(when coffee cost 25 cents and came with a roach)
Back in 1989 I was a nineteen year old fashion design student living in
A glass French door I tried to break by throwing at it a hideous ceramic “vase” I had made in the eighth grade and vehemently hated but felt weirdly hesitant to throw away. Actually, I threw it at J during a huge fight, but it sounds less violent to try to break a French door. My aim has always been famous for it’s awesome ability to miss it’s mark by several hundred inches; I not only didn’t hit J, nor the French door, but worst of all- the stupid fucking vase didn’t break and I still have it to this day.
I may not be able to throw anything to save my life, but apparently I have the skill of an ancient Mayan to make disturbing ceramic artifacts that will survive Armageddon. God is gonna find that African styled “vase” when we’re all gone and it’s going to scare the shit out of him.
By the time we lived in our apartment in the
My memories of my life before I turned twenty are all in flashes and strange short film format. Sharp excerpts of what should have been a sweeping long story but which have been chopped inexpertly by someone half blind. Or by someone with the scissor skills of a two year old. If I try to tell my story in chronological graceful lines I become instantly mute. My pen ink leaks and my hands carry blue marks from skin to page to mug to face to smears on the bathroom sink. And I walk out in the world this way.
When I think of it now I’m not sure how a blood drive came to be run through a fashion design school. Who thought it was a good idea to pump out gallons of amphetamine-tainted cells to give to sick people? Best case scenario in a school full of fashion students is anemic malnourished blood full of twenty five cent automatic coffee, with the dubious presence of cockroach traces.
I’m not sure if I was struck with the sudden image of me doing a Florence Nightingale number with the accompanying sharp nurse’s uniform that I had surely already half sewn in my head, or if the blood drive people threw me guilt laden dagger stares as I sidled past them, but I laid myself down to give a pint of my best. My blood was not anemic they told me with some surprise. It was dark and viscous which was the tip-off, they told me.
I remember the nurse with her perky cap, a type of cap I’ve always longed to have an excuse to wear, leaning into me, with some pricker poised over my finger, telling me that I would barely feel the staple dive into my flesh to reveal it’s secrets. It had been at least a year since my body had last been suspended in a place of no pain. I felt pain now. Even though I still often felt disconnected from myself at random moments. I felt all physical pain.
It has been my experience that nurses are liars. They say that “you won’t feel a thing” or that “it won’t hurt very much”. “It’ll be over in a(n interminable) second” they assure you. That finger staple makes a huge sharp noise as it shoots down into your skin. The noise itself is the sound of pain. While the nurse squeezed my bloody finger to find out if I was a drug addict or suffering from tuberculosis we engaged in a surreal conversation in which she congratulated me on the quality of my blood, the rich color, the thickness of it…just the kind of blood they needed.
When the little dish of my blood revealed it’s secrets she told me that my blood had the added blessing of being A-, a blood type they always needed more of because it was rare. I never knew my blood could make a person so happy.
I remember having to turn away from the filling sack of fluid, the hoses attached to my arm running with red, and to try to block out the sound of my own blood pumping and coursing through my own body because it was loud. So loud I was sure that everyone else could hear the cacophony of flooding tissues too. I had to try to ignore the disquieting feeling of the enormous needle stuck there, a needle I had thought insignificant before they tried to find a vein with it.
They told me to wait. Wait to go home. I saw the sun shifting from reflective high-rise windows to the warm stone of nearby old buildings. I could see the arteries of traffic growing more congested. I wanted to be home. I needed the peacefulness of riding the Geary Muni home. I was momentarily fixed in place by the light. It was the soft light of approaching evening. I hunger for that light. I get lost in that light.
I don’t remember leaving the FIDM building. I don’t remember waiting on the corner for the Geary line. I don’t remember squeezing myself between the packed human bodies to find a spot on the hand rail. I only know that once on the muni all the voices around me faded, like a rushing noise, noise like loud far away water, none of them distinguishable. Just a large mass of noise outside my circle of quiet. There was almost certainly someone picking their nose in the seat in front of me.
I only remember the ivy leaves. The light on the ivy leaves. Was it a memory of ivy leaves the light was fixed on, or was it ivy I saw in the road divider? Hushed. Hushed quiet absorbing the sharpest flecks of hard light on reflective green surfaces. Resurfacing. In the quiet of the lit green leaves. Something kept climbing up out of the dark to be revealed to me in the middle of human chaos. Something important. If I could eat that light, or breath it, or touch it…it stayed in my cornea like the most painfully delicate revelation. Diamonds on the green. I’m not sure I breathed. It was like watching a birth where you don’t know if you are filled with the craziest joy at the gorgeousness of emerging life with all the hope the first breath of life brings to us all - or immeasurably sad knowing that the second breath brings hunger and cold and suckling into the blind air for touch and milk which sometimes never comes.
The light turned to liquid gold. The light became warm and absorbed the hard flecks, melting into the green.
Suddenly the noise was so loud in my ear that I had to fight not to rush to the front of the muni in a panic and beg to get off. No one was getting off. We were in stopped traffic. I hadn’t realized. We’d been stopped in traffic interminably as the light went from hard bright, to embracing gold, to cooling shadows.
The first thing I saw was a roll of blood spattered toilet paper on the road. Half rolled out as though dropped in a great rush. An intimate article in suspended animation. I saw it first, before I saw the smashed cars. Before I saw the flashing blue and red lights, or heard the sirens, or saw the grim faces of the paramedics.
Just a roll of bloody toilet paper unfurling itself in the road like a single Angel Trumpet bloom at twilight, opening with silent grace; secretly revealing the private life of stamens. White and red like flags of truce and war. Rolling out a like a long carpet for consumptive brides. Like the entrails of ghosts.
At last there was a shiver back to focus. Focus away from the minutiae and back to body and place and seeing the accident recede farther and farther behind us as we finally began crawling toward home. Home where sometime soon I was going to discover a side of beef my bisexual room mate had left in the oven to defrost and forgot about for two weeks.
But that’s a story for a really good bottle of wine.
