“Y’all have no idea how much it costs to look this cheap.” –Dolly Parton I, too, believe in makeup, believe in the luxurious artifice of color that couldn’t possibly come from within. I want my eyelashes as long as spiders’ legs, my cheeks the startled tones of too much– sun, drink, fevered loving–and my mouth …
by Gailmarie Pahmeier (winner of the 2009 Coal Hill Review Chapbook Prize) for Carson, Luke, and Dylan If you do all your growing up in the same small place, you don’t shed identities. You accumulate them. –Tracy Kidder When a female jury can’t be counted on, The end is near. Sweet sanity is gone. …
Wrapped in a glad baggie and taped to the plaster of my bedroom wall, my grandmother smiles at me from a seventy year old photograph. She cradles a shotgun, its head held gently in her left hand, her right supporting the butt. She’s comfortable. I believe the fur coat that drapes her is brown, but I can’t tell in the grays and whites of the photo. It sparkles, almost, and in this cold leaking through my bedroom window I wonder about its warmth. She is smiling and her teeth are straight, bright, bought that way with the same bootleg money that bought her that coat, that gun. This picture is from the depression era. This night, my shoulder has woken me up, the scar there swollen, like it gets sometimes before the rain. The line of it is straight, bits of the flesh still folded on itself, strange for a gunshot wound, even one this old. There’s this look in her eyes, a gazing, like it’s past the camera man. I can almost see the lines of her mouth crinkle, speaking, “sleep, mijo, sleep” as I try for something other than awake once more. I imagine her watching over me, shotgun light in her hands, her back and neck strong, eyes clear, daring someone.
Right on Lincoln, left on Venice, half a block up. It is three o’clock on Sunday, and the streets of Los Angeles are heavy with people. The place still has the same coat of paint, same color at least. My wife rests her hand on my thigh, and asks, “Is this is it?” “Yes,” I say, “This is where he died.” We had been dancing that night, waiting for dinner to finish. Me, my sister, and Albert, three kids shoved into the small space between sink and stove. Then the windows caved in around us, glass like rain in hair and eyes, hum of bullets, piercing air like kisses, plaster hiccupping off the walls, and the scream of my sister, bacon grease splashed from pan to arm. My cousin, Albert, his face left me that day, went from cheeks, and eyes, and lips, to nothing. There was so little blood. Just a raggedness with teeth, clumps of hair and something dark like wetness. The radio never stopped playing, the thump of ranchero music echoing in the house. It’s been 20 years, and still this place is home. My wife and I drive by, hum of motor and music spaced between our silence. I close my eyes and try to remember his face, Albert’s, and I can’t. All I can see is the yard of the home, upturned, filled with holes where trees were pulled up, and nothingness was left.
Four hours of work paid for this. A lady sits to my left, hair like plastic, coifed with hours of hairspray, hours of time. I hear her whispering about our clothes, words like ratty and poor. I rip cubes of beef with my fingers, let cooked juices and pepper roll down my fingers to the edges of my wife’s lips. If she hears, I can’t tell. But she tears shrimp from kabobs, pulls the looped flesh over to me, shares what is on her plate. We don’t know what merlot means, or cabernet, but we have the dark one, a glass of the blood-colored wine for each of us. There is just this moment, the black decor of the restaurant, the angled stares of people, the group of teens to our left flipping through blackberrys, through photos stored on cell phones, plates heavy with uneaten food. I let it all go. I keep only the crunch of grilled vegetables, the tang of the wine, spoons dipping into dessert, my wife kissing off a spot I missed with my napkin.
I hang ten stories above the ground, all of it like pebbles below me, the shuttles, the cars, the people. Then it all suicides down, the ground reaching for me, the green of trees and shrubs, grabbing, like dirt under fingernails, and then it shifts, the coaster slinging me through spirals, through tilts. November is the word. Already his desert training has started. He tells me about sun, about heat, about how none of this is shit. Words come from the phone that I am not used to, hostiles, terrorists, fucking things up. All I know is that in November his first tour in Iraq starts. The wind is like fire in my ears roaring, out of control, lost. From between bars, my wife stretches the thin flesh of her arm until she can grab my knee. She has noticed my silence and screams if I am okay. There is a pressure here, metal on my chest, tightening on my balls and knees, keeping me in place, keeping me from falling. I tell her I’m fine, and open my eyes.
He laughs and tosses back another shot of whiskey. There are questions about cousins, how is Lisa doing, she still drinking, did Eddy finally marry that big bitch, heard Monica is in L.A. now. I fill him in, crack open another beer chaser, and tell what stories I can. I am light here, keeping things brief, smiling, avoiding the heat from his skin, the pocks and purple circles that tighten his face, mar it. A curl of scarred flesh lifts up from the collar of his shirt, hanging like a question I can’t ask. And suddenly the food is done, barbeque finished, mom calls out to get the kids ready to eat, and his face fills with an emptiness, jaw loosens and he is muttering now, about kids, something about so many goddamn kids. He asks me if I know what the color of brains really is, and I answer that the ribs are getting cold.
the bag boy at Albertson’s stared, said, You like Eminem? Knew he meant my shaved blond head, I said, Yeah, I like him, do you? Oh yeah, & dropped his head/ quick to some cracked hip/hop in his head, the middle-aged cashier in the 70’s smock confused. It was a burning question, he said. Then you have to ask it, I said, & he spun & dipped/ punched the air from the bag’s body, his green watery eyes our new dangerous sea. He said, I get off at 9— Remembering 18 & dangerous I wanted to, but said see ya later/ & he popped up beside me so I could hear him breathe: you don’t know what you’re missing I kept walking, yeah I do, and it’s good.