chris-carson

[chris-carson]

The Economist

Up until that day Arthur had spent his life on one branch of a family tree ripe with independent wealth. When they met, his parents joined their respective fortunes—his father’s from a string of agricultural technology patents and his mother’s from a high profile corporate law practice—to bring him, their only child, into a very comfortable nest. He had a cousin that made a fortune with an app that alerts users that their laundry is dry. One aunt made a fortune ghostwriting bestsellers for entrepreneurial men that, like her son, make apps. His uncle was publisher and editor-in-chief of an iconoclastic political magazine called The Ambiguous Review . Then, of course, there were his grandfathers, on both sides, whom he only ever learned to describe as “businessmen.” Call it a blessing or call it a delusion, but Arthur never thought about money. When he finally attempted to fly the nest he only fluttered softly to the ground like a maple seed, where he sank into reverential daydreams about his own lineage. He wasn't mesmerized by the fortunes, no, but by all the ability, the talent. He was sure that equal, or greater, talent was waiting in him for its moment to flower. It was only a matter of finding the right habitat. After four years of college in San Francisco, and three more years there waiting to blossom, Arthur had relocated to Washington DC, to more fertile ground in which to take root.

The week he arrived, the whole historical DC skyline was erased by a thick gray blizzard that, when finally settled, had buried the eastern seaboard under feet of snow. As the city stalled, trying to clear the streets and dig out the metro stations, Arthur stayed indoors, typing. He was planning on starting a blog about DC, an insider's look at the world’s most powerful city. He wrote a few pieces that he never published. Then as quickly as it came, the snow melted away. From his window Arthur could watch clouds of honking geese push their gracefully rounded weight through the thick, misty air. He watched as people, thawed out of their apartments, made their way back to work. But Arthur had no work to go to. He had a freezer full of bagged food from Trader Joe’s and in between episodes of “House of Cards,” Arthur Isaacs began to worry about his future. Something would have to happen.

And something did happen. Arthur’s publishing uncle called one afternoon to say he had a good friend in DC, an economist named Lev Reissmann. He was the world's foremost expert on Sri Lankan rubber imports. Arthur recognized the name from college when Reissmann came to lecture, Arthur’s sophomore year. After hearing him speak, Arthur changed his major for the third time in two years to study economics. When Arthur learned that his uncle knew Reissmann, not as the wizard that had predicted Myanmar's boom in thumbtack sales, but as Levy, fellow Cub Scout and childhood friend, Arthur saw a chance to make a big connection in a city built on connections, and finally do something for himself.

All Arthur had to do was find P Street and hurry to the meet Reissmann. He was already late, but heading in the right direction now, he walked down a long street. Victorian town houses rose above him on either side, with long thin fronts, the paint faded to colors like soft pastel and red brick faded to orange. They were squeezed together like layers in ancient rocks. The leafless limbs of the magnolia trees lining the street bent arthritically in all directions. Parked along the sidewalk was a steady stream of placid luxury sedans and station wagons. The narrowness of the street made it seem like a dry bone that had shrunk under the heat of time. But with the sun at his back Arthur walked quickly through the whole scene, up to a tall house fronted by thick brown stone steps. There was the  figure of a man standing at the wide window holding a road atlas but gazing past it and onto the street from under a red baseball cap. It was Reissmann.  

The front door was nearly ten feet tall with a big brass door knob and a glinting mail slot. The big front window jutted out from the front of the house and through a thinner pane of glass on the side, Arthur looked into the front parlor room at Reissmann, still standing at the window. The immaculate room could have swallowed Arthur’s entire studio and held room for more. The fireplace alone was larger than Arthur’s kitchen. It was framed by a glittering marble mantle, cut with straight stately lines. Books lined the walls from floor to ceiling. Billowing white sofas sat carelessly in the center of the room surrounding a low table carved from wood fine and red. Arthur stood at the window on the porch waving, trying to catch Reisman's attention but couldn't. Arthur’s own reflection in the glass waved back at him, like it were mocking him from the center of that wonderful room.

How nice it would be to live in one of those, instead of these tiny apartments in these old buildings. In San Francisco, he had shared a basement apartment with his girlfriend Anne Marie, and standing in the cold he suddenly thought of the musky smell that permeated from the carpeting and the constant battle against black mold in the bathroom. Before his last rainy season out west, Arthur remembered getting a call from his cousin, who mentioned that a tech millionaire was looking to invest in something artistic, like a movie. Arthur felt confident he could write a screenplay. He told his girlfriend Anne Marie about the opportunity. She was a small young woman, almost squat, with plump red cheeks and little pea-shaped brown eyes that would droop at the corners when she was excited, and she was excited by the news, as she was by all of Arthur’s opportunities, and much of what he thought and spoke.

“Oh babe, that is so great. I’m so happy for you” Anne Marie had said.

She was working as a waitress in a hotel restaurant to earn a little bit of money while she got her graphic design portfolio together for graduate school. Every night she made a point of bringing sushi home just in case Arthur had forgotten to eat dinner. So while Arthur ate salmon nigiri dipped in soy sauce, he glowed vibrantly with all the ideas he’d ever had over the years that could be used for a screenplay.

But on a night when the rain came, without a sign of letting up, Anne Marie returned from work with her leather jacket pulled over her head, the paper bag of sushi soaked through and torn. After eight months on the screenplay, Arthur had taken a lot of good notes, but hadn't put anything to paper.

“I hope the sushi isn't wet,” Anne Marie said, shaking herself off at the door, and combing her fingers through her dripping hair. Arthur was reading on the couch, a little drunk.

“Hi babe,” Anne Marie said, but Arthur didn't answer.

She walked over to him. “Are you not talking to me tonight?” she asked.

“No, I’m sorry,” Arthur said, “I’m just busy doing some writing.”

She bent down to kiss him. Walking off to the kitchen she asked, “How has the writing been going?”

“Fine,” Arthur said.

“Are you getting a lot done?” she asked.

“Yes,” he said.

“When can I read it?” she asked.

She came back with a glass of water and the sushi on a plate that she placed for Arthur on a low table they kept in front of the sofa and sat down next to him.

Arthur didn't answer. Anne Marie turned the television on. He was better off without her. He was better off here, in the city of his future. It was only a matter of ringing the doorbell. Arthur fired his hand quickly at the brass encased doorbell and heard it chime inside. When he turned back to look in through the window Reissmann was gone, the road atlas rested on the back of one of the white couches. But nobody answered the door. Arthur worried he had done something wrong. Had he imagined hearing the chime? Maybe he had imagined pressing the bell all together. Maybe this wasn't even the right house. In a panic, Arthur fired his hand again. As he did, the door opened and a now hatless Reissmann, bundled in a dusty wool coat and scarf, appeared at the door as the second bell chimed just above the old man’s head. Reissmann gasped and jumped back in surprise.

“Sorry to keep you waiting, Mr. Isaacs,” Reissmann said, hard lines cutting through his forehead, below his marble white hair.

“No, I’m sorry,” Arthur said, “Are you okay? I just didn’t think you heard me.”

“Yes, I’m fine and I can tell you I heard that,” Reissmann said, ducking back inside the house, leaving the door open. Arthur watched him shuffle down the long shadowed hallway to a block of light coming from the back of the house. Arthur began to follow him, only to realize, after three or four steps in, that he had not, in fact, been invited inside. He quietly made his way back out, hoping Reissmann wouldn't see him. Arthur heard muffled voices coming from the back. Dipping his head back through the doorway into the shadows, he asked, loudly, “What was that?” No answer. When Reissmann came back outside holding a briefcase he told Arthur, “I wasn't speaking to you,” and locked up the house.

They walked down the street, back in the direction Arthur had come from. The sun in the late afternoon was low in the sky. It spread a thick blonde light over everything that briefly reminded Arthur of San Francisco. Anne Marie used to squeeze honey that was the same color as the light spreading over everything into her mint tea. Thinking of her like that made it hard for Arthur to concentrate on whatever it was Reissmann was talking about. All that honey she would go through, how greedily she’d squeeze that bear-shaped bottle into her favorite tea cup.

“You live on such a beautiful street,” Arthur said suddenly, cutting Reissmann off in the middle of an anecdote about his son’s tenure.

“Yes, I suppose I can take a little credit for the street,” Reisman said. “You see, when my wife and I bought our place — that was nearly fifty years ago now — this whole street was just full of empty houses. We basically had our pick of where we wanted to live and bought the place for a little more than the money we had in our pockets. Not really, of course, but you get the idea. It was cheap. Now it must be worth...well, millions!”

“You are very lucky,” Arthur said, unsure himself what he meant by lucky.

“Luck has nothing to do with it. We are still working on the house, of course, and that means, still paying for it,” Reissmann said.

“But at least it is yours,” Arthur said.

“Yes,” Reissmann said, “it is ours.”

A silence fell between them as they paused at an intersection. Arthur looked at Reissmann who looked back and gave a forced and toothy smile. Reissmann’s teeth were in bad shape, small, birdlike and brown, his lips were all chapped and cracked and dry. Looking closer, Arthur saw his small and crooked fingers gripping the faux leather briefcase. His chinos had bleach stains near the pockets. He had loosened his scarf, warmed by the walk, revealing the wide collar on his dress shirt poking out of his sweater like a gaping mouth trying to swallow that little head of his.

“I have a late meeting this afternoon, in just about half an hour. I thought we could get coffee at the Bolingbrook Institute, where I work, and bring it to my office, instead of going to the cafe to chat,” Reissmann said as they crossed the street.

When they arrived at The Bolingbrook, Arthur looked up towards the angled glass structure donning the front of the tall, brick building, home to one of DC’s most influential think tanks. Looking up, he could see people walking quickly from one floor to another, working on the world’s finest economic quandaries. They were as busy as ants, moving like quick geckos in a terrarium. Arthur didn't know the first thing about what they did at the Bolingbrook Institute, but he still pictured himself charming Reissmann into an internship, then watched himself rushing down those white steel steps, looking out from inside the glass box at a hopeful young man looking up from the street the way Arthur was. He could see himself invite the boy up to give him an opportunity, just like the great Lev Reisman did for him. He saw it all before even going inside.

Inside though, Reissmann led him silently downstairs to the cafe. Arthur ordered a simple black coffee, while Reissmann got a large cafe au lait. The young woman working the counter had big eyes brown as acorns like they were painted onto her soft, full, brown face. As Arthur tried to pay Reissmann for the coffee, Reissmann was busy following this young woman along the counter, saying, “And please, more milk than coffee.”

She nodded at him without a word. Reissmann, though, was eager to talk. “Your hair looks very pretty today,” he said. She didn't respond as she turned to fill the tall paper cup with more milk. When she turned back, Reissmann asked her, “How are you?”

She nodded and handed him the cup. He took it and said, “Gracias,” with a long, roll of the R. He held up one dollar for her to see, then stuffed it in the tip box with a smile.

This woman was not Mexican or Spanish, and Arthur could see that, but he didn't think he should say anything. He watched Reissmann struggle with his stiff fingers to pour honey into the cup, but didn't offer to help.

Upstairs, Reissmann’s office was spacious, but mostly empty. There was a desk in the center of the room, some wires running from the dusty computer on the desk, back to the outlet below the wide window on the room's back wall, directly behind Reissmann, who sat behind the desk. There was a filing cabinet in the corner. All the drawers were open and empty. Along one wall were stacks of old boxes that looked to be deflating like old pumpkins. There were no bookcases, no phones, the computer wasn't on. It was hard to tell if somebody was just arriving, or on his way out. Reissmann got right to the point.

“We don't have much time,” he said. “So tell me how it is you think I can help you?”

“Well this is a big help,” Arthur said, “just meeting with me like this. I know you are busy, so thank you. I guess I’d like to know if you have any advice for a young person who's just moved here, any advice on how they can make it.”

As he was finishing talking, Reissmann raised his cup to his lips. Arthur watched as the loose top slipped off and he spilled a stream of milky yellow coffee into his lap.  Reissmann shrieked and leapt out of his chair.

“It’s fine,” Reissmann said.

“At least it is more milk than coffee, right?” Arthur said.

“Something like that,” and sitting back down Reissmann added, “I don't know what happened.”

“I do,” Arthur said.

“Excuse me?” Reissmann asked.

“The top wasn't on all the way,” Arthur said. “I noticed it downstairs too, but didn't think it was my place to tell you, or say anything.”

Reissmann looked at Arthur for a moment, his lips taut like he was about to say a hundred things, but couldn't start somewhere. “Anyway,” he started after a moment, “to answer your question. Young people have been moving to DC for as long as I've been here and seem to make it, as you say, just fine without any advice from me. You see?”

Arthur nodded.

“In fact, I think there have been entirely too many young people moving here and expecting the city to give them all kinds of things, expecting the city to change for them in all kinds of ways. They don't appreciate the history. They don't appreciate the culture. They don't want to work hard. In fact, it is as if all they want is advice.”

As he went on and on, Arthur saw, in the lines around his forced smile, could hear, between his polite tone, exasperation and annoyance. He thought about San Francisco again, about the last time he spoke to Anne Marie, when he told her he was thinking about leaving and he could see in both the shape her face took and the way her eyes moved, that the surprise and confusion had morphed into anger and resentment. He remembered the way she challenged him to simply say what he wanted, whether it was to leave her or stay with her, it didn't matter but just be a man and say it and stop the excuses. He never did. He told her he was going to visit family on the east coast, but never intended to see her again, and somehow, listening to this old man talk about what he learned in the Peace Corps, Arthur finally understood what it must have been like for her, trying to talk to a cowardly, selfish man.

“Well, thanks for your time,” Arthur said, standing to go, “It was a pleasure to meet you.”

“Sure thing,” Reissmann said, “and good luck.”

The two men never saw each other again, but when Arthur got home he found an email from Reissmann waiting for him with the name and number of a reputable temp agency. There was no response to the Facebook message he had sent Anne Marie a few days before, telling her that he was going to meet Reissmann for coffee. Arthur opened their messages and looked at the little thumbnail picture of her for a minute, then wrote, “Well that couldn’t have gone any better. I think I may get a fellowship at Bolingbrook!!” She never responded to that message either. San Francisco was having a heat wave and the nights there were suddenly warmer and Anne Marie was happy to find herself enjoying bourbon for the first time in her life, and giving up mint tea completely.

[chris-carson]

San Francisco's Years of Terror

The early morning hour, August 28, 1971: Sergeant George Kowalski, a clear faced young man, with big owl like eyes, and a firm neck, is working the midnight watch for Mission Station. He stops his cruiser at a red light, at 16th and Folsom Streets. Today marks about five weeks for him as Sergeant in the San Francisco Police Department. The day also falls in the middle of one of the most violent periods the City has ever lived through.

Ahead Kowalski sees the headlights of a speeding car coming towards him, furiously sparkling like the eyes of a hungry animal. The car switches lanes and crosses the intersection, stopping about twenty feet away from the young Kowalski- a Mission high graduate, born in Chicago. Kowalski looks over. He can see two men in the neighboring car through their open window. Then he sees something else, pointing at him like a mocking tongue. It is the barrel of a sub machine gun.

Kowalski hits the floor of his cruiser; grabs his service revolver. Thirty five years old is no time to go. But it seems to be the way for San Francisco police officers these days. He is ready. Ready for his cruiser to be turned to Swiss cheese, ready for what that may mean for his life. Just maybe he can get off a few rounds in return.

But nothing happens. The would-be killers’ machine gun jams. Turns out the shell with Kowalski’s name on it is mutilated, and gums up the barrel. The car takes off. Kowalski follows. In the high speed chase, shots fire at Kowalski from a .38 caliber, bursting orange in the darkness as they pop. At 16th and Alabama, the suspect’s car collides with an innocent driver.

Kowalski and other officers arrive on the scene for a shoot-out. Kowalski fires his shot gun, blasting through the suspects’ window, lacerating their faces with glass shards. There is a struggle between one officer and an armed suspect. The officer raises his revolver and brings it down with a crack, breaking the suspect’s cheek bone.

The two men are taken in an ambulance to the Mission emergency Hospital and placed under arrest. The police officers search the smashed and shot up car, where they find a military sub-machine gun with a magazine containing 29 live rounds and a .45 caliber automatic. The officers also take a gun off one of the suspects; the .38 caliber. On the butt of the .38, they notice a stamp with the serial number and the letters, NYPD.

One of the suspects arrested that night was an Oakland kid named Anthony Bottom. He was young, only nineteen years old and quick to tell whoever would listen about his position with a radical group called the Black Liberation Army. Later, Bottom will admit to officers that on August 24, 1971, he went into the Ingleside Police Station to report a stolen bicycle. The report was a ruse. When Bottom walked out of the station, he did not leave the premises. Instead, he stood in the chilly air, observing the stations layout, making note of easy ways in, and quick ways out.

Night time, August 29, 1971: with Bottom sitting in a cell at the San Francisco City Prison, killers crawl through a hole cut in the fence between Ingleside Station and Interstate 280, loaded shotguns at their sides.

Inside Ingleside station, Sergeant John Young sits at his desk. Across from him, the office typist, busy patting the keys of her typewriter or shifting through the papers on her desk. The radio on the wall between them may murmur and blurt, reporting the day’s activity back to the station. Maybe one of them is drinking coffee; maybe the typist just lit a cigarette, or emptied the glass ashtray on the corner of her desk. What do people do before the last thing they expect to happen, happens?

Whatever they are doing, they are not ready when those who cut through the fence storm the station, poke their shotguns through the circular hole in the bullet proof glass separating office from front door and open fire. Sergeant Young is hit and killed. The typist injured.

Sergeant Young’s murder was never solved. When the killers fled, all they left behind was a dead man, and cracks looking like someone smashed an egg, and watched the yoke run down the smooth bullet proof surface of the glass there to protect him.

After the San Francisco Giants won the World Series this October, the streets were flooded with people. The celebrations took all forms. From the innocent- hugging, chanting, drinking beer with friends-, to outright destructive and violent-smashing a barricade through a Muni bus windshield, setting a Muni bus on fire.

On Haight Street, people set off fireworks and decorated telephone wires with toilet paper. The next day, when the photos began to service online, many people wondered why San Francisco residents celebrate joyous events by infusing the atmosphere with the nervous edginess of a war zone.

But for new transplants, young people who weren’t alive at the time, or older residents who may have forgotten, it is worth remembering through most of the 1970’s, San Francisco was the battle ground for something like a reign of terror, or an armed revolution, all depending on which side of the political telescope you choose to examine it through. Either way you see it though, there was an almost unimaginable amount of violence in the streets.

In 1970, four police officers were killed in the line of duty, including one Brian McDonnell, who was fatally injured by a bomb explosion at Park Station on Waller Street. As the 1970’s ticked on, violence wasn’t strictly targeted at police. From the fall of 1973, through spring ’74, more than a dozen people were murdered in a racially motivated killing spree called the “Zebra” murders.

Jump to 1976: While then Mayor Joseph Alioto, whose time in City Hall is today remembered for BART and the Transamerica Pyramid, was negotiating an agreement with the police union to end a strike, a pipe bomb explodes outside his home. Though his wife was upstairs at the time, nobody was hurt. Meanwhile, Supervisors were targeted that year too. Quentin Kopp and John Barbagelata received candy box bombs in the mail, and Diane Feinstein was sent a bomb in a flower box. None of them exploded.

It’s clear the era’s boiling frustrations spilled into the hearts and minds of many a San Franciscans, but the steadiest source of violence welled within radical groups like the Black Liberation Army and the Symbionese Liberation Army. In the name of revolution, these groups usually targeted the most immediate and accessible symbol of the status quo they could find; the San Francisco Police Department.

An explanation of how the American political left of the 1970’s slid from idealism to terrorism is complicated, but not unlike the rise of Maximelien Robespierre and the Reign of Terror after the French Revolution. In both cases, the push for a more free and equal society was eventually hijacked by impatience and the egos of a charismatic few, and morphed into a push for violence.

One way to explain it, is to say that activist groups from the mid 1960’s, such as The Student Left and the Civil Rights Movement, were fractured; The Student Left over the Vietnam war and the Civil Rights Movement over a guiding philosophy and direction; either follow Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s nonviolent doctrine or admit that nonviolence can only go so far before confrontation with the power structure becomes a necessity.

By the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, the country was on edge. Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X had been assassinated. Jim Crow had been eliminated, yet his shadow still hung over the American South, and elsewhere examples of social and economic inequality between blacks and whites were as obvious as ever. Student demonstrations continued on college campuses with new intensity, and on May 4, 1970, the Ohio Army National Guard fired on students at Kent State, killing four and wounding nine.

As a result, activist groups fractured further, giving rise to The Black Panther Party, which then split over clashing philosophies between leaders Huey Newton and Eldridge Cleaver, with Cleaver calling for a more militaristic and guerilla approach in order to unify the black communities, ultimately founding the Black Liberation Army. Meanwhile what began as the Student Left also began to adopt a more militaristic approach as a way of showing solidarity with their black brethren. By 1972, the year after the death of San Francisco Police Sergeant John Young, The Student Left had dissolved into groups like Venceremos, led by Bruce Franklin and the Revolutionary Union led by Bob Avakion, whereas the more militant sects of the Black Panther party calcified as Eldridge Cleaver’s Black Liberation Army and The Symbionese Liberation Army, led by an escapee from Soledad Prison named Donald DeFreeze.

While the battle continued to rage on the streets of San Francisco, police officers here were able to connect the .38 caliber revolver used to fire on Sergeant Kowalski that late night in the Mission, to the body of a New York City police officer named Waverley Jones, who was killed with his partner Joseph Piagentini in Harlem, on May 21, 1971.

From there, the SFPD connected Tony Bottom to a string of terrorism and attempted terrorism throughout San Francisco. Like on February 21, 1971: members of the Black Liberation Army placed a booby trap at the front door of a vacant house at 1674 Hudson Street and called police officers to the scene, but officers avoided the trap by entering the house through the back door. Or March 30, 1971: the BLA planted dynamite on top of the Mission Police station, but a defective fuse kept the sticks from igniting. And August 25, 1971: BLA members stood on the grounds of the Horace Mann Middle School near 23rd and Mission Streets and pointed a .66 MM anti-tank gun, which looks like a cannon small enough to take on a cable car, at the Mission Police Station. Like so many other attempts by the BLA, this too failed, because BLA members didn’t know how to fire the weapon.

One attempt that did work however was the bombing of St. Brendan’s Church, on October 20, 1970. Bottom apparently told police officers that he and other members of the BLA placed a bomb in the shrubbery near the churches front entrance. On that day, a funeral was being held for Officer Harold Hamilton, who was killed in the line of duty after responding to a bank robbery at a Wells Fargo at Seventh and Clement Streets.

St. Brendan’s Church was built in 1929, in the California mission style. Its bell tower is just tall enough to tickle the fog blown in from the nearby ocean, like the outstretched arm of a child reaching to touch his mother’s necklace dangling above him. As guests filed into the church down the concrete walkway, the bomb went off, and the explosion’s blast twisted their bodies like spinning tops. Dirt and rocks leaped up into the morning’s fog. An iron guard over one of the church windows was easily splintered and broken, as if it were made of tooth picks. Nobody was killed, but several police officers were injured. After a bomb expert checked the scene the funeral continued as planned. Six badged officers of the San Francisco Police Department carried Harold Hamilton’s flag draped casket through the gray morning, passed his widow and three children, and into St. Brendan’s Church.

In 1971, a jury of four men and women found Tony Bottom and Albert Washington guilty of assault with a deadly weapon on a police officer, for their attack on Sergeant Kowalski, and they were sentenced to six years to life.

But New York City wasn’t satisfied. They wanted Bottom and Washington to stand trial for the murder of their officers, Jones and Piagentini. That wish came true. After sentencing in San Francisco, Bottom and Washington were put on a 747 at Oakland airport, and flown to New York City, where they found themselves again in court. On trial, not for assault, but murder.

And that is where this story here, the one you hold in your hands, ends. But it is not where the story of San Francisco’s unrest ends. By the end of the 1970’s, Supervisor Harvey Milk and Mayor George Moscone were killed by Supervisor Dan White. In early October of this year, San Francisco Police arrested 22 people who hijacked the one year anniversary of Occupy Wall Street at California and Battery streets for vandalizing cars and a Starbucks. Just like the armed and bastardized groups that grew from the social movements of the mid 60’s, a more aggressive sect of Occupy is the result of frustrations at the thought of progress grown stale. But no one is considering that a revolution is judged as much by how it is done, as by the change it fosters.

Like Hemingway wrote at the end of “The Gambler, The Nun, and The Radio:” “Revolution is catharsis; an ecstasy which can only be prolonged by tyranny. The opiums are for before and for after.”

[chris-carson]

Hardwood Sketches

The walls squeeze tight to the sidelines in Memphis. The gym is cold at 7:30 on a Saturday morning in May. The bleachers are empty. In fact, there is nobody in the gym aside from the people who have to be here. About twenty players taking layup lines with hoodies and tees over their jerseys, getting warm and loose. About six coaches, three to each side, whose laughter can be heard over the echo of leather on hardwood as they sign players in at the scorer’s table.

I’ve never traveled, but through AAU basketball I’ve seen the United States one court at a time. AAU stands for Amateur Athletic Union, and boys and girls ages 10 to 17 compete across the country, at fluctuating levels of skills, every summer. This here, though, is as made-it as you can be right now. The tippy of the amateur top. That is why the gym is empty. The national AAU circuit is a business, not entertainment, of which the greatest profiteers are multibillion dollar shoe companies and elite NCAA basketball programs. This cool and quite gym off some highway in Memphis represents the mine from which they pull the best players like rocks and make them into dazzling diamonds, while the other less brilliant ones get tossed away. But for a white boy from the North Country like me, there is more to this world than that.

With tip off the walls that seemed to choke the court recede. So do the empty folding chairs under the baskets, the referees, the coaches. I’m sitting near the end of the bench and I feel myself start to recede. I feel like I’m watching, from the bottom of a narrow tunnel, while two flocks of exotic birds dance and swoop over my head.

Dagz, our starting point guard curls off a screen and splashes a deep jumper, as his body weightlessly soars to the right. Now Dags is over half court and pulls up from even deeper and sinks another one. Driving to the hoop, his slow footed quickness leaves defenders rocking as he fades away. His jersey plumes. Nobody is able to stop him, and by the end of the half, he’s got twenty eight.

I play a little that half; almost none the second half. But here, in some games, I dont play at all. I’m used like an experiment. I get tossed onto the court and told to do one of three things.

1. Try and eat every rebound.

2. Try and block every shot.

3. Run as fast as possible and hope for dunks on the break.

Some games I do all three and play a lot. Some games I can’t do one and ride the pine. I will land no scholarship. I will sign no autographs for opponents after the game. What I will do eventually will have nothing to do with basketball.

But for now I enjoy marvelling at flashes of brilliance like the one Dagz just had in that half. They happen often. And when they do, I’m both awed and contented with the fact that, at least for now, I can run with pretty much anybody on a basketball court and hold my own. And I do it on all different types of courts

New York City is like a secret behind a steel door with a cracked window mended with a strip of packing tape. It overlooks the East River from atop a narrow linoleum staircase. On the other side of the door, everything is bright and new. The nets are stiff and the rims orange, lush, and hang from flawless glass backboards like ripe fruit from a spring tree. Light drops from the overhanging fixtures onto the polished hardwood in haloed pools and reflects glaringly off newly varnished bleachers stacked into a wall on the baseline.

Hampton feels like another dusty gym until I see three jerseys hanging below the green and yellow banner that wraps the gym’s wall. Each jersey is a different color, each from a different stage in Allen Iverson’s career. Bethel to Georgetown, Georgetown to Philadelphia, Philadelphia to 2001, when for one season Iverson was the greatest player to ever hold a basketball. His hardened gaze, his shadowed and biblical visage marked the heel of my shoes that year, and was crowned with the prophetic maxim: Only the strong survive. I quoted his game in the driveway. He who shook M.J, the cornrowed word, the answer.   

Hackensack is where the AAU season begins. I walk into this field house and onto a white court, the lines laid down in black paint. Unlike the gym in Memphis this one is buzzing with people for the first big AAU tournament of the summer. Hard dribbling, screeching sneakers and galloping bodies fill out the space with the game’s natural music.

A group of man-sized boys are lounging on a pile of blue mats stacked in the corner of the gym. Two are lying on their sides while three are standing and playing a game. The game has two purposes. The first is to kill time while they wait for overtime to end so they can get on their scheduled court and start warming up. The second is to catch one of the other guys off guard with a pass. I watch one of them loops the ball around his arms, glides it over his chest, then flips it off the back side of his hand. It rotates briefly in midair before he looks to his right and slaps the ball to his left. His teammate catches it perfectly at his chest.

The silhouette of a bull’s head with long curling horns buffs steam on the front of their burnt orange tee shirts. In a gym like this, it is understood that everybody knows how to play. But just how much they know can only be measured by the logo and team name printed on their gear. Where are they from? I recognize these guys from the Bronx. The team warming up further down the rubber track that circles the courts, dressed in powder blue, come out of West Virginia. Their name though, reps no location in particular. They are, simply, The D1 Thoroughbreds, a representation of where their players are going over where they are from. But for a few, their journey will go further than that. The Thoroughbreds are being called the best AAU team of all time. They start three McDonald’s All-Americans. One of them, scouts say, could have been the number one pick in last year’s draft.

Our team comes from Albany, and I come from further north than that, and often wonder what I’m doing in the same gym as some of these guys. I remember a game last summer against the Philly MJC, when Dagz came down center court slinking like a cat, pumping the ball at his right hip and seeing everything. I crossed half court and curved in, planting myself on the right block. Dagz gave the ball one firm bounce with his left hand and stepped to the wing, as if to deliver a bounce pass to the corner. Instead he hooked his arm around and sliced a perfect, curving bounce pass down the lane, right through my unsuspecting hands and out of bounds.

Now I’m looking down the vast sprawl of courts, the colors of the jerseys blend together, and the colors of the players’ skin blend together, and the game becomes, not basketball, but a moving abstract painting, dripping and beating, and dancing. Basketball is an unchanging work of art. No matter the parts that it is made of, or the environment in which it is presented, the game itself, when played well, forms into a masterpiece every time. A ball of energy wells up hot in the midpoint of my torso. I think of it as adrenalin, as the urge to get on the court and ball. Years later though, I will find this same feeling in reading great books, in drugs, in feeling a woman’s soft naked breasts below my chest. It is the urge to create something. To take the fissure of material that floats in the space before my eyes and affect it, make it do things and call it my own. It is the urge to seize this opportunity I was given and begin forming the rules to my own game. I feel all that now standing at the court’s edge and watching other do it with a basketball.

This guy Flynn over here on court one is from Niagara. I watch him drive down the left side. His handle is mathematically steady. The bounce in his elbow works in rhythm like a machine. He is the smallest guy on the court but he jacks the defense with a crossover clearing the path for him to rise over everybody. He bursts down the left, crosses over and, like snapping wood over a tree trunk, dunks with one right hand. His game abuses and it all starts with the way he puts that ball to the floor.

On court two, Hodge is dropping forty five against team from Oakland. In an AAU game, with a running clock, forty five is a hell of a lot of points to score. His fake is smooth, and rocks left to right like water splashing up over the side of a swimming pool. He slips the ball under the defenders’ arms, and with one stride floats into the paint. He keep the ball spellbound and under his complete control. He hooks out his left arm as he rises, stretching the ball across his body, before rolling it off his finger tips. The baggy tee shirt under his jersey makes him a bird too, swooping to the lane like a steady breeze is caught under his wings, sweeping across defenders and fading back into another made bucket.

This weekend, this gym is full of scouts and college coaches. Spotting the different color windbreakers is like spotting birds. Scouts carry folders and clipboards and are always on their cell phones. Either that or talking loudly to somebody in the lobby. If neither of those then you bet they at least have a pager clipped to their khaki shorts. They have the confidence of gamblers, and that’s really what they are. They are betting that one of these kids will be the player who will win games, and keep their babies fed and their running shoes spotless.

In the crowds around the courts too are guys with names like Onion and Iceman. They have no kids on the team and don't do any coaching, yet they always have a ride, always have a few dollars to hook you up with some BK. You hear stories every year of a kid who let an Onion or an Iceman buy him some Sean John then had his scholarship revoked. Or his mom let an Onion or an Iceman by her groceries one day, and the kid has his scholarship revoked for that too. AAU is peppered with these men like baggy shirts, who hang all over the players. They stand behind benches. Every team has one.

I hear ours played at St. Bonaventure and used to run John Wallace ragged during pick up in Rochester. But he’s so pale and his mustache is like a joke he doesn't get, so it is hard to imagine his game that sharp. He doesn't talk much. He hands out cold Gatorades during timeouts. So many see him and the other Onions and Icemans as trying to get theirs through our talent, like their presence on these courts taints what is an otherwise wholesome summer.

When I think about what I’d be doing without basketball, I taste sweet outdoor rolled in grape dutch, the smoke oozing from my mouth on a hot night. Cicadas, grasshoppers chirp among the darkened branches. I see myself hanging hard at a bonfire with the townies I grew up with. They are so firmly rooted to this one place they’ve only known that I see the sprawling nature we grew up in lurch over them with every shot of vodka mixed with cranberry juice. For some of the other guys hanging hard means getting pinched in the mall with light crack rocks tucked in the waistband of their jumpman shorts.

Without basketball, there is nothing to do and nothing to do where we come from means never leaving the city, the neighborhood, the street. Or like me, some patch of field or woods. Yet here I am. Seeing the world one gym at a time. Getting away, even if it is just for the weekend.

[chris-carson]

The Saga of the Gold Dust Lounge

[chris-carson]

How to Survive

We rode into Oakland on a warm day, keeping the windows down all the way across the bridge. Everything there had the feeling of unfinished plywood, so refreshing and new to me after so long in the increasingly refined San Francisco. The buildings in Oakland were low and the skyline opened up a view of hills all the way across town. The air was turning copper. When the car stopped at a red light a bespeckled Chinese man in a chocolate colored suite crossed the street, his fingers pinched a smoldering cigarette. We parked along an empty lot near Lake Merritt. Rachel cut off the car engine and I filled the silence with, “I think I like it here”.

“I think I prefer it,” she said.

My earliest writings were done at the end of high school on loose, frayed pages I’d torn out of single subject notebooks. I’d write stories a couple of pages long before bed. In the morning I’d blush at the pages there on the bedside floor. Whatever it was I had come up with at night would be torn up in the morning and tossed out of my car window on the drive into school. I panicked thinking that anybody would see it. Not because I was embarrassed by what I had written. I was embarrassed that I had the urge to write. For whatever reason I felt it as a kind of weakness.

It wasn't until I moved 3,000 miles from home, to San Francisco, that I could admit I wanted to be a writer at all. I still wouldn’t dare say that I was one. It would be years before I could do that. All I could muster was the strength to hope one day I’d wake up and it would be so. I would be a writer. I moved in with my cousin and his family, to their house on the hill above West Portal station. I got a job working after school care at Clarendon elementary school and sometimes tutoring kids in English composition. I enrolled in classes at City College.

I gave up all attempts at making friends or getting laid after one date. It had ended in disaster when she tickled my stomach and asked if I were a hungry hungry hippo while having coffee at Bagdad Cafe. I was mostly withdrawn anyway, and was happy to carry on a lonesome but observant life in a new city. In the morning I’d go to class. In the afternoon I’d work at Clarendon. In the evening, I’d spend time on West Portal smoking Marb reds and drinking coffee. I’d walk up and down the avenue writing poems in cheap notebooks about kids from St. Brendan’s and their school uniforms or memories of watching my father fold the newspaper. There was no Mission for me then. There was no Dolores Park. There wasn’t even Fisherman’s Wharf. I had West Portal Avenue. I had Chinese food on Taraval. On my most adventurous days there was Ross on Sloat and the Stonestown YMCA. I see that time now as key in shaping my relationship with this city. Through my cousin and his family I was introduced to San Francisco as a city of neighborhoods, schools and children, only different from the small town that I grew up in, in size. I saw San Francisco as a place that had existed long before I arrived. I was quickly aware that to survive here I had to join an already thriving community, not remake one for myself. Watching my little cousins grow up here, and watching the place change so quickly, I wonder how they will survive here. It’s like they are being made strangers to their own home before they get a chance to lay proper claim to the place.

When I got here I didn't have the first idea on how to make the transition from regular 20-year-old to writer. I set out doing two things as often as possible. The first was write down anything that came into my head. I just had to get it down, develop the muscle that connected my eyes and my brain to my arm and my hand. The second was read great writing. I was lucky to have enrolled in Loren Bell’s short story class at City College that met once a week for three or four hours at James Lick Middle School. The class required one book. It was an enormous collection of short stories that I bought used nearly to death from the City College Book Store on a foggy day, and immediately began reading.

The book introduced me to a whole written universe that I didn't know existed. It introduced me to the work of writers I only knew in name. There was Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants,” Chekhov’s “The Lady With The Dog,” countless stories that I still consider some of the best written. And of course there was John Steinbeck’s “The Chrysanthemums.”

Reading “The Chrysanthemums” now, I can't remember what it was that captivated me about it then. To put it simply, I’ll say it was the way Steinbeck could say so much without saying it at all. The way Steinbeck could create these details of the Salinas Valley that were simultaneously details of his character’s inner life. I was spellbound by his language. I tried recreating it in a story based on a dream I had. The story was about a couple of drunk teenagers escaping a house party, but crashing their car into a convenient store and dying under the desperate hands of firefighters. But it was really about homesickness.

I brought copies to class for peer review. What I remember about my group was this old man, about 70, with a scratchy gray beard and a tan golf jacket zipped to the chin. His body sat curled in his desk and had told me, out of the corner of his mouth, that he came from Rochester and was reading a biography on George Eastman. And I also remember that he didn't like my story. Nobody liked my story. Nobody should have. The story was bad. Young men gripped by sexual frustration should not write short stories. While I thought I was being brutally honest, honesty and the intensity of the feeling that sparked the story does not have anything to do with the story’s quality, or anything to do with good writing. If I really wanted to be a writer I would need to get used to criticism. I was happy to take deserved lashes for faults in my prose. Each one was deserved. I would have liked to have given some myself, but nobody else in the group brought in anything to read.

I’ve been living in San Francisco for six years now, always with help. Be it my cousin and his wife, my mother and father, friends, girlfriends; I’ve some how been blessed with a life full of giving people who believe in me as a writer, and as a man. It has made all the difference. I wouldn’t have been able to survive a day here without each one of them.

KEEPEYES, the magazine I co-founded and edit recently turned a year old. It has enabled me to take the risk of publishing my own opinions and allowed me the joy of publishing work by other incredible writers and artists surviving in this city. Each issue is better than the last and each issue leaves me slightly speechless because I’m doing something that for a long time I didn't believe was possible.

Unlike many of my peers, I didn't come to the arts until recently. For most of my life I considered myself an athlete in the strict sense of the word. A jock. A basketball player. I started playing around first or second grade after watching my older brothers play, and eventually I became good enough to play on a nationally ranked and shoe sponsored travel team through high school. I was recruited by a few colleges and went off to my freshman year to play D3 ball in Oneonta, New York and study English Literature. I wanted to become a high school teacher and basketball coach.

That goal was the best I could do to remedy the split that I was beginning to feel in my personality. I had started smoking a lot of weed and reading the Beats and Albert Camus. I began to see teaching great writing to teenagers as something like death, hoping instead for the feeling of midnight sidewalks, drunk and lonesome, living the life that makes great writing. I couldn't see these two sides of myself existing together. I quit college basketball and moved to San Francisco. I took to the tortured writer romance hard and foolishly. I was a heavy smoker, a heavy drinker, and a really bad writer.

Now though, I see that basketball was an important piece in any development I’ve made as a writer since then, if I’ve made any development. My earliest and most profound memories all seem to have come with a ball in my hand, not a bottle. With my feet bouncing off concrete, not stuck to a bar room floor.

I remember my father’s house. It rests at the end of a long, pocked driveway behind a toy factory, and between a horse pasture and Dionondahowa Falls spilling out of the Battenkill, in Middle Falls, New York. The house is back far enough in the woods that surviving there sometimes meant battling the elements. So come spring, precarious trees or branches would be felled if it looked like they couldn't make another heavy winter. Come summer there were other battles. The cat had a run in with a hawk that we think tried to carry her away, while I had my own battles to fight.

One summer I was outside, working on pullup jump shots. A pestering chipmunk kept scurrying over the black top my father had pored over the gravel driveway, a gift to my brothers and I so we could play basketball without jagged pebbles. I was startled every time the chipmunk made a run in one direction or the other. I never liked the creatures that lived back there with us. I went inside and got the BB rifle we bought at the Greenwich Plaza Kmart. Ten pumps of the lever could shoot a copperhead BB the length of a football field. But I must have cocked it enough to travel ten.

When the chipmunk stopped below the hoop to nibble on something that had fallen from the tree I shot it in the head. It’s small body flipped in the air as easily as the Pepsi cans I had practiced on. I went back inside feeling like I’d put my tongue in an electric socket, and into the bathroom. My body couldn’t cut the shaking while I did my best not to let on to anyone I was crying by letting them hear me choking on sobs. I hid the rifle from myself, but I didn't get back out to play basketball for the rest of the day, making the chipmunks murder pointless. When I finally did make it out there the body was gone, carried off by the cat I figured, or something else from the wood and, in all likelihood, eaten.

I’m like a mother in that I save every scrap of paper that is in anyway related to a friend of mine and the work they are doing. I keep them all stuffed in a biblical sketchbook I use for my journal. I’ve been planning to tape the scraps into it, but haven’t found the time. It’s good to see the collection grow as I see my friends become more and more productive. At night, when I open the journal to write before falling asleep, a flood of paper scraps, flyers, and business cards leak from the bottom end of the journal all over my lap.

Most of these scraps can be attributed to one artist in particular, Rachel Simon Marino. As editor of KEEPEYES magazine, I’m always pestering the team to describe exactly how they plan on accomplishing something or another. When it comes to Rachel though, all she has to say is trust me, and I do. The cover she did for KEEPEYES #5, in my opinion, hands down, the best thing the magazine has done in its one year of existence. It is a vivid, dynamic, surrealistic painting of incredible proficiency, executed with a level of skill and craft beyond that of any other artist I know, working in any medium. But it is also the most striking and accurate statement made describing the magazine, and explaining its reason for being. There is something to be found in everything, be it noises on the street, neon in the Tenderloin, or a three legged pig dancing in blue loafers. Rachel summed it up perfectly.

She draws or writes on everything. At her house, the skin on all the fruit is tattooed like my arm with various phrases with no context. Phrases like take two and call me in the morning or my name ain't Peter. Not those phrases exactly, but like them. When I asked her once why she does it, she said, have you ever tried writing on the counter? The ink comes right off. She’s even written on money. I keep a dollar bill in my journal that she colored in and scribbled on with black sharpie because, in a weird way, it represents some great memories for me.

On the Washington side, Rachel colored his face in, except for the eyes, and she didn't color in the mouth completely, instead she enhanced it with full and pouty lips. A small square shows on his neck like he is wearing a priests collar. She did it one night when her and I, and our other good friend Chris Moore were sitting around my girlfriends dining room table. On the other side she wrote Return to C.Moore Please. Reward. (Needs it back for glasses)- but she crossed out glasses and wrote above it, soup.

Chris had lost his glasses not long before this particular night. He had lost them on the Bay Bridge, as we rode back to San Francisco in Rachel’s volkswagen from Oakland. The car was full of people. I was sitting in the front seat, Chris in the seat behind me. I turned to look back at the Bay Bridge’s passing suspenders aglow with LED lights. Driving west and looking east the lights seem to collapse into each other one stripe at a time, until they build into a wall of light, and the whole project comes into view just outside the car window.

I told Chris to look at it too. And he did. But for whatever reason, he put his window down and stuck his head out as the car zoomed along across the open expanse of bridge hanging above the bay. When he pulled his head back in, his glasses were gone, ripped from his face by the force of wind and the car’s speed. All he said was fuck.

For a few moments nobody said anything. I looked at Rachel driving, and saw her lips struggling to suppress a smile, and could feel my chest heaving with the desire to laugh. Why would he stick his head out of the window like that when he wears glasses? When I saw him do it, I remember having a brief moment of voicelessness when I thought I should tell him not to, but I didn't because I figured, the man has worn glasses for years. I’m sure he knows what he’s doing. None of that mattered. The glasses were gone. There was no chance of them coming back. Finally, we all laughed. We laughed about it for the rest of the ride. And we laughed about it again when Rachel documented it on the dollar bill.

And I’m laughing about now. Hopefully I wrote the story well enough and you are laughing about it too. If not, that’s ok. This piece is not meant to be funny. It is meant to give my opinions on how artists can survive in this cold money city. Finally, I think I found the answer that I wanted to give all along but didn't realize until now. It’s not even my idea. It’s printed on the cover of a book I bought one night on 16th street at the party that opened my eyes to the energy and passion to create amongst the cities young and hopeless.

The book was made by Xara Thustra, and on the front it says “Friendship between artists is an equation of love and survival.” I survive in this city only by the support and love from my friends, who inspire and give a damn about me.

This essay was published in the chap book Artist Survival Guide, published by Adobe Books, in collaboration with the San Francisco Arts Commision in 2014. The Artist Survival Guide was a collection of art and writing examining the effects of gentrification on the city’s artists communities and how they were reacting to it.

Press Release

[chris-carson]

From the Mockingbird's Throat

January 3, 2014

Reading Whitman’s “Out of The Cradle Endlessly Rocking” as the dishwasher gurgles into the quiet morning filling the room. For Whitman, longing for another is a quality communicated to man by nature. A boy stands on a beach, hears the mockingbird’s song, long blues of loneliness for his mate. In singing we inflame the source of life, the reason we’re here, to fuck, to love, to find a mate and transform one’s self into “the here and hereafter.”

“The here and hereafter”; the term brings to mind the image of an open door at the end of a hallway no longer than one connecting two rooms in a small apartment. At the end is another door. Both are open. The image blurs into something like early computer graphics, the walls, the rooms, the doors fade as the seen twists through a mine shaft of sky blue. All that remains: two uninhibited door ways that alight on what looks like a man’s torso.

January 22, 2014

It is just after 5am spooning quickly escalates. Feeling my already hard cock push into her soft ass as we sleep wakes me up. Suddenly I am wide awake inside her. She yawns. The light is on. Her dark hair is wavy, sleepy, soft, but her tone is cynical. Not directed at me, but at Russia. Russia calls Ukraine a friend. She calls the destruction of her homeland a tragedy on par with the death of her sister.

Late. Vitaly Klitschko announced today he is giving Yanukovych and his regime twenty four hours to hold elections that will surely lead to his removal from the presidency, or Klitschko himself will lead a full scale attack on the riot police in Maiden. “Bleak” is how she has described life in Ukraine, and the protestors in Maidan have made it clear they are willing to die for a sense of promise. I read this on my phone while sitting in the barbers chair. It served the purpose of keeping me distracted so the barber didn't get the idea I wanted to chat. It was a warm, golden afternoon. I took the bus to Market Street. After my haircut I met Aaron at a nearby cafe. He told me he’s got no girl, no job, and no reason anymore to stay in San Francisco. Meanwhile, far off, my lover’s homeland is, what? Unraveling? Awakening? In revolutions all bets are off and in civil wars anything will happen.

January 25, 2014

Tonight Aaron came over and we played poker. I lost everything. Eventually betting it all on a pair of 9’s, hoping to steal the pot. No one fell for it. Chris won the hand with two pair. Inside, I started burning with rage. Not because I lost the money. Besides, he and Aaron kept trading me their paper money for quarters. I ended the night with six dollars in paper. A loss compared to the change I had, but it feels like more. No, I was in a rage because the bare surface on the reflective table stared back at me, gloating, a sign that I was no longer welcome there. So I left and had a cigarette. It didn't help. I was as angry when I came back to watch as when I left. Tanya offered to let me play on her team. Instead I sat alone and read the news on my phone. The situation in Ukraine is decided as far as I can see. Since the government texted the protestors (“Dear subscriber you are registered as a participant in mass disturbance”) the protestors have no choice but to succeed. Text messages mean names. Names mean addresses. Those who make it home alive if the protests fail will only live to be perhaps jailed or executed another day. They must feel that deeply.

February 19, 2014

This evening we had friends over to watch the olympics and eat pizza. Human’s have a drive to make things always and always better. We started watching the figure skating on a laptop, then I carried a larger desk top screen up from the bedroom so we could all watch together. Jake and I joked that skating would be better if the women were also contortionists and were required to end their routine by skating into a small box, that is itself on skates, and off the ice unassisted. We watched only hoping to see if the next competitor did better than the one before. Tanya is still watching upstairs while I’m in bed writing, even though she looked up the results before streaming a previously taped feed. What is the word for believing the future will be better than the past? There has to be one. Progress? People are dying in Ukraine for it. For believing the future could be better if it is given the chance to be. It is like gambling in a way. Stay at the table and play one more hand. Stop at the gas station to buy a scratcher. Bet on the next moment being better then the moment at hand, or the moment that passed.

February 24, 2014

Memory is experience tied to emotion injected with value, meaning, and understood as important for some reason. If I look back at my memories, describe them, then answer the question, “Why do I remember these moments over others?” I could answer based on what has happened since and before. In some ways memories are signifiers in themselves, and the sharing of a memory without explanation should spark connotations, signifiers, and more memories for the reader or listener. But I was reading Auden’s introduction to Goethe’s Italian Journey yesterday in Larkspur’s Piper Park, under a tree. What kind of tree, I don't know. Auden explains the importance Goethe placed in just that particular knowledge. A man can not write about the beauty of a tree without knowing dendrology, or know the beauty of clouds without understanding meteorology. One too can never know the beauty of a place and its people, or a lover, without knowing their history.

February 28, 2014

February is finished. Tomorrow will be the first day of the third month of the new year. But I guess every year only gets a few days to be called a new year. It is hard for something novel to stay special for long, when you know it will be replaced in a matter of time, only to be replaced again and again. Very early this morning I couldn't sleep. In the dark room I could see the glow of Tanya’s porcelain back and outside the sky was readying for sunrise with lavender paint. Now I’m recalling how that sliver of sky just above the roof of John O'Connell High School seen from the bedroom window this morning, and realizing I didn't fully appreciate how pretty it was. I read, sleepless in bed, about the appearance of armed, unmarked, unbadged, speechless and faceless soldiers at an airport in Crimea. I woke up Tanya at 6:30 with this news. She said the Russians are just waiting for orders to make their first move. I thought of an old Chinese man I saw walk out of a market on West Portal with a bundle of bananas. I said, the Russians are trying to take Crimea the same way, like a bundle of bananas, and wait and see if anybody notices. “I hope Ukraine doesn't become a bundle of bananas,” she said, and went back to sleep. It rained a bit in the morning. I slept through most of it. By late afternoon it became one of those special days like spring (the smell of which has been invading the city) when rain falls sideways in perfect sunshine and the air feels moist and tropical. Tonight Tanya said she would move anywhere with me if I invited her. But I plan on doing more than that.

April 7, 2014

I learned a couple good words tonight. The first one. Russian. Used in Ukraine. “Blat.” A noun for institutional and cultural favor payments. Honors, services, attributes, experiences need not be earned, they can be purchased. Sometimes to get a passport, In the old days a doctor could give “blat” to the bureaucrat in charge of pant rations for his or her patients. The second word is cogitable, a rare adjective meaning conceivable, or able to grasped by the mind. I told Chris that we should speak in more rare, or hardly used words. Like purposeful. Chris said I sound, “pretentious and fuck.”

May 19, 2014

Dream: I cut up from the street, running through fenceless backyards where light from a large unseen moon, or my own eyes, made everything visible. The aroma of pine and dirt, and the night air, muggy and breezeless on my skin. The ground black but littered with red pine needles that guided me home, but I felt no comfort. The pine canopies were collapsing on me as I ran as hard as I could down the straight line of backyards to my home’s fence. I could hear someone shouting at me from the street on the other side of the houses. The voice seemed to come from everywhere. It permeated through the splintered fence lining our back yard, through the grass beneath the rusted trampoline, through the door knob I turned to let myself into my dark home, where the voice came through the walls.

I could feel the sharpened words dig into my skin like the presence of God, somehow like teeth biting my wrists and forearms, and a nasty churning began inside of me. I’m a man, I thought, living in a world where God gives nothing but anger and hatred for me and me alone.

Then it stopped. I walked slowly through the kitchen. The house creaked under my heels. In my bedroom, I pulled open the blinds and saw a man on his back on the roof outside the window. He looked at me. The moonlight bounced off a bottle of rum in his hand. There was a girl beside him in a spaghetti strapped tank top and bathing suit bottoms. She had a toads head. Her legs were long, dangling from the drain like hanging vines. She said, zilch. All she did was smoke a cigarette, peering off the roof, out over the roofs of the houses in front of her looking just like my own, up to the cloudless starless sky washed in gray from the moon’s white light mixing with the black of night. She pulled her knees to her chest and blew smoke from her toad lips, and it floated away.

July 18, 2014

I closed the book lightly. Tanya held her phone with both hands. I was going to miss her. Her subtle nightgown was the color of lavender. About a year ago to the day, she placed restful lavender stalks in the breast pocket of my denim jacket and told me that now I could always smell lavender. It was growing in a pot of soil just outside the door leading onto the balcony. We stood there in the wind. Soon after I’d see the same restful hue alight on her bedroom walls. We watched it manifest around us in bed as the sun seeped through the shadeless windows. The sun carried the lavender on it’s white capped edge and left it on the walls before receding back out into the world as daylight. When she placed that honey dyed scent in my pocket I fell a little in love. Now I stand in front of her, bashful for giving more time to hillbillies and books then to making her feel how much I’ll miss her, in our last moments together. So I did. We made love. I left for work happy. She for Ukraine.

July 20, 2014

In pictures of the wreckage the Ukrainian sky spills like tea and milk over the edges of a table, falling behind men with their faces covered with black masks, holding large machine guns. The land looks lush and deep green, almost purple at one layer, faded green at another, and at the next layer golden brown, and going on like that over the earth. Is this right? I only see it in pictures on news sites, while you are there, though far from this pictured landscape where all of those people became corpses in a mess of fire, smoke, and metal made into wreckage.

An article by the Kyiv Post says the rebels are moving the corpses to refrigerated train cars, to transport them someplace where international representatives can identify them and decide where they should be buried. The writer said, “but the mutilated and decaying bodies were most definitely inside, as evidenced by the pungent odor leaking from the unsealed wagon doors.”

July 21, 2014

In the main branch of the public library, drifting through the main fourier on the ground level, I had this brief moment where I felt like I was an alien species dropped from the moon. Like I was experiencing earth for the very first time. I can't say what brought it on, but it was a very clear thought, one that cut through all other potential thoughts, and bumped up hard against the front of my mind. The echoes of foot steps and clicking computer keys, the muffled voices. All these things filled the space up to the glass dome sky light, from which a heavy gray light dropped in as I looked up to see the somnolent movements of fog swirling overhead. It was blueless. Utterly without blue. A thick woolen layer of fog that didn't seem to be moving at all, until I looked again, and saw a few fibrous strands of fluffed moisture swirl too. There is no indication, or demarcation of worlds at the library. The outside comes in, and you sense it in your nostrils, a sour burning smell. Outside people walk around inside half dead on drugs and booze. Inside people saunter outside and avoid the wheelchairs and beggars. Smells from the street penetrate the library. Madness penetrates the library. It mingles so naturally with the children on summer vacation, with their nannies or tired mothers. All of these things mingle so well with the endless variety of world knowledge surrounding everyone at the library. The library maybe the most charitable place in the city, the most democratic place as well. Neighborhoods on the other side if this sliding glass door that whooshes open for me now, are being broken up by the street into subsets based on race, yes, but mostly money. And this fragmentation lives in aesthetics and taste. You know how you can tell if a restaurant is for you by the way the light glitters off the window into your eyes that look in from the street? By the style of light bulb? Well, the library is gray, without aesthetic. Meaning the library is for everyone. It is in its insistence to remain dull and gray that it is its most charitable.

July 22, 2014

Since Tanya left I've had to watch my money closely. The food in the refrigerator is rotting. I haven't gone to the grocery store. Only a few dollars remain in my bank account that I will have to stretch for the next week. Am I collapsing without her? With her, I know I’m me, and I’m alright. Without her I am incorporeal. I’m removed from myself and instead of living as I am, I watch me live, stare at my own shadow walking down the street. Without her all I have are books, which have been nice company, cigarettes, which have been an unwanted guest, and an incessant need to masturbate. But I’ve been picking my skin less.

I don't understand how the day moves without her, or if it moves at all, as night seems to fall without warning. I sat with Jake in the Pan Handle, chain smoking. The air was cool, and a light, yet cutting wind wound its way through the trees. But the hours leading to that moment felt like a dream I may have even forgotten.

Tanya, the effort I make to remedy the nights without you stand in stark contrast to the things I do during the day to pass things by. A man can go through hours of light dead if he wants, and be able to get away with it. There is no meaning to my job, no meaning to the mail I avoid opening, to the calls I avoid answering. No meaning to these cigarettes. But at night, my loneliness is full of meaning. Every motion I make deliberate and timed to get me back to the death day hours safely. My hands are soaked in coconut oil. I asked you once if you wanted to know what it would be like to be a man. You sat on me the same way this faceless woman is sitting in the video I watch. When I cum my hips lift off the bed, and semen splashes on my face, chest, all over my belly. It smells like wet grass and sweat. My tongue lurches from my mouth and licks my lips and I taste it, sour, warm. If I can’t have you now, I’ll be you tonight. You and in one body. I slowly massage the semen on my belly as you would if it were gleaming off of your smooth porcelain body. But my body is coarse ape hair, and the sound of semen moving through my body hair reminds me of walking through dead leaves in autumn.

In the bathroom I see myself in the mirror. Streaks of yellowish gray fluid shimmer on my jaw in harsh light. Have I heard your voice since you left? I would gladly die to hear you even swallow water.

July 23, 2014

Cinnamon layered the inside of the bowl like sand clinging to a white rock face. What was left of the granola and milk I’d eaten reminded me of moist rocks and the smell of mud. Brown milk rested in a little pool at the bottom. On a cobalt blue tea plate were the cold and gnawed strawberry tops, their leafy crowns dry and brittle. On the radio, Dutch voices mourned the arrival of the dead, raged at the way the corpses were treated, and argued over the importance of having the rest of the bodies returned home.

During breakfast I was able to download Viber. It took fumbling with the password, which I again forgot and had to reset after three missed tries, and then a world of aggravation trying to update my billing information. I entered everything exactly as I believe it to be and the machine said I was wrong.

But it turned out that I didn't even need to enter that, and happily skipped the screen by checking the word none, and tapping the word done. Viber downloaded. I finished my breakfast brimming with excitement to finally hear your voice and tell you so much of what I’ve been up to without you.

July 24, 2014

I finished a new book this morning, Victoria by Knut Hamsun, and Hamsun is only too cruel for what he did to those young lovers. And either from Hamsun’s cruelty or the hangover I feel from last night’s edibles, today the world feels dull and flat. I’m closed off. Drained of everything. Every thought I’ve had about writing you has been countered by a strong desire to lie on the couch all day and watch The Simpsons. What could I say? I just miss you, that’s all. I’ve filled pages in notebooks talking about it and each page could be rewritten to simply say, “I’d rather spend the next days with my hand in the garbage disposal then without you.”

Then my phone buzzes, and it is you. It is your body outlined by an oval shaped mirror. Your dark hair draped down your smooth back that flows like a waterfall into your perfectly round ass, all curves and softness. And are you cupping your breasts a little, keeping them hidden from me?

I’m coming alive.

It is not that you are a figment from a dream, something I imagined, but you are an entity from another realm, another life, something I never could have imagined, even if I were a great writer. No imaginative capability could have created you. Even in my deepest heart I couldn't have fathomed you for myself, and somehow, you’ve found me.

The message with your picture reads, “Something for lazy days.”

Then another that reads, “You’ll have to read Victoria to me when I come back.”

But I missed these messages when you sent them, and in the long wait you wrote, anxiously, “Hello?”

But I didnt mean to miss them, believe me. I write, “Oh my God, Hello!”

And about the book I say, “Yes, yes I will read it to you. I will sing it to you if that’s what you want me to do.”

This piece was written specifically for a writing contest I saw advertised in a magazine. A London based publisher called Fish wanted creative memoir for an anthology they were putting together. They were even giving out a little money. I used it as an opportunity to confront two challenges, the first being the utilization of raw material from journals, the second being writing about a lover. This piece did not win the writing contest, but was shortlisted, whatever that means.

-Chris Carson

[chris-carson]

The Homes They've Haunted

I remember raspberry jelly and dead fish all over the kitchen floor. I remember feeling the earth shake like a wet dog and watching the air around it vibrate into particles like water lifting off its coarse surface. A month later we carried what was left in bags from Los Angeles, the city of riots and earthquakes, of fungus and fever chewing the smog bitten air, to Cornwall, on the south west tip of the English island, where the air looked like a wool sweater.

Days there at Goonwinnow Farm started for me when our mother released us children into the lush, moist landscape. Above us the the sky was drooping gray everywhere down to the horizon and illuminated within by a strange tone of sunlight trying to break through it. The hills were green, rolling and dipping one after another as far as I could see in one direction, and as far as the edge of a deep forest in the other direction.

This forest was full of treasures, buried reminders of the old life surrounding us always. All around us there was never any new life. We’d unearth pieces of chipped china in the forest, or a smoothly weathered tea cup handle, or old coins. I remember once finding a spoon, the handle curved like letters in my name I’d learned to write, and the soft green color of aged copper. 

One morning my brother and sisters went off to the field beyond the chicken coop to jump off the hay bails. I didn’t want to go. The night before I’d broken my mother’s glasses getting out of the bath. She’d left them on the floor beside the tub and her cooling cup of tea, and I smashed them with my little heal. I promised her a new pair from the treasure forest when she tucked me into bed.

That was my purpose that day. Even at that young age I could feel the urgency of promises, of the need to keep them, and if the other kids wouldn't help me, I was resigned to search on my own.

I climbed my way up over one hill after another, our dog Choo-Choo, a spotted mutt I named after watching him chase rabbits, trotting ahead of me. My brother hated the name. But I was the youngest. My hair was cut short, near white, and when I cried my thick cheeks would plume red. When it counted, I cried. When I cried I could get whatever I wanted. When we reached the top of the last hill Choo-Choo ran ahead in a blur that looked orange against the cool backdrop of the surrounding nature. Going to chase rabbits. Fine. I didn't need him either.

I walked deep into the forest. I gazed at the languid elm limbs reflecting off the puddles at my feet. All around the forest moved by invisible forces. Sometimes it was just the rustling of rabbits or sleek bodied lizards gripping branches on tree and bush with their suction thumbs. But sometimes I imagined it was a great city of winged people, no bigger than my fingers, fluttering around the damp leaves, and the wind slithering through the tree trunks was actually their laughter. I imagined they loved me at that moment, even more then my sisters or brother, and were so happy I was with them they could laugh with joy.

Yet I was frightened. I’d never been so deep in the forest before, and never so alone. And if this ancient Moorland was home to tiny winged people, what else could live here? My imagination couldn't paint a single picture of what it could be, but managed to infect me with a feeling of dark lonesomeness.

I’m on my own, I thought, and reached into the wet ground and pulled out a split piece of latticed fencing that stained my palms orange with rust. I walked on kicking over shattered pieces of plates and bowls. I gripped the fence that rested on my shoulder like an axe.

Up ahead I saw a large stone, a granite outcrop, so alone in the forest that it must have been dropped there by a giant who tills the forest like a vegetable garden. The way the loose strips of light through the gray sky landed on the rough stone’s edges invited me to it. The glasses. The glasses are in the stone!

I ran to it dropping my weapon. But before I could reach the stone, something in the mud on the forest floor seized my foot. I shrieked in terror. Nothing could make me to look down to see the bubbling hand that held me. I called for someone to help. I called for the dog. But nobody heard and nobody came. Soon though my struggling freed me and I ran all the way home. I felt the tears soaking my cold cheeks, and felt my nose red and runny.

Our mother never let us walk through the mud room until we are all checked for ticks, but I was so frightened I ran straight to the kitchen calling for my mom to come to me. The house was empty. It was cold and silent, as if the gray sky had flattened down on the roof of the house and seeped in through the windows, enveloping my mother in its mystical cloak, making her invisible to me and deaf to my calls.

“Mommy!” I called.

The stove ticked as it heated. A single drop of water splashed at the bottom of the kitchen sink. A deep moan burst through the shut bathroom door and bounced down the long wood paneled hall, a hall that seemed to grow longer as my fear intensified.

“Mommy!” I called again.

The moan turned into a painful wail. The pain it carried down the hall sharp enough to pierce through my eyes. Something unfamiliar was chewing into the roof of our now unfamiliar home.

I was motherless and scared, and knew it was coming for me.

For as long as I can remember the lives of adults seemed to exist in a reality far removed from the one of fantasy my imagination would conjure in that forest, and farther still from the reality I shared with my brother and sisters, the reality of children. Adults were a wholly different kind of being that I was at once eager to be near and fearful of. I remember the moment I became aware of the vast distance between me and them.

Between our life in L.A. and our life at Goonwinnow, my family spent three years living in a trailer park in Cornwall. For our large family the trailer was small and crowded, but I loved the way we stuffed ourselves into the tiny space, the nights I slept between my sisters on a flimsy mattress, sharing a big scratchy electric blanket our father would never allow us to plug in. I slept easily with them.

But I began noticing something different happening between my parents. Looking back from now, I see the that the small space, that for a child seems to bind the family more tightly, was for the grown-ups, eroding a gulf between them.

The trailers in the park were arranged in a wide circle, so if you were to look at it from above, it would be a dartboard with the bulls at the center a rickety playground and sandbox that was always cold and dark from the ceaselessly damp air. At the outer rim of the park was a club house with a bar and a pool table. For the families in the park the world of children and the world of grown-ups was separated by a layer of trailers, the shared space of home, where the two worlds found ways to coexist in the variously strange ways that families do. These separate families would come together in the clubhouse, where the presence of so many unfamiliar worlds created an air of delicate tension, where each word spoken between the grown-ups was a praise and curse on the body of the stranger before them.

The lights were always on in there and entering through a heavy side door, we kids walked over a cement floor in the section of the room with the pool table. I found my mother smoking a cigarette at one of the low tables that surrounded the pool table. I tried to sit on her lap but she wouldn't let me up, and sympathetically put her arm around my waist. My brother walked to the bar side of the room to push the buttons on the pinball machines. That side of the clubhouse was carpeted with a stoney green material dotted with patches of black mould from years of spilt beer. My father was on that side of the room. He brushed away my brother’s request for quarters and leaned back against the bar, holding the pool stick against his shoulder. He twisted it in his fingers. Light hit his ring and split into rays like fingers on a hand. An old man with a face I recognized was taking a shot. His white jeans were tucked into the top of his snake skin cowboy boots. Behind his bent body, a woman sat with a beer in her hand. A sleeping baby in a car seat was propped on the table beside her. Above the bathroom door beside them the clock was frozen at some time.

I whispered to my mother that the clock was broken. She said to my father, “Well, I must say that surprises me Eric. I figured most men would be thrilled to have a chance to earn a little something for their families.”

My father swallowed some beer and let the glass land firmly on the bar top. He walked to the other side of the pool table.

“It surprises you Anne? Is that right?” he said.

When they used one another’s names with this sharp intent it triggered something in me. To my eyes, their bodies would lose their form, like they were turning into lumpy potato things with melting faces. At moments like this, my parents, who when alone looked to me like warm, familiar wholes, morphed into grotesque, unrecognizable others.

I felt a strange muddiness seep coldly through my shirt where I thought my mother’s arm had been. I saw my father as a lumbering monster, gangly and wet, when he leaned over to line up the cue ball.

My mother pushed these words through her now overgrown and fang filled mouth, “Yes! I’m always surprised at what a right bastard you’ve allowed yourself to become!”

When my father hit the cue ball it sailed off of the pool table and bounced off the wood paneled wall, nearly hitting the sleeping baby in the head. It fell solidly to the cement floor. The childs mother shrieked. My mother shrieked too, and pushing me aside, shot out of her chair and began beating my father over the head with open hands. He dropped the pool stick and covered his head until he finally escaped my mother’s anger through the side door.

The baby didn't even wake up, but its mother had turned white and sick from fear. My mother was orange with rage and tried to cover each of her leaking eyes with her sharp fingers.

The smell of burnt nicotine and sweat suddenly became oppressive to me, and sticky. It felt like the smell was clinging to me. I looked again at the baby, so removed from its own danger, and saw that the clock wasn't frozen at all. I had seen it wrong, or my eyes had tricked me. But there it was, moving steadily, and unavoidably forward.

By the time my family moved back to California, to Los Osos, I was old enough to understand. I had done the arithmetic on our time in England, added up all my experiences and sensations, and the sum was this - a child is essentially alone in this world. The troubles of adulthood are too expansive to leave room in parental hearts for the troubles of childhood. My pain is not their pain, and more importantly, their pain is not mine. Parents give a child words to speak and the strength to stand and move, and I realized that now that I had those powers, the rest is up to me. I realized if I was going to make it in this world I would have to do it on my own.

This began a long process of trying to separate myself from my parents and from the adult world all together. As the youngest I was able to hide in plain sight. Arguments and jokes erupted in the space around me but never penetrated through as anything but background noise. Choices and decisions were made for and about me by everyone else in the family. I ignored all that I could. I wanted no attention, only to be left alone.

I began to imagine adventures for all of my stuffed animals. I’d arrange them on my bed, my dresser, my desk in separate clans and picture them as an ancient race of mountain creatures, their lives clinging heroically to the sides of crystallized slopes. Compared to my world, these stuffed bears inhabited such a mystical reality and I thought of it and them often. While my mother was shuffling me from the porch to the car to school, or back home again, while my father, half drunk, and surrounded by television noise lectured me on why I should care about learning to write checks, I’d be thinking of the bears in my room, what they were doing without me, of their private sorrows and desires. I became convinced that their black bead eyes had the power to see, and when I scratched their worn cotton heads, they could feel it.

These fantasies maintained longer than they perhaps should have.But the severity of life moving around me made it all the easier to dig myself deeper into a world that was only as severe as I made it, where time only moved when I allowed it to. As conversations between my parents began ending in arguments more frequently, when my mother began choking on a woman’s name I’d never heard before, and when words like affair, office, whore, and secretary, started sprouting up in quiet corners of the enormous house, I only wondered if my bears looked at or touched one another when I was gone.

This thought gave me a kind of pulsating fulfillment that for months drifted into my dreams and wake me with a feeling of beautiful disconnect from the room, and like my body had been squeezed over and over again by a warm, wet hand. One morning I woke up and changed my underwear before joining my family for breakfast. When I got to the table there was only my mother and sisters.

“Where is Dad? Where is Lonnie?” I asked.

There was a brief silence as they looked at eachother, before my mother said, “For Christ’s sake child, we’ve been over this. You’re father and I are divorced. He and your brother moved out months ago. Now please, don’t ask me again.”

And I never did.

The University of San Francisco School of Law's Public Interest Law Foundation presented its 2012 Public Interest Excellence Award to David Boies, third from left, at a recent auction and award ceremony. Congratulating Boies are Dean of the School of Law Jeffrey Brand, event co-chair Natasia de Silva, and event co-chair Catherine Crider, right. (Photo: Rick Gerharter)

When each of them remarried I didn't ask anything either. When each of them got divorced again a few years later I didn't ask anything. There was nothing I wanted to know, and anyway, I saw it as a good trade off. Mom and Dad, I am happily staying out of your business, avoiding it at all costs when you bring it swinging into every room of your respective houses, it is not unfair for me to expect that you will both do the same. Yet of course they didn't. Throughout high school my every move was scrutinized and inspected. In a strange way, it was their collective concern over me that brought them something like back together again, on a Monday afternoon when my father came bursting into my mother’s house.

I was sitting on the back porch looking out on the circular bay below, watching the ocean eat away at the golden strip of sand dune to the west. My friend Kylie was there with her cousin Jessica, who brought a handful of pills she’d taken from her house keeper’s purse. The pills were arranged on the deck table’s glass top like gems peeking up from the bottom of a stream. Kylie was telling us that her boyfriend’s uncle got drunk and cornered her at a barbeque the previous weekend when we heard the back door slide open. “What are you doing here”, I demanded to know.

“You’re mother said you’ve been skipping school,” my father said, and shuffled us all into the house, scooped up the pills and flushed them down the toilet.

Though it was the worst my parents had seen from me, they knew, I think, after the stresses of my siblings, that it wasn't that bad. I had had no drunken car wrecks, no abortions, no streaks of drug dealing or shoplifting. “My mother used to say, ‘at least none of my kids have been in jail.’ I wish I could say that too,” my father would mumble through his aged and sagging cheeks. And I’d say nothing out loud, but think to myself, that has nothing to do with me. Besides, he and my mother had brought these stresses on themselves. I can’t remember any of us kids asking to be born.

By the time I moved to San Francisco for college, I think my parents saw it as something like their exiting of a long tunnel. Parenthood over, they could now escape into the sunlight in the next phase of their adult lives. So by the time I moved into a beat up Victorian on the edge of the Pan Handle with eight men from school, their faces had changed again. The flesh on them had tightened and taken on new light and color, the summery effects of a year into a grown-up childhood.

My face had turned sallow and pale. The winter I spent in that house was one of the last rainy seasons I or anyone I know can remember touching the City. We were all so broke. PG&E turned the electricity off and nobody could figure out how to get it back on. The roof leaked, and after a few months we began longing for the darkness, inviting it into each of our makeshift bedrooms like it were a stray cat lurking from room to room with a handle of Popov between its teeth.

Rampant depression. Too many nights to count spend drunk and crying. “Do you realize,” I’d cut off Max, my roommate mid sentence to say, “Do you realize. I’m an art major, I say I want to be an artist, and I don’t make art. The only time I paint is the day before something is due, and half the time I don’t wake up for class the next day.”

He’d blow smoke from the cigarette we shared through his nose, and his eyes were so big, quiet and inviting to all my new struggles that they made me want to cry. I’d cry and sleep and wake up hungover, and call my mother from the pillow, without knowing how to ask her what I need to ask her, how does one go about being a grown woman? But her voice on the other end of the telephone was so weightless. Not only weightless, but resistant to the weight I tried hard to put on it. No matter how awful I tried to make things sound, she would only be reassuring. She never once broke. She never once cried for all the things I cried for.

I hung up the phone this one morning, resigned to fight off this black room feeling with nothing but the actions of a moving body. Today I will move, I will work. Today, I will.

I pulled my head off the pillow and held my eyes open as wide as I could, trying to reenact the motion of emerging from water, emerging from this musty, moldy, cold air hovering between the damp walls surrounding me. Out of this muddy flesh that clamped itself to me while I slept, despite my best efforts to say spring fresh and young.