Thomas Strohm is the antithi-slut. He's
the guy in the back of my mind who I assume I can always call when I
need a one-night stand. The one from my teen years ended up a meth
head, blowing up a lab and scarring his face, then died just last
year. So Sarah says…Thomas is around. In between jobs, in between
coffee shops, I check his Facebook periodically to view his swimming
pool girlfriends and bar girlfriends and am amazed he doesn't have
multiple venereal diseases because he's the Burger King of weekend
romance; fling romance. Sometimes I think the cops or the
scientologists are following me around and I might end up the crazy
lady arrested at the skate park for 'running away from the devil man'
or the lady who stands in the middle of the intersection while my
overweight black dog rolls around on the sewage grate. And traffic
passes and no one says a thing because that’s how Montrose is.
That's how it’s always been, which is why we gravitated here years
ago, dropped out of high school - punk rockers, gay, artist, dike,
titless, overweight, the wrong size, the wrong mind; inappropriate
and insecure. Lost and shunned. Sarah was a junkie and I was a poet.
Andy dropped out of High School for Performing and Visual Arts to
drink himself to gay bars. Every night, gay bars. Transvestites and
punk rockers. Now they’re 'cleaning up', bringing in the
metrosexuals, the families, and the upperclassmen. Cyclists, coffee
shops, people hanging toys from trees, thrift stores and Wal-mart.
I write 'f--- you Houston' on the walls
of the Art Guys exhibition. Jack and Jim Pirtle and Pat, god that was
an awkward evening of cocaine and weird, and all those pictures of
people I was standing next to. And John, I wrote for his paper, he
lived at Notsuoh briefly. Cocaine brought them together. Black and
whites side by side, telling my story of the people I knew and the
places I lived and maybe I thought I saw my shoulder or the back of
my head in one photo or I just wish I did to get over it. Nestor with
his write up in the magazine, now residing in an 'undisclosed
location' it says…I know where he lives and want to call them,
bribe money to tell all.
Remember that summer? The summer I came
back from California, hell I can't even remember why I was in
California except I was stoned and pissed off, decided to take what
little money I had, around 500 and take off to find 'something'.
Something, it's that void of something again. Lead a poetic
lifestyle, write the great American novel from the aisle of a
greyhound bus, a Louisiana swamp novel; 'looking for love in all the
wrong places' like an old country song. Like Texas. Too many faces.
The place I hate when I'm in but love to say I'm from when its time
to leave. I loathe remembering things. Because I never have the
answers to impulsivity. The second time I landed in Los Angeles at
the greyhound station was in my early twenties, maybe 23 or 24, and
those men, you know the ones waiting for their next Sally does porn
victim all gathered around as if I'd never done this before. As if I
was that naïve small town girl rolling into the big city for the
first time.
“Nope, you're too late,” I told
them,
And I woke up one day to realize he'd
handed me all his rage, all of his insanity. The war in the mind -
the masons, this mad mad industrial city – this stupid hot state of
Texas. 100, 100, 100 degrees day after day after month after month
for half a goddamn year. Where are you going? He'd always say –And
the race is always on the streets. I drive crazy the way you taught
me you angry old man, I drive that race on the highway, I weave
through traffic, I scream and I burn.
I never knew what caused those
nosebleeds.
The Houston ports bring the ships in,
the tugboats create rifts along the San Jacinto River, polluting the
shores with their industrial chaos. The oil industry and
petrochemical dump. The art scenes flourish, to create a gifted
community beneath the ancient elms and oaks that droop with humidity,
which cough each breath, each wind stagnate. The metro buses putt
putt along down aging streets, Westheimer, Montrose – throughout
downtown, its reflective windows erect buildings into the sky. They
construct stadiums with a removable roof, new high-rises, condos and
more parking garages to accommodate. We are greening a nation,
greening the city, a city park complete with sculptures from 1983, a
yard for yoga, a playground for the children and a basketball court
two blocks down. They are running away the homeless people, the
leftovers from Hurricane Katrina, the Louisiana scragglers with
nowhere to go. New Orleans has rebuilt itself without them. Their
voodoo and Mardi-Gras permeate our barrios and Vietnamese doughnut
shops. The Heights of a hundred years has a bike lane, as they plan
to build trains to cart us back and forth. The east side is
regenerating artist warehouses and tiny eateries for the eclectic;
the modern. The art car parades are dying down but they still chalk
up the streets, close down the highways for the big race.
The grand prix.
The dog walker lesbian told me the
mayor was a bitch. I don't believe her. She's the first lesbian
mayor, with adopted children. I've met her at public poetry readings.
I need a one-night stand or at least
something similar.
Thomas' new apartment is only 6 blocks
away so I stop by. His “roommate”, where have I heard this before
– she has beer bottles stacked along bookshelves, shelves and
shelves of collector bottles. And mirrors, beer labeled mirrors hung
on the walls. The dog hair from three dogs clumps and gathers along
the stairwell. The house smells of dog. He's shorter than the last
time I saw him, lost some weight.
----So this is your new place, huh? How
do you get these people to take you in?
----I don’t know.
He grins. The dogs are barking
upstairs. I inspect his “roommate’s” bike to see if it could be
my bike, painted, still looking for that amazing light blue Raleigh
someone stole from me over 2 years ago. I'm like that. Always
wondering who stole my stuff and who keeps following me around, and
why guys leave or don't leave. And have nothing to believe in
anymore.
He's skinny.
It's gone.
I've lost him.
He's sleeping in this woman’s bed,
calls her friend, won't admit he's having whatever he's having with
her – calls her “roommate”. He's lost that shine, that glow,
that neediness. He's just skinny Thomas now, that guy whose back bike
wheel is flat and lives with a strange tattooed woman who collects
hundreds of beer bottles. I tell him I need a drawing for an art
class.
'Naked?' He asks. He's forgotten how to
communicate beyond putting out to live.
You smell like dog, smoke pot, look
amazing for your age, yes, but like old gay men who never
rehabilitate and end up kicked out of gay bars they spend years in
and into coffee shops where they read books, not laptops.
(Wouldn’t it be just like that? – I
put out to a guy who never gets me out of here, a guy who brings me
back, a guy who traps me. Not that I have some magical pussy or
anything – there’s no place like home, there’s no place like
home; withholding like Neverneverland.)
Willie Nelsons' stoned and crooning
voice overrides the coffee-shop silence at Black Hole today.
'Its seventies country day?' I ask.
Yes.
I wonder how long before the headphones
hit the ear. The days in the fall always start off slightly cloudy
and cool then gradually work back up to sunny, humid, and miserable.
For about an hour, sometimes two - a soft blue hue overrides the
usually warm and orange taint. Yes, taint. Not tint. The silver grey
of cement, the gradual flow of dew damp traffic just before sunrise,
just before exiting the freeway. The roads shorten. Bucky texts me,
says he hates Houston and wants to move to Cleveland. After all the
poetry festival marketing and carrying Sal through Fringe Festival
for three days; I'm sure he's burnt out and suicidal. Before the sun
becomes that pervasive red ball of flame; just behind the clouds,
it’s a burnt moon of silver reflecting off poles, off rails, off
street lamps and puddles. When the rain comes, when the sky darkens,
when the lights are out and sky is clear – the stars beyond the
lightning. The flashes like 'I wish I was in another world'. Like a
silent bomb beyond the horizon, like a mystical orb – a pulse.
There's that one moment. Like a shock. Like the light bulb flicks on
in the middle of the night. 2 a.m. Shock. And for three brief
seconds, you know everything there is to know. The past, the present,
the future – all together at a stand still. Breathe.
Look away.
Don't look back.
You can never return.
It's over. Move on.
If only you could remember what
happened, how it came to this.
Black Hole. Like an intentional
community, like the substance of Houston; try to get out, ha, fooled
you. It will bring you back from the Portland crisp falls, from the
Colorado mountain winters, from sunny California; it will suck you
back like a crippled mother, an ailing father; a disease. Texas. Hot.
Texas. Suck. Houston. Swamp oil industry bog bayou pig face cement
trailing on and on mayan and incestuous northern and gothic southern
charm, its wit about you, its wit about you – to grandmothers and
smoking cigarettes to hot rods and porch talk with lemonade or hot
coffee with an ice cube. Just a little sweet to take the edge off.
F--- you Houston…No more summer trips to Kerrville. Nana died and
left memories of the hill country, of bullshit religion, of her crazy
Scotch-Irish Brit grandmaster mason husband, and of those hidden
springs outside Austin.
“Sometimes the machines and the steel
sound like music,” Kira says as we pull out of the driveway this
morning. Darkness, the car covered in overnight dew, lights from the
building behind the house shine through the vines on the fence,
through the brush and reeds and decay.
“I don't hear it anymore,” I tell
her.
The steel scrape, the layer of
inorganic matter, metallic dust that settles across everything, and
that smell – of shit of metal of butane of random stink. That
sound, the scrapes like monster claws on chalkboards, the clank of
metal hammers and steel construction, of valves opening and the hiss
of emissions releasing, the whirs and hums and overall ugliness. The
grass grows strong; the trees last decades and droop an exhausted
wilt. The industrial river, the port of Houston, is hidden behind the
city backdrop. They create art to forget; to look away and pretend
it's somehow beautiful – the willow along the faded skyline, the
tattooed lovers and foreign immigrants, the Texas flag and Menil
collections. Punk rock, hipster, hip-hop, professors, yuppies and
Macbooks in coffee shops across the freeway from the universities –
of engineering and science. From the space shuttle of NASA to the
port, we will erect mutated statues; build a green space to make up
for it. And rent-a-bikes.
I don’t believe in you anymore.
I look for jobs with chains, so I can
run a search and find all their 126 other locations not here. Not
here. This is not Marfa, this is stink.
As we drive along the loop on the way
to school this morning, Kira tells me how they'd had a discussion on
religion at school, that the atheists and Christians had split the
room, and how the Christians proceeded to tell everyone about Jesus
and god. Well, god made you, and this and that and all things god.
So Kira says, “Really? Well, who made
God?” and the room fell silent.
And the atheists snickered beneath
their breath.
And everyone was stumped. Those
preteens are suddenly at a loss again - for meaning and substance.
“And that's how Kira makes friends at
school,” Zane interjects, “yea Kira.”
We laugh.
Would I be wrong to say that I taught
them to believe in nothing so that they could see everything there is
to believe in?
'Big city set me free'. He makes
presidential heads at summer street studios - I have photos, blurry
digital images from years ago. Next to files of Kate Bush music in
Andy's car – those cold front nights of driving at 3 am, the
streets are vacant and slick. We are no longer waiting in grocery
lines, we are no longer shopping for comfortable slip-resistant
shoes, we are no longer smiling smiling for the public to make
everyone happy and pay those goddamn bills; we are just alone at the
top of parking garages and wandering through the maze of underground
tunnels beneath the hotels. All those hotels we sat in lounges and
drank seltzer or smoked and hoped we'd meet someone with a ticket
out.
When I feel really spiteful and haven't
eaten, I throw trash out.
Its 9 am, Bucky still doesn't like
Houston.
He sends me a text, 'I can't get
killing myself out of my head'.
For the past month maybe. Incredibly
tall, short ponytail and magnet blue blue eyes. I hope he's not gay,
so I avoid being attracted. Maybe he will swing. One day I nodded,
one day a grey murky day I think I mini-snarled, one day I spoke to
him briefly saying something stupid like, 'you're much taller when
you're standing up'; and then there was the day I nearly fell off the
curb. Well, I guess that’s better than getting stuck in some
fashion craze of golf visors, tennis shorts, and aging gum smacking
blondes.
I tell the kid sitting next to me that
I'm going to go see if he has a house in Canada, and if he doesn't
I'd be right back.
Neville; a name given to him from his
grandfather of Luxembourg. His tall sturdy build, high cheek bones,
and those eyes – disturbingly romantic and eerie at the same. Vlad
the Impaler, Dracula, wet cobblestones on misty days and dungeons.
It's Czech, it’s the Jewish ghetto of Prague, its French cemeteries
and German death camps. The ashes of the dead as they rise over the
skies to block out the sun, a plume of thousands of scorched bodies –
I feel so nauseous, crawl down from the bunk in the back of the silo
– we will escape before they take of me again. I hear their boots
shuffling along the ground, I hear their vicious language and so
seductive in Lux, with French accents. We die over and over.
1943.
1971.
1882.
2014.
Here we are again. In between jobs.
He works down the street, says he
enjoys his job and I've done most of the talking. Same job eight
years. He needs to get there early today to set up candles, he says.
That explains why he's always wearing black, every day.
--- Do you have a house in Canada?
--- No, but I have a house in upstate
New York, close to Toronto.
I need a heart to heal me; someone with
passion. I have forever, now go away all – goodbye exes and Texas
and stinky barrio house and morbid nursery rhymes from hot summer
daycare on the ship channel. Maybe I will join the P.T.A. and the
kids would be able to play outside again, in the fields, in fresh
air. This city is for people not from the city.
I go back inside as he leaves, watch
the girl with the turquoise blue leotards – she doesn't look the
slightest bit uncomfortable, and tell the guy I'm sitting next to,
'He does have a house near Canada'.
