Day 36: BABIES IN AVOCADOS (part a.)

Six years ago it was June and there was Nina--the eyelashes that launched more poems than Helen did ships to Troy over a two week period in the early haze of summer, the plum-brimming dusk of a June evening over the eye-liner of the west replete with (seasonal) seventeen year cicadas chirping out own anthropodal oratorios in the background. Nina who met me at the bus station in Joliet with her hair pinned back and a kick ass green dress that slid over her cinnamon skin-limbs of her petite poetic frame like quarter notes skimming across a the lithe rungs of classical sheet music. The rich chestnut tint of her eyes blinking in unflinching curiosity, as if trying to sop up every quark of her experience on this vessel deemed earth one astonishing blink at a time. Nina who was the size of a grain of rice and who rode her bike everywhere she went. Nina who was just bitchingly well read and worked at the bookstore. Nina who always referenced me as the 'sexy' librarian. Nina who only wore dresses and had bangs. Nina who took me forever to find on Facebook because she went by a diffeernt last name.

Nina who was leaving to enter the Peace Corps, going to South Africa for three years.  Nina who I had met all of once and asked if she could spend the last night of her sojourn in the states at my apartment. Nina and I who drank Beamish (which she pronoucned, "Be Amish") and merlot and listened to music and danced and read to each other and cried. Nina who I woke up with next to and who slept with her head on my chest and it felt like her dreams were sifting like weebles into the interior of my flesh.

Nina who when she left I gave her my pirze possesion, an autographed copy of Ginsberg's 'ALLEN VERBATIM,' thinking I would never see her again. Nina who I kissed goodbye, wedging my head into the driver's side window and watching as her car transitioned into a pebble, into an errant button, into the splash of summer light and then she was no more.

Nina who, when I entered my apartment, found a strand of her hair and held it up like a wick that had already burnt out.

STRAND

 

There were three that I found right away that morning

While you were dressing

Your naked body slipping into your

Lavender spring dress and tank top

Like a clamp to a bell

I found three separate threads

Fibers plucked from a waterfall of

Dark bangs and tresses spilling down the

Tanned canyons of your neck and shoulders 

You told me the night our bodies

Tripped and fell into the soil of each others thighs

That you shed rather easily, your hair,

And how when you were seventeen and came home

From running away to San Francisco

You shaved your head into a shell of exposed skin

As if your brain were waiting to incubate and hatch

Pecking its way out of the drywall of your skull

With beak and feathers while I relayed to you

The time when I felt like Jo March at the end of summer

Sawing off the auburn cord of my pony-tail with pruning shears

Severing the neck tail identity bracelet of my mid-twenties

With one rusty chomp of the twin garden blades

Hoping that my mother would be appeased enough 

By my appearance to co-sign on another high-interest loan

So that I could finish college and how my fingers

Combed the sockets of my apartment as if reading Braille

Skimming over the carpeted coastline

Across the continental shift of upholstery and used furniture

Hoping to sift a few orphaned follicles from a collected

Sagebrush nest of body hair and strings

Only to hold the fabric of your body up to the 

Window frame of early June at dusk

When the sun dips its scalp into the western shoreline 

Streaking the overhead forehead of the atmosphere

With wispy bangs of light tint and copper

As I held the relic of your hair in my hand

Like a stem to an unknown flower

So fragrant and oh-so sweet.

 

 

 

 

 

                                                                             ***

 

 

 

That summer I was drinking Dundee craft beer because it came in a Variety pack and ghetto Sav-A-Lot in campus town priced it for under ten bucks. I would blow through five or six cubes a week, sitting at my writing desk across the street from St. Mark cathedral. I would work on my novel everyday for eight hours then I would got to work and come home and drink and write and sit on my back porch and lose myself in the skidding heliotrope of light heralding the arrival of a pending dawn.

One morning I came home from work and found a bag of marijuana sitting on my welcome matt.

I thought about Nina in South Africa. I thought about the woman who the last three years' had evolved around who was planning on moving to europe with her family. I thought about lost. I continued to drink.  

One day I arrived home there was package in the mail from Johannesburg. It was from Nina.

Inisde there was two letters. There was an autographed copy of a Sherman Alexie novel. There was a copy Harold and Maud. She said she would be gone for three years and that she missed me but that she wanted to see me again when she returned. She talked about Allen Ginsberg's Supermarket in Calfornia. Thinking about Walt Whitman, " Wives in the avocados, babies in the tomatoes!"  Nina told me that she wanted to have Babies in avocados. She told me that she wanted to be a Parisian bumpkin and live with me and be artists when she returned.

She told me that she wanted to have Babies in Avocados with me.

 

 

Babies in avocados

 

I found it on my way to work this afternoon

Perched on the lip of my doorstep

In a thick brown envelope like the

Abandoned bassinet you always

See placed in front of an orphanage

Christmas morning in movies where

The young superhero reared by nuns

Learns through a series of jump cuts and stilted

Black and white flash backs the elusive

Origins of his past and how I smiled

At first when I saw your name

Picking the package up with two hands

And just holding it for a minute

Remembering how our bodies fit together

How I could hear, audibly hear

The syllable of your every thought

Swelling in your pulse

Your petite neck on my chest 

As I held you early that morning

Before you left as I held

The postaged preemie

In my arms before

Opening it as if I were

Trying to unhook

A brassiere for the first time

Excited and curious as to what would

Release itself into my palms

Yet nervous and even a little scared

Watching with awed vision

As the contents availed themselves

An autographed (!!!) novel by Sherman Alexie

(Whose short-story “The Toughest Indian in the World

Is one of my all-time favorites.”)

The mixed CD the first half I’ve

Already listened to during my break

Here at work today,

A copy of Harold and Maude

Your favorite movie which I have never seen

And a letter

—Two letters composed in pencil

Nobody including myself writes

Beautiful letters and sends them via

Mail anymore without logging in a

User name and dotted password first

Unfolding the twin sheaths

Still fresh with the DNA of your

Fingertips and breath

Alphabetical paper ships

Of your words floating across

The white pond of the page

Where you wrote me about your religious periphery

Language kneeling at the altar behind your voice

Where you wrote me about

Yearning and about fear

And about leaving and near the end of the second

Letter you told me to drop you a line if I wanted to have babies

The quote I have never before heard

Embraced in a gray-ripple of penciled

Dashes buoyed with an exclamatory stalk

Walt Whitman’s name standing

On the banks of the quotation 

As if the overweight bearded poet himself

Toasted the pear shaped orb up to the sun like a film negative

One morning after bathing

Naked in the Hudson

And found a fetus

Pitted within the center of the fruit

Like a dead Christmas tree ornament

The color of the wood in my apartment since you left

The embryo spending the last trimester

Outgrowing the mother

A seed so lonely for the taste of what once was

Surrounded by a moist placenta of mushy

Wonder wet with joy.

 

 

 

 

 

 

A month after Nina left I started seeing Tiara. Tiara was in her late thirties and was a sexy college English prof. I first met Tiara two years' earlier in a workshop with then Poet Laureate Billy Collins when he came to Bradley. I had never seen Tiara before and she was wearing glasses and had what I thoguht of was a pixy-girl haircut. The whole-seesion tiara was making witticims and flirting with Billy collins. After the session I turned to my friend Shannon to inquire who that girl was, "Her name is Tiara," Shannon told me. "Oh, and she has breast cancer. That's a wig she is wearing. She doesn't need glasses but she also lost her eye-brows via the chemo."

 

I became friends' with Tiara. She was married and had three kids and two dogs whose name all began with Z. Sporadically we would see each otehr at campus events and sit next to each other and laugh.

 

The local paper did an account on Tiara  and showed a Christmas card of her and her family smiling. Tricia is sporting the infamous chemotherapy-inspired Sinead O'Conner doo while her three children and husband are each wearing a sort of nylon over their heads, pretending to be bald as well.

"Merry Christmas!" the card said, "And a Happy New Hair!"

A semester ealier Tiara stopped me after a Screenwriting class to congratulate me for a local writing award I had won. It was my first encounter with her tete-a-tete. Ironically the story that I sold was about my father who had died from a disease she was all too familiar with.

What happened next was weird. She just wanted to talk about my story and all I wanted to do was thank her for surviving. She smiled and acted like the twelve months of enervating chemo treatments were no big deal.

"When you have kids its just something you do. You survive."

She was wearing her wig, the same wig she had on the first time I had spotted her flirting with Billy Collins. In the article the paper she talked about loosing her physical identity, but never loosing her sense of humor."

"Look," She told the local Urinal Jar (Journal Star) reporter. "I thought to myself, If I'm going to go through this experiment, I might as well laugh my ass off."


A few weeks later I saw tiara.. We were walking opposite directions. A woman with scruff short hair was power walking on the sidewalk opposite from me. She hollered out my name and I had no clue who it was (I thought it was a lesbian at first)= to my dismay it was her.

"Can you believe it--MY HAIR IS COMING BACK!!!!"

"So it's gone?" I inquired. "The cancer is gone?"

"As far as I know." She responded. She went on to talk about her screen play (80 pages!!!) how BU had hired her to teach two classes this pending autumn. When I asked her again about the venom that momentarily rented the inside her body, she just laughed, referenced her kids and again, insinuated, that surviving is just something you do. You live and laugh as much as possible through this process of life--through the art of living.

I tried telling Tiara just how much her survival meant to me that afternoon. She blushed it off and I hugged her goodbye, told her that I was proud of her. That she was my hero for conquering the disease that took my old man so suddenly three years ago.

Her shock of short hair looks like golden wheat atop her head and (using her own humor) Trish, you really were the sexiest lesbian I've ever seen that day (with the exception of late night hi-channeled adult quality viewing, of course....hehehe).

What Tiara doesn't know is, after our last encountered, I cried. An avalanche of tears spilled from my sockets. True I was missing my dad, pissed off that he had died before he ever had the opportunity to escort one of his daughters down the aisle; pissed off that he had died while his only son and first born was engaged in a rather hedonistic and unhealthy lifestyle.

But mostly the reason I shuffled tears away from my cheekbones that afternoon has to do with beauty. Beauty in its most true and unadulterated form seems to sometimes involve an intersection of suffering, glory, resilience, laughter. What I saw that day, gazing at Tiara's back confidently power walking down Cooper as she gradually dissipated was simply a person who had accepted the "test" they were for some horrible, inexplicably given and had impeccably passed it with multiple plus signs following the first upper-case vowel.

Most notorious writers can't do this. For a long time I hid. I hid behind the blonde that was coddled in my right palm and the beer that was grasped in my left. I hid behind a plume of arid, cancer-friendly cigarette smoke. I hid behind prose so bloated it must be mistaken for splashes of genius 'less it be uncloaked for the elementary ink-drops that it truly was.

This was two years before Nina.

 

A month after Nina left for South Africa I was at Kellehers nursing a beer on the brick patio when I felt someone slap my back. The girl was wearing a blue and white dress. She had long auburn hair that dripped past her shoulders.  Her eyes were carribean azure and looked enhanced. I swear I had never seen her before or figured she probably knew I was a local writer on the verge of greatness (hahahaha).

 

I was wrong. It was Tiara. She looked stunning.

 

We had a few beers. She told me that she read soemthing I had written a few years earlier that had given her a good cry. I told her that she was my hero. She told  me that she was going through a divorce.

 

"My husband would drop me off for Chemo and then go fuck his girlfriend and then go pick me up afterwards."

 

We hugged goodbye. She clapsed both her eyes tight when I kissed her cheek.  Ironically we bumped into each other a few days later. I kissed her cheek again. We said goodbye, I went to my apartment and drank twenty beers and watched Harold and Maude for the first time.

 

                                                            ***

 

The first time I watched Harold and Maude I couldn’t get past this scene. I was drinking beer and watching the movie and Harold kept looking spooked and he was wearing a scarf that looked like he just graduated from Hogwarts buffeted by the distilled jangle and subtle clang of Ruth Gordon playing the Piano and I just kept having to replay the scene again and again and again and again and I was dancing, I was thinking about Nina in South Africa and thinking about vocation of a writer and drinking beer and thinking about resilience and finding myself dancing  in the room, in my apartment.

 

 

                         

 

 

I watched the scene twenty times in a row without finishing the movie. I then passed out, smiling.

 

 

                                                                   ***

Harold and Maude, My dear

You’d have to pretend you have a penis
The curious brown tint in your eyes
Cosigns you to the title male lead
Which leaves me as Maude
Neal Cassidy’s vivacious
New-age mother-in-law
Driving stolen cars in a hazardous slop
Across sidewalks and state lines
Attending every bodies funeral
Except that of her only son.

But being Harold means that you are rich
No more burgeoning student loans
Or scraping by on noodles three times a week
You could invest in a lucrative seminar series
Teaching individuals how to fake their own demise
Hanging themselves
In front of creditors and critics,
Offering the world a refreshed smile
As you walk away from the
Silhouette of your own mock suicide
Whistling out the chorus to a Cat Stevens tune
Leaving all over to start again.


And how we would find ourselves married
By a simple conjunction
Modeling nude for fictional artists
Brandishing banjos between hookah drags
Frequenting local arboretums with purloined city trees
After Motoring around the lush countryside
In a makeshift jaguar-hearse
Stopping ever so often
To somersault or to scream

Ending the day in a duet of piano keys and voices
My Maude offering a dimpled request
To your Harold
Asking him to join in on the chorus

To sing out if he feels like stretching his lips
To be free if he feels like taking a deep
Breath of new way opportunity
Dancing around the living
Room on a Persian carpet
Clapping my hands together like a prayer
Saying “Oh boy, that was fun!”

 

***

 

The next morning is Saturday and I arrive at my office at the university where I work to bang out a few hours on my novel. It is raining outside and I turn on my computer I find an e-mail from Tiara she composed a couple of hours earlier stating that yesterday would have been her ten year wedding anniversary and she shouldn’t feel bummed but she is.

She says that the rain outside feels perfect.

She says that’s it been nice running into you and then she says thank you for the beer.

“A girl can always use a beer.”

I don’t think. I immediately type her name into the campus directory and find out that she lives in a big old house abutting Bradley park. I lock the office up, go to the liquor store, buy two Grolsch’s and tramp to her Victoria front porch in the rain.

I am drenched.

After a knock she opens the door. Her body jilts. She looks startled. She says my name followed by exclamatory marks.. She is wearing only a t-shirt and panties. She then garbs them hem of her shirt and pulls it down into her thighs.

“I’m so sorry. I thought you were one of my daughter’s friends.”

She is blushing. Thunder is applauding overhead in reverberating bowling alleyesque purr.

I hand her a beer. I tell her I got her letter. I am drenched. She is looking at me. Before I realize what I am doing I manacle her wrist and reel her into my body. Our eyes seem to close at the same time as if choreographed.  My hand is behind her waist pushing her lower back into my body and my other hand is cusped below her torso, finger the elastic of her underwear.

We are kissing.  It is like we are trying to unlock something by physically trying to enter each other’s bodies only our lips.

“David,” Pushing me back, holding her skirt down. We both look like we have been involved in some intense callisthenic exercises.

“My daughter is upstairs. Come back tonight.” She says. We kiss again, there seems to be some sort of fervor exploding. She pushes me out the door.

She then says the word tonight again.

It is raining a perfect June rain and I am wet and all I can do is smile.

 

                                                                   ***

 

 

Three times a week I skulk in the alley behind Tiara's house at one o'clock in the morning and hop the fence to her backyard. Three times a week she is waiting for me.

We meet at the trampoline, the enclosed tarp that is thirty feet wide and monopolizes the majority of the backyard.

We can't seem to get enough of each other's bodies. She has prosthetic boobs. Her nipples don't get aroused becasue they are composed of plastic.

She is the sexiest human being I have ever seen.

We make love in the under a pocketed sprinkle of July stars, the pilsner moon and slashes of heat lighting accompanying us as if in applause.

There's no sort of sex like sex with a woman who inspires you and who has grappled death by the lapels and told him to fuck off for a few more decades.

And trust me, nothing is fucking sexier than a woman who has trounced her fears and now cannot stop smiling and laughing at everything around her.

 

We don't use the word love. We don't hold hands in public when go out for breakfast. She tells me that it's safe for me to come in only if the downstairs bathroom light is on becasue that means that her kids are the with their dad for the weekend.

We kiss again. We cannot stop kissing. She says I encouraged her to start writing again. She says we need to be careful becasue she is a fertile-myrtle. She says that she feels like she is hindering me because she is pushing forty and I am not yet thirty and she has three kids.

"You don't want to be with me forever, David." She says, before we make love no the trampoline again. It feels like the harder I fuck her the more I can bring back the people I have loved who have died from cancer. 

The more all of us can survive.

When I arrive at work in mid-July there is an e-mail from Nina.

"South Africa didn't work. Will be in  Illinois next week. Babies in Avocados."

                                                       

 

                                                           ***