreams. I had remembered the sunset over the sea as being this beckoning representation of everything peaceful. There was nothing of the old enchanting trance that had held me captive. 

Now, the sea seemed carnivorous. Thirsty for the blood of those who sought to reclaim a kind of innocence. There was nothing gentle or pure in the shocking wetness of sea foam that curled and licked at my ankles. The waves that had kissed my legs as a child now felt cold and fierce and I stepped back, confused. 

I had imagined myself rushing toward the waves with arms wide open, to meet the beauty of the ocean with everything I have, and bathe and be somehow renewed in its glory. But now as I stood at the edge of the tide, I wondered instead where the magic had gone. Wondered if the sea had also grown up somewhere along my journey.

The sun had almost gone. Soon the sky would be black and I would have trouble finding my way back to the car. Perhaps by morning, things would look different again. Maybe I was just too stressed out tonight to enjoy it, to see it the way I once had, the way it should be seen. I would try again at dawn. Sunrise always made everything look brand new.

Serial Killer Farmboy and an Unimpressed Cat

Serial killers aren't usually young, shirtless farmboys with freckles and red hair. I don't think they are. I'm sure they're not... 

But as I followed him through a cornfield down a little dirt road, the stalks so high I couldn't see anything but his car in front of me, I started to panic. I had my trusty road-cat LB with me, sitting like His-Highness on the passenger seat, paws crossed, like it was completely ordinary to be following a stranger through a corn field on a spare tire that was in worse shape than the actual tire had been. I gripped the wheel harder as we drove further into the dense stalks. 

"When I stop the car kitty, run!" I tell LB. He glances up at me. I can hear him thinking moron as he lays his head back down, unconcerned about our fate. 

I'm convinced I'm going to die. When I rolled into the parking lot of the broken down cafe off the highway, the people inside sized me up like they were already measuring my straps. How convenient that the telephone doesn't work. How convenient that there's no auto shop in town either. 

The woman behind the counter tells me her son can help. He comes out from the back wearing an apron, no shirt, dirty khakis. I'm pretty sure they've stopped him in the middle of disposing with the last body and he's annoyed. Then he spots me and his eyes light up. How convenient that his father has a shop with a tire mount. It's at their house. Right across the highway. 

"I thought this town didn't have a mechanic." This isn't suspicious at all. 

"It's just a hobby", he replies. Sure, I think. Okay. I'm being silly. It's probably totally normal to have a shop like that. Maybe they repair farm equipment. I have weird hobbies. I used to try to repair broken neighborhood birds in handbuilt cages, in my childhood walk-in closet. I'm just being silly. He jumps in an old pickup and I debate not following him briefly. But surely, farmboys aren't serial killers. 

I follow him for what seems like an eternity and have changed my mind again, imagining the blood soaked cornstalks as I lay there watching my cat, hiding in the tall stalks with his glittering eyes as the last of the daylight fades away. I am considering throwing the car into reverse and mowing down the stalks and spinning dirt to get away (because in the movies a donut tire can totally handle four wheel drive shit) when suddenly a little farmhouse and a giant shop appear in a tiny clearing. 

I'm stiff and weary from my adrenaline when I pull up behind the farmboy. He bounces out of the truck and throws open the doors of the massive outbuilding to reveal an actual auto shop!, complete with car lift. I can't quite believe this is just a hobby, and scan the equipment for anything resembling the gadgets of a torture chamber. 

"What size you got?" Farmboy startles me out of my thoughts and I flinch again when I turn to find him standing uncomfortably close. 

I step away. "How much is this going to cost me?" I venture carefully. I don't want him to get the wrong impression, or worse, go psychopath on me. I figure I should get this part out of the way now though, so no one can say they were taken advantage of. So I know what Im dealing with. 

Farmboy shrugs and squints into the sun. "Figure $20 bucks oughta cover it". 

Great! I have $20 bucks! I also have no gas left and about 70 more miles to the city. This is my own damn fault, I know. I never should have taken off in a fit like that. One trash bag full of crap and the cat. It backfired. Of course it did. I really didn't even think that it would end up turning out any other way and I still left. And so what? Now that I'm coming back I should have the welcome mat shaken out? A banner hung? Of course he wasn't going to wire me money to come home and stand there waiting for my headlights with open arms. 

Well, he could have.... 

At least I'm coming home! And I bring peace offerings! Two gorgeous knives I purchased just for him at the Iowa 80 Truck Stop. They say it's the biggest truck stop in the United States. I have to believe them. I've never seen bigger. It was like a mall, but without all the crying babies and frantic unhappy housewives. Better merchandise too. I've never seen a mall shop with a marble handled butterfly blade for sale. 

Knives! That's it I think! "Well I have cash if that's all you'll consider, but I have a couple of brand new knives that are worth more than $20 if you would possibly consider a trade." I try to appear like the kind of girl who can afford high quality knives and also use them, and not like kill bait. 

"Let's see em," farmboy says. I walk around my car and open the passenger door to get to the bag so that my back won't be too him. It does occur to me how silly and futile this is when I am about to voluntarily hand over two very sturdy weapons. I grab LB too. His claws are unforgivingly sharp. I will throw him at this kid's face if I have to.

But I don't have to. In the end the kid fixes the tire in record time, the cat falls back asleep on the passenger seat on our way out of the cornfield. The kid chooses the marble handled knife, but I still have the switchblade. The sun is still hanging on for me...I might make it back to fix the mess I left behind in the city before the sky goes dark.

Slumber

                                            

                                            

Leaves swirl intermittently at my feet
As I walk by
My autumn soul, damp and quiet

Beyond the harvest now
My branches harden
Cure, in preparation
For the quiet slumber of winter

A Stripper Named Candy

Once upon a time, in a kingdom far far away named PovertyMeetsAnEighteenYearOld, when I was just a young and rebellious princess sneaking out of the castle through the servant's entrance, I ended up becoming a stripper. 

It was a quick and easy way to make cash, save a friend from eviction, and as I would quickly discover, the most efficient way to discover what having a crack addiction would actually mean. 

I only worked there for a week. Long enough to earn the cash for an entire month's rent (the amount needed to keep my friend from the streets), a new wardrobe, something like fifteen hundred lipglosses, and a new collection of drugs I'd never heard of. Long enough to play hero to a girl whose name I barely remember, and who was probably kicked out the next month anyway. Long enough to leave a lasting impression on a man I would work with three years later. So much so that he would even be able to recall the very obnoxious and long Victorian name I'd chosen to dance to among a sea of Candies, and the first song I took it all off for.

I packed lightly for my first night at the club. Just the tallest heels I could get my hands on and a small bag of tight slutty dresses I had found on discount at the mall. I'm not sure if I am supposed to arrive to the club ready to dance, my interview had been a short tour of the pole followed by a drunken conversation in a dark back room that had mostly revolved around someone else's sickly pet dog. So I wear just a thong under one of the new dresses, slip on shoes, and a flannel half buttoned for modesty. It is a cold night and I hurry across the parking lot toward the bouncer. 

"It's my first night," I explain, already digging nervously through my bag for my ID in case he wants to see it. He does not and he waves me through the big wooden door impatiently, already looking past me as I slide around him. Just inside is a small entryway with another giant door and I can hear the pounding bass pouring through. A rack holding free zines is bolted to a wood paneled wall, advertising local escorts and other persons of political importance. I take a bracing breathe and opened the door. The smell of smoke hits me at the same time the darkness does and I stop short on bowling alley carpeting, stunned by this forbidden underworld. 

The first thing I notice is how brightly lit the stages are in contrast to the rest of the club. The women on the stages are lit up like bright crayons in glitter thongs, melting under neon spotlights while the patrons themselves are shrouded in anonymous darkness. It is a stark contrast to the quiet of day when I auditioned in dim overhead lighting that reminded me of college basements. I look around for the man in charge, the man who hired me, whose name I either never got or can’t recall. I don’t see him so I tap the arm of the girl walking by in tassels and a thong so tiny it might as well be a rubber band. 

“Today’s my first day,” I tell her. She looks me up and down and I feel myself turning red under her scrutiny but square my shoulders. “I’m supposed to start to work? As a dancer?” 

“Backstage.” She jerks a thumb at the far corner of the room to the entrance of a corridor at the edge of the mirrored wall. I wind my way through a throng of men and women, of smells both sickeningly sweet and sinister, and burst into a tiny harshly lit room filled with lockers, mirrors, and women in various states of undress. 

That’s when I see her. She is leaning over another girl, her naked breasts pressing gently against the other girl’s shoulders as she applies her lipstick in the mirror. Her perfect hair falling in waves around her shoulders and arms, tickling her perfect waist. I let my eyes fall to her legs. Legs that tortured me with all that I was not, that went on forever. Her thong says Candy across the ass. My eyes crawl back up her body stopping at her eyes, now gazing sharply back at mine in the mirror. I know this look. It is painful and familiar. It belongs to my high school nemesis. 

I want to laugh at the irony. The cruelness of the Gods. I want to run. I want to cry. I want to throw up. Instead I take a step forward and brace myself. I am no longer the sad tortured soul on the school bus trying not to make eye contact. I am not the idiot little girl that cried alone in the locker room. I am a fighter now. See me? With my mission? With someone to save? 

“Its my first night,” I announce to the floor. I feel the instant silence and all eyes on me. Never in my life have I felt more like the mountain girl I was raised to be and suddenly I realize two things. One: that I am playing this part to save a friend, that this is not the real me: this hardened carefree city girl I will get up on stage and pretend to be tonight; and Two: that this makes me better than her somehow.

She recognizes me. She knows. I can feel the weight of every interaction between us coursing through her, radiating off of her. I can feel the scrutiny bouncing off the glass and boring straight into my forehead. And I can see her deciding and time feels frozen. Then she straightens, turns slowly to me, and says, “Well anyone who can do this is alright in my books. Come on, I’ll show you the ropes." I set my bag down next to the row of lockers as she grabs my hand and pulls me back down the corridor. There is silence, briefly, then Def Leopard's "Pour Some Sugar On Me" starts to play...

The Inheritance

                                                   For my daughter.

                                                          You are the future, the mother explained
                                                  And I give you these wings to fly
                                                 Soar above the midnight stars
                                                  That blanket the clear night sky
                                                  Over the powerful mountaintops
                                                  To valleys far below
                                                  Dance along far away rivers
                                                  Run barefoot through the snow
                                                  Laugh with full abandon
                                                  Throw your arms around a tree
                                                 Let your heart be filled with passion
                                                 And pride for all you see
                                                 Walk gently where you cannot fly
                                                  Plant flowers by the roadway
                                                 Spread your wings with courage
                                                  Choose wisely what you say
                                                  Learn to hear the whisper
                                                 Of the harmony of living
                                                  Protect this priceless ancient gift
                                                 Never take without first giving
                                                  This world is your inheritance
                                                  With all its joy and pain
                                                   When all else is just a memory
                                                  This world will still remain.

Mr. Mafia Part Two

We are in a storage unit. I’ve been told not to ask any questions. I stand in the entryway of a dark hallway, staring out across an even darker parking lot, lit only by the raindrops glistening against far away headlamps of traffic on the roadway. Patrick and Mr. Mafia are struggling past me with huge pieces of carved wood furniture; a table with delicately patterned legs, a head board with chiseled scrollwork. I feel Uncle Frankie’s breath against my neck as he leans in to whisper in my ear, “From Egypt. Imported”. Imported indeed. 

 
Mr. Mafia had gotten typically drunk the night before. Where he suddenly had all this money to splash out on happy hour night after night was quickly becoming less and less a mystery. He’d spent the entire walk home from SomeBar bragging about his father, the great import Don of the entire upper west coast. Shipping from foreign countries. There was money in it. Alot of money. And if Patrick was free tomorrow, they could have some it. So here we were.

I cross my arms, forever cold in the unforgiving Seattle rain as Patrick and Mr. Mafia scurried back and forth, moving things from one storage unit to a different unit across the walkway. I want to ask. So badly do I want to ask. It burns how badly. I rock back and forth on my heels, holding myself against the sheeting wind, concentrating on how tightly I could keep my lips pressed together. 

I was hoping I would actually get to meet Mr. Mafia’s much lauded father. This great import magnate. I imagined him with a marble cane, gold topped, ruling his seven sons and everything else with a commanding stoicism that rendered the world silent in his wake. This man who had forced his son into humility for his own salvation. This man of largess, with an even larger reputation. I was prepared to fall silent for him. I was disappointed. 

We are finished and I watch Uncle Frankie slip Patrick a small stack of cash I know I will never see again. Uncle Frankie catches me watching and puts his arm around me, “Don’t worry beautiful, we’ll get you some pretty new clothes, huh?” But I’ve seen that episode of CriminalTVShow before. I get the pretty new dress, then new shoes I can barely walk in, the new pimp. I shrug him off and climb into the car next to Patrick. I avoid Uncle Frankie’s glances in the rear view mirror and focus on my lap, on my hands. On the fingernails that haven’t seen polish since I can’t remember when. 

We pull up to the roadside motel we’ve been holed up in. Mr. Mafia spills out of the front seat and I vaguely think about how quickly and stealthily he manages to get shit faced every night. I hadn’t even seen him drinking. 

“Let’s go to SomeBar” he tells Patrick as Uncle Frankie drives away. 

“Hey guys can I just hang out here tonight and crash? You guys have a guys night out?” I am hopeful. I need a break. I need silence. I need the black void of sleep. 

“No way!” Mr. Mafia says, quickly at my side to grab my arm. He propels me forward. “We can’t let you out of our site, a pretty little girl like you!” There is menace beneath his smile, his fingers dig into the underside of my flesh. 

“I’ll lock the door” I suggest feebly. 

“It’s not safe” Patrick says, staring ahead. He doesn’t see me. He can’t see the pleading look in my eyes. I am starting not to recognize him. I am starting not to recognize me. We begin to walk toward the bar. 

“Do you know who you remind me of?” Mr. Mafia asks me for the fiftieth time since I met him. 

I hate these conversations. Each time the conversation begins the same, but lately, it has taken a dark turn. I no longer want to hear about this girl I remind him of. It is becoming harder to convince him I am not her at the end of a night like these. “Lori,” I tell him. “I remind you of Lori. I’m not Lori”. I think Lori is dead. 

“I think maybe you are Lori, and you’ve come back to me,” he announces. “I think you have come back…..” he pauses, getting louder. “I think you came back to FUCK WITH ME!” 

I recoil and look around for Patrick as he draws the attention of everyone around us. He leans back laughing then leans forward again and whispers, “I’m going to call you Lori”. 

“What happened to Lori?” I ask for the fiftieth time since I met him. I am afraid to look him in the eye. 

“Lori,” he repeats. He grows very serious, studying his beer. I have to strain to hear him. “She’s gone.” I slide off my barstool and go searching for Patrick, finding him engaged in a deeply philosophical discussion about astrology with a brunette on the other side of the bar. 

Mr. Mafia destroys my bag that night in the hotel room. He is enraged that I won’t give him my mother’s telephone number and address back home so he can always find me if ever I should leave. I want to leave. I want to leave now. Patrick by my side or not. I grab my bag and before I reach the door he is in front of me, tearing the bag off my shoulder, slamming me backward onto the bed and strewing my belongings across the floor. He grabs my blow drier, slams it against the wall. Picks up a shirt and begin tearing it at the seams, pulling off the buttons like a madman. The violence has me stunned, and I am frozen in place, half on the bed, half on the floor, terrorized. Patrick puts his hands out ineffectively, “Whoa, whoa dude, calm down!” 

How is this just alcohol, I think. Time seems to slow and though I know there is so much noise happening I hear nothing but silence. It occurs to me that no policemen will be coming here to save me because, well, who is going to call them? The prostitute ring renting the room to the left? The non-english speaking Russians here on "business" in the room to the right? I pick up the nearest sharp piece of my broken hair dryer. 

Mr. Mafia grabs his hair with both hands and half-screams, half-growls before storming into the bathroom and slamming the door. My brain kicks into action. 

“Patrick let's go!” I beg as I scramble to gather my clothing and shoes from the room. “Please let’s go let’s go! Right now!”

 
“Ssshhhhh!” Patrick scolds me, grabbing my wrists. “We can’t leave right now, in the middle of the night! We have nowhere to go!”

 
“I don’t care!” I squeal! I am crying. I am prepared to go now, into the night without a dime in my pocket. Or a plan. I will sleep under a bridge. Again. 

Mr. Mafia opens the bathroom door and we freeze like children caught in the pantry. He walks up to where I am crouched and stands there stiffly while I slowly look up at him. He is eerily calm. Too calm.
“I am sorry for my behavior,” he announces stiffly. He hands me his hair dryer. “I did not mean to break your things”. 

Satisfied that I have been duly compensated, he turns his attention to Patrick and I am dismissed. I sit at the table under the dim pendant lamp with my back to the wall and my foot to the door and watch them pass a joint back and forth. Neither of them give me another glance. 

“But don't you think he’s obsessed?” I ask Patrick two days later. We’ve been at Somebar for an hour and Mr. Mafia has just called me Lori again. “It’s like he can’t tell the difference between reality and I'm worried. I don't think it ended well for her and I don’t think it’s going to end well for me either. Especially since he seems to think I AM her!” 

I’d given him an ultimatum earlier. We leave, or I do. Patrick takes another large gulp of cheap tap beer and shakes his head. He begins to slide off his bar stool at the exact moment Mr. Mafia begins to yell “Lori!” at me across the bar. I don't answer. He throws his beer at the wall behind the bartender and it shatters and we are thrown out. 

This appears to be the last straw for Patrick. He waits until Mr. Mafia is sleeping that night before giving me the all clear. We slip out of the motel and into the cold black night. 

It’s been a week and we still haven’t left SeaTac. We are practically just down the street from Mr. Mafia in another motel I’m convinced Mr. Mafia will check into at any moment. We have no plan and no prospects. Things are tense and we are fighting all the time. 

“How about if I come with you tonight and keep you company,” I offer an olive branch. Patrick has been offered temporary labor from the labor center parking cars at the rental lot tonight. 

“Won’t be able to spend much time together,” he replies without looking up. “I’ll be working the whole time. What would you even do”? 

“I can read, hang out with you on breaks…” 

I take his silence for a yes and so three hours later I am parked under a streetlamp on the car lot, reading in silence while he works. I haven’t seen him since he clocked in. Finishing a chapter I glance up and around. Because the air is always wet where we are, the headlamps of the traffic on the street look like glittering orbs and I watch them passing by, transfixed. A pair of headlamps looms past, slows, actually backs up in traffic, and pulls into the car lot. 

I have no reason, no logical reason, to know this car is for us, but I do know and my heart begins to explode out of my chest. The Cadillac drives right past the normal customer entrance, fixed on our car parked like a neon sign directly under the light, and pulls into the empty space next to mine. I try to lock the door without being obvious but Uncle Frankie is already watching me with those squinting hawk eyes that don’t miss anything. He motions for me to roll down the window. 

“Where is Patrick?” he asks. Mr. Mafia sits like a petulant child in the passenger seat, arms crossed, refusing to look at me. I motion to the parking lot. 

“He’s working.” 

“He is supposed to work with me. Tomorrow.” 

I stay silent because I don’t know how to reply. 

“Is he planning to show up?” Uncle Frankie demands to know. "We have a house to paint."

“He didn’t tell me anything about it. I don’t know.” 

“Where you have been staying!” Mr. Mafia breaks his silence, leaning across Uncle Frankie to demand. Uncle Frankie pushes him back with his forearm, never breaking eye contact with me.
“You have him call me.” His voice is lower, icy. “You have him call me tonight!” 

They throw the car in reverse and drive slowly away. I realize I have been holding my breath and exhale loudly. I don't see Patrick for the entirety of his shift. When I see him walking toward me I get out of the car and run toward him, spilling out what happened hysterically. I ask if he he’d been talking to Uncle Frankie behind my back. How else would they have had these plans after weeks of not seeing them? Patrick doesn’t answer me in a way that gives me any confidence he is telling the truth, but we leave for Seattle before sunup. I leave Seattle for Denver not long after, and though I will see Patrick again years later, I never again see Mr. Mafia. 

_____________________________________________________________________________

Many many years later I am in SeaTac for business, on a road I suddenly realize I recognize. I pull into the parking lot of SomeBar and sit in the car, staring at the front door of this little tavern I never made peace with. I walk inside and sit down at the bar, ordering a beer. The bartender, an older man, serves the same brew on the same coaster. I slip the coaster into my purse. 

“For memories,” I tell him. I ask him if he’s worked there a while. He has. Almost twenty years. 

“Do you know a man, an older gentleman, goes by the name Wolfman?” 

“Yeah yeah I remember the Wolfman!” the bartender chuckles. “Hell of a guy. He was a staple.” 

“Was?”

 
“Yeah he’s been gone for a good ten years now. Heart attack. How’d you know him?” 

I ignore the question. “Whatever happened to that crazy nephew of his?” 

The bartender grins, remembering. “Ain’t been around since his uncle died. Never saw him again.”

I thank the bartender, tip him, and open the heavy wooden door, squinting into the sunlight.

Mr. Mafia Part One

I still don’t know if I was a part of the mafia for one brief moment in time, or if I was a part of another man’s vivid fantasy world, created especially for us. I try to look him up on Facebook twenty years on, sure that I still have his name spelled correctly, remembered correctly, burned into my mind. He is never there. Almost as though he only ever existed in my own memory. 

I met him at a homeless shelter. This was at the end of the most incredible road trip along the west coast, the part where the magic began to fade and reality was setting in quickly. He wants to be called Al. He and Patrick become instant friends over their mutual dislike of the authoritarian establishment that was the homeless shelter, with me along for the ride, a silent passenger in the backseat of my own car, because Al has errands. 

Al isn't supposed to be there, doesn't have to be there, he’s informed us. He is only there to learn “humility”, ordered there by a rich mysterious father. Presumably the baby of the family, he’s been too out of control and is now "learning a lesson". Patrick hangs on his every word, enamored. This is a cathartic concept for him, that a man can do this, live this, in the context of simply learning a lesson. In an abstract way, I watch him take himself out of the responsibility of our situation and begin to look at it like he is only an observer. 

The homeless shelter is run by an executive committee of some of the other homeless people who live at the Hawaiian House, who are further along in the program. The program is simple. Residents are required to work security and front desk shifts in three hour segments totalling 12 hours per week in return for a free room. There are two rules: no drinking, and hold a job. We manage to violate both inside of a week. 

Perhaps it is because we cannot immediately find jobs that we find ourselves at the bar. Maybe I prefer to remember it wrong and it was the other way around. But like every night after desk shift, there we are, the three of us. Al and Patrick are scheduled to pull security shifts promptly at midnight so I am promised we will leave in time. But like most promises made on this trip, this one too is broken. And so at half past one in the morning, I find myself silent in the backseat of my own car, listening once again to Al rant and rave about how, if we are about to get kicked out, it won’t matter anyway because he is important, his family is important, and he doesn’t have to be there. “If one falls we all fall” he and Patrick shout from the front seat, Patrick forgetting in the passion of their rebellion that he did in fact have to be there. 

By the time we arrive back to the shelter, Al has changed his name back to his family name (I'm going to refer to him as Mr. Mafia because I can’t think of any other mafia names that would suit him.) and he and Patrick have worked themselves into such a frenzy they have convinced themselves they are walking into a war, fighting the injustice of rules like “Don’t get shitfaced”, and “Don’t be a homeless person”, because how dare the establishment try to help you off the streets. I however, still have a naive glimmer of hope and so when we drive up to the shelter, I order Mr. Mafia to stay inside the car until we come out to get him. 

“I’ll pull your shift for you, just stay out here in the car,” I explain to him reasonably. “We’ll tell them you had an emergency with family earlier and we just dropped you off at the hospital so you couldn’t call but that you’ll be back in the morning. And then we’ll sneak you in when everyone’s gone to bed”. It would have been the perfect plan. 

The Head of the Committee, who happens to be on shift that night, and whom Patrick and Mr. Mafia are supposed to relieve, is angry with our lateness and seems suspicious of our story. But he agrees to let me work Mr. Mafia’s shift alongside Patrick and heads upstairs to his bedroom. Not even ten minutes have gone by, just enough time to think we may be getting away with it, and he comes thundering back downstairs, raving about having an emergency committee meeting to kick us all out. Apparently Mr. Mafia has climbed out onto the hood of our car and is sitting pretty-as-you-please chugging a six pack he's appropriated from the bar, directly under the glare of the streetlamp. Directly under the window of the Head of the Committee. 

They have breathalyzers! Little portable breathalyzers in a locked cabinet in this room filled with committee members, that I have never been inside of. The committee members sit at the front of the room behind a long table, side by side like an actual legal proceeding; the three of us in metal folding chairs in front of them. Mr. Mafia is the first to be tested. Almost three times the legal limit, but the smallest amount wouldn’t have made a difference here. 

In rare deference to my, by now, extremely fragile state of mind, Patrick informs them that after his test they needn't waste one for me as I will be going wherever he goes. To this, Mr. Mafia again raises his cheer, “If one falls we all fall”! and I wish that I actually did have anywhere else in the world to go in that moment. Instead I stand with a ram-rod straight back and as we walk out the door, I fall with them. 

“Don't worry”, Mr. Mafia tries to soothe me as we were escorted to our separate rooms to pack our belongings, effective immediately. “I have a good friend, he’ll come get us. He has money. We won't have to worry about it.” I want to scratch his face off with my fingernails and am glad when they led him to his room, away from us. 

They stand in the open doorway of our room watching us pack our meager belongings, suspicious now that because we are leaving against our wills we might try to steal from them what few things we could fit into our bag...like the sink faucet perhaps, or a patch of the carpet that was coming up in the corner. A man I've only ever seen in passing has the decency to let me unpack my underwear drawer with his eyes cast to the floor, but the woman standing beside him stares directly at me, nostrils flared in distaste of the lace in my hands as though she’d known it would only be just a matter of time. 

Mr. Mafia has taken no time at all to pack and is waiting for us in the lobby, looking bored and unaffected. I still want to scratch his face off so I stand behind Patrick. “We’re just waiting on my friend to show up,” he informs me nonchalantly. We are not being allowed to take our vehicle off the property for 24 hours because we have been drinking. We are also not being allowed to sleep in the car either. If they see us on the property before 24 hours have passed, and for anything other than picking up our car, they will call the police. 

“Well you all need to leave the building so he better hurry up!” our escort tells Mr. Mafia with a sneer. A girl that they have woken to taken over the front desk shift looks at us through lowered lashes and I wonder if I still looked young like her or if I have aged like the others. I wonder if she will too, or if she'll do the right things and get out the right way. I hope she gets out the right way. 

A shiny red car pulls up in the valet port, unused in this motel’s modern reincarnation as a shelter. “He’s here,” Mr. Mafia smiles and stands up, picks up his single bag like a businessman whose taxi has just arrived to spirit him away into the city. “Follow me!” 

Suddenly the perfect gentlemen, Mr. Mafia informs me that ladies sit up front and holds open the door for me. I slide in next to a tall skinny man who looks at me with kind eyes but who does not smile. Patrick and Mr. Mafia get onto the back seat and we take off into the night, none of us saying a word. It is me who finally breaks the silence. I can’t bear it a second longer. The men in the car all seem to know some secret about our future, or maybe its just that they do not care. Theirs is a comfortable silence. But for me it is screaming. 

“Thank you for picking us up,” I say, glancing quickly at the driver. He looks at me but says nothing. I clear my throat. “You have a very lovely car. What kind is it?” 

“It’s a 2002 Mercedes,” he answers gruffly. I nod and look out the window frowning, as it occurs to me that we are only in the year 2000. I can feel the smugness wafting off Mr. Mafia in the backseat like an odor and sink further into the seat, a little closer to the door as I suddenly begin to entertain thoughts of what it would it mean if Mr. Mafia had in fact been telling us the truth about who he is. 

We ride in silence for what seems like hours. I fight a constant battle with myself not to ask where we are going or what is going to happen to us now, because as scary as not knowing is to me, I have decided that at this point, knowing might be worse. I try to close my eyes, let the flashes of streetlamps darting across my eyelids lull me into a trance, but I can feel Mr. Mafia watching me, his eyes trained on the back of my neck and it rattles me. 

By the time we pull into the casino parking lot I have myself convinced that I am getting kidnapped into the sex trade and that my boyfriend is going to meet a bullet to the back of his head before sunrise, and I fight the urge to bolt from the car. I wouldn’t have succeeded. I have worked myself into such a state of panic that when the driver opens my car door I fall right out onto the pavement. “I'm not drunk,” I grumble miserably as he helps me to my feet. "If one falls we all fall," Mr. Mafia cheers from the backseat. 

“She doesn’t drink much!” Patrick boomed as he came around the car. “She’s just a little overwhelmed”. I let out a harsh bark of a laugh that is half sob and turn away from them both, following Mr. Mafia across the parking lot. We march single file around the building to the back door and crowd up on the steps. Mr. Mafia gives a quick knock and a waitress opens the door. 

"Mr. Mafia!” she crowed happily as she lunges into his arms. She gives him a noisy kiss on his cheek and steps back to look at him. “Well! Aren’t you a sight for sore eyes! Come on in, your uncle’s already waiting for you!”

We are ushered inside and seated at a large table in the back kitchen of the casino, a private table for employees. A large older man with thick black hair and gleaming black eyes sits at the head of the table, working a giant plate of pasta. Mr. Mafia introduces him as Uncle Frankie. “The Wolfman,” he tells me as he shakes my hand. I nod, afraid to break his gaze. What big eyes you have. 

I am scared that if I speak I will begin to laugh maniacally and not be able to stop, like I am perched on the edge of hysteria. I sink into the chair he offers beside him. Almost instantly, plates full of steaming hot spaghetti appear in front of us and I tuck in like I am the wolf, forgetting for the moment to be terrified.