untitled (intro to neal)

The latest draft from my UCLA writer's workshop:

Neal gets his fix outside of town. Two nights a week, he takes the A train south and transfers at Charlton. I found the ticket stubs in his pants pocket the day I offered to do his wash. The fact he does this goes on our running list of things we don’t talk about, but just because it’s not being said out loud doesn’t mean I don’t know. He goes to see a guy. He takes the eight o’clock A train, transfers at Charlton then gets off to meet a guy to get off with and takes the two o’clock express train back. He’s at home long before Loraine ever wakes up. He thinks he’s clever. He thinks that his mother has no idea what he does at night, where he goes, why he hasn’t had a girlfriend since he was seventeen. She knows. She doesn’t talk about it but that doesn’t mean she doesn’t know.

At nine o’clock sharp, Neal slams through my kitchen door like a bull and goes straight for the refrigerator. “Where’s the beer?” He pushes the condiments around angrily. “Where’s the goddamn food? All you’ve got is fucking olives… and mustard.”

Jude looks up from his notebook, wearing the usual scowl he makes when Neal is around. “Isn’t there a young communists meeting or a pro-fur rally you’re missing?”

“All the trains out are cancelled tonight,” Neal says, to me and me alone. He slams the refrigerator door, jar of olives under one arm and a bottle of soda in his hand. “A fucking cargo train turns over, spilling tubes of toothpaste, or whatever it is they carry. Just push the fucking toothpaste aside for Christ’s sake. It’s not like anyone died.”

A folded wad of cash bulges out of the wallet in Neal’s back pocket. Everything today has a cost - love not excluded. This is where Jude and I are lucky. With nothing to give and nothing to take, it’s an equal exchange of worthlessness. Unless, of course, you count the fact Jude washes my dishes and kills my spiders. I guess you could call that love in exchange for slave labor.

I take a mug from the dish rack and hand it to Neal. “There’s whiskey on the table if you want to mix that soda with something.”

first page

The human hand contains twenty seven individual bones. Give or take. Nineteen if you don’t count the eight in your wrist. It’s also the home of six different kinds of arteries and two different kinds of arches, although it escapes me at the moment what, exactly, an arch is. Then there are always the variables. The babies that come out plus or minus a finger. The victims of hand saw accidents. Chances are you’ve sat next to a variable on some form of public transportation at least once in your life. Variables are big fans of public transportation. They’re always there on the bus or the train with their six and a half fingers on each hand. No shame at all. As though you’re the strange one, you with your measly twenty seven hand bones - nineteen if you don’t count the wrist.

This is before all that though. Before there is a botched job interview, before the tin buckets of syringes, the drool rags and the diapers. Before all that, there is the problem of the young boy sitting on a stranger’s back porch. He presses a suitcase between his bare knees, bone thin and beet red from the frozen air. Shorts in the middle of winter. Who lets a boy that age out of the house like that?

I’m watching him as he watches the empty yard. Him with his blank stare and his suitcase, me with my cigarette ashing aimlessly into the snow. God only knows how long he’s been sitting there. White flakes have started to collect on the shoulders of his snug corduroy jacket and he didn’t so much as flinch when I pulled my rust bucket of a car down the narrow driveway. Its as though someone’s deposited him there like an unwanted garden gnome or one of those plaster child-shaped fountains, forever spewing rank, recycled water. You know the kind. Your mother probably has one in her yard somewhere, and if not her, your grandmother or aunt for sure. They belong to the lawn jockey and plastic flamingo family. My mother brought me back one from her last trip to Germany – a gnome that is. I put it on my apartment balcony for about a week before I pushed it off the edge in a feigned suicide attempt. It bounced. Two weeks later she found it under a stack of newspapers in the parking garage dumpster. She dusted it off, brought it inside, clutched close to her chest like a baby and asking me in that tone of hers why, exactly, it was in there. The better question would have been why, exactly, she was digging through the dumpster.

This is a boy, however, (at least to the best of my observation) and not a lawn ornament. And a boy is not the sort of thing a person can get away with dumping on a stranger’s porch, suitcase packed. A boy is not the sort of thing you can just leave as someone else’s problem, or buried under a stack of newspapers.

drawing pictures of birds

Thirty-two year old Stephen spends his days drawing pictures of birds on the wallpaper of the apartment his mother built for him above the house. He doesn't have much else to do. Mom doesn't allow Stephen downstairs when she's teaching. She has enough on her hands without him stirring up the kids. After they leave he'll be able to go down for a while. He likes to watch his mother sing to herself as she cleans up the mess of crayons and toys. He could watch her like that forever - but soon little brother Neil will come home from his normal school and it's back upstairs for Stephen and back to the birds and the wallpaper. The good times are so short lived.

This is not Stephen's story, however. Stephen is dead. The scraps of wallpaper are boxed up the in basement next to the shovel and the washer and there are new people in the house now. Mom is still here. Neil comes and goes. The kids in mom's class change over like seasons. Some of them die. Some move away. A small handful grow up and graduate, kicking and screaming all the way.

Then there's Madison, the girl living in Stephen's old apartment, here to help Mom now that she's gotten so old. That's whose story this is. This is Madison's story - and Mom's and Neil's and that guy who walks through the yard every day with the disheveled black hair like the crumpled wing of a broken bird. If Stephen were alive he'd probably look out his window and start drawing pictures of the man on the wallpaper next to the rest. He looks like a bird from a distance, small and black there against the snow.

But Stephen is dead. This is not Stephen's story. It's Madison at that window, cutting herself with her new kitchen knives and wondering how the hell she ended up here, right in the middle of the lives of so many strangers. All she wanted was to disappear somewhere, to escape from herself somehow. She never intended to become so involved.

No, this is not Stephen's story.
Not until Madison finds his birds, anyway.

evaluation and management of traumatic brain injuries

[excerpt from rough cut of: drawing pictures of birds]

Jude buses tables and washes dishes at the local twenty-four hour diner. It’s one of those places where the plates are so thick it takes both hands just to lift one of them, and the coffee is perpetually burned from spending long hours cooking on the warmers. In a place like this, a city that turns into a virtual ghost town after dark, a restaurant that is not only open but survey leathery, over-fried omelets at three in the morning, draws all kinds. In my mind, the idea of spending eight hours a day chipping at dense layers of melted cheese sounds about as appealing as sawing off my leg with a steak knife. Jude doesn’t seem to mind so much.

“The best part is cleaning out the booths,” he says. “Usually its just some spare change or whatever.” Huddled in the diner’s concrete block of a bathroom, Jude takes a hit off the joint we’re sharing and reaches past me to push open the small, chicken-wire-laced window. “But sometimes,” he says through an exhale of smoke, “Sometimes you’re lucky and what gets left behind is a folded up to-do list or a photograph or a grocery receipt.”

Perched on the sink, I shift my weight awkwardly to keep the cast iron edge from cutting off circulation to my legs. It might not be much, but getting high in a cramped bathroom beats sitting home, listening for ghosts. Hands down. I take a hit and pass the blunt back to Jude. It slips and lands in thick, yellow toilet water.

“Aye, dios mio!” He cups his hands to his mouth, filling the space between them with the warmth of his breath. “I can’t feel my goddamn fingers.”

I smile, watching it float like a leaf in the ripples.
The death of a perfectly good roach.

Outside metal grinds against metal as the back door swings open and then there is the hiss of steam as someone dumps a bucket of hot mop water onto the frozen pavement. I check my watch. Another two minutes until Jude is due back from his break. He unwinds himself cautiously from his entanglement around the dirty toilet and squeezes himself into the tight space next to me at the sink.

“I’m not moving,” I tell him.

“It’s not like there’s exactly anywhere else for you to move to,” Jude says and laughs, leaning in to examine the roots of his dark hair in the clouded mirror. He squints as though he’s trying to find something, anything recognizable in his reflection. Dilated pupils in weak afternoon light makes his eyes into thin black crescents as he takes a step back to get a better look. He runs into the toilet.

“I swear,” he says, shaking his head, “Every couple years or so I wake up and I’m this completely different person. I think it happens while I’m sleeping.”

the life and times of a malnourished houseplant

[excerpt from rough cut of: drawing pictures of birds]

I smoke my last cigarette for breakfast then cut the palm of my hand with my new chopping knife. The blade leaves a thick trail of blood that runs down my wrist, cold and slow. At first it doesn’t look real. It doesn’t look like it could have come from my body, so I squeeze my hand tightly until pain shoots up my arm.

That’s better.

It’s not entirely clear in my memory when, exactly, I started this. All I remember is the first time I slammed my hand in my dresser drawer. I was twelve and the pain was shocking and I felt it pulse instantly through my entire body. I had never felt so alive. I was almost heartbroken when the pain subsided. So I went seeking it with knives and razor blades like an archeologist digging for the body of Christ.

I put the knife back in the drawer and wrap a dishtowel around the hand. With over an hour to kill before class starts, I take my new favorite seat in front of the window and stare across the yard.

The man with the black hair locks his front door. It’s a different coat this time he’s wearing. A brown one. Motorcycle style. His breath makes steam clouds in front of him as he buttons his coat and checks his pockets. A knit cap is discovered. The man pulls it down firm over his ears, stopping only when he catches me watching him. Now I’m the crazy girl that lives next door. The one that spies on people out her kitchen window and keeps a bloody chopping knife on hand in case an unexpected guest should drop by. It’s day six and I’m off to a fabulous start.