For the last ten years, I have always had at least one job. I've never been "between jobs," because before I moved cities or chose to relocate myself as an employee, I always waited until I'd found a replacement employer in order to avoid the stress of unemployment. Always, that is, until this summer. Six weeks ago, I left my full-time management position in Encinitas to join hands with my mom's tomato plants and sing happiness into the sunshine (while wearing two layers of SPF 50, of course). I had no plan, no idea, and relatively little stress about any of it. Fast forward to the present, and you'll find me wearing holey pajamas that I bartered off of a homeless bearded man for a fistful of blue jay feathers. Well, almost. Yeah, actually.
After the first week of joblessness, I bit off my hands and laughed maniacally to myself through a mouthful of bloody angst. I am used to working 40-80 hours a week (apparently), so to tell myself that my "job for now" is to paint and write and exercise feels something like telling myself to dance without making jerky neck movements and head swishes. Just not quite right. I promptly got on a train to Santa Barbara and started picking up shifts at my old restaurant. (My favorite part about this is that after eight months of being gone, when I showed up and started giving tickets to the kitchen, the chefs just took the paper slips from me and started cooking my orders without so much as an eyebrow-raise. The words "EPIC FAIL" flashed in front of my eyes when I realized they probably expected I'd crawl back someday to fake smile at tables for five dollars.)
Week number two was a good week. My mom and I had our first gallery show. My brother and his girlfriend came to help us set it all up, and all-in-all I'd say it was a success. Thanks to Sam and Sara, we were the only gallery in the Art After Dark loop known for "that bomb-ass soup!"; at one point we had almost twenty people crammed into our closet-sized space, murmuring pleased remarks about the art works through closed lips harboring the vegan summer squash stew and sweet potato hummus. For the first hour of the show, I went into no-nonsense-manager mode and silently covered the walls with all the artists' information for their individual pieces. When that was done, I looked down at my Homeless Outfit and decided I should go change into something nicer. Looking at pictures from the evening, I'm still not sure why that meant I should put on wool slippers, hippie tie-dye leggings, a baggy black sweater, and a thuggish black beanie. I was a walking upside-down funky mullet-- straight-up gangsta business on top, rainbow daisy party on bottom. Oh well. I don't think any of the people passing through even knew I was one of the two women running the show because I found out straight-away that I am not one for schmoozing. I spent the night fighting off old ladies for the last bit of soup, hiding behind tall people in shadows on the balcony, and finally, escaping for a 40 oz draft of beer from Chino's. Great success!
The third week marked my first job interview. I was VERY excited about it. The interview was for a coffee shop slash book bar slash art venue slash amazing fucking awesome establishment. I fell in love with it more and more every time I walked through the doors and saw at least fifteen pairs of black-rimmed emo glasses and a hundred different colors of flannel. On the morning of my interview, I awoke early to go for a Good Karma Run (oh okay, JOG). I gave myself plenty of time to cool down and shower and make myself presentable. The problem was that I underestimated the fatal combination of being severely out-of-shape AND being 99% albino. Two hours after my run, I was still sweating bullets, and the heat radiating off of my fuchsia face was causing my makeup to curdle. I had no choice but to arrive at the interview with... well, with a sopping wet red face. As I shook the hands of the general manager and the owner, I don't think I even said my name. I just blurted out in a disturbingly loud voice an apology for the sheer amount of sweating that was going on, explaining that I'd gone for a run TWO HOURS BEFORE. They both nervously laughed, and I nervously sweated on their hands.
Then I blacked out.
Really. I don't remember what was said in that entire fifteen minutes. The only thing I DO remember is that they asked me questions regarding my working capabilities, and that instead of answering them I started laughing a lot and leaning back in my chair with my arms limply sprawled out to both sides, like a fat king in a royal bathtub. I laughed. I sweated. I wiped my hands obsessively over the slick surface of my face, grimacing at the handfuls of water I encountered with each swipe. Oh another question? Hey maybe instead of answering, I should just apologize for being sweaty again? Sounds like a plan to me!! And then I'll tell them that the last job I had was really easy. That's a good one, that'll help a lot. You GOT this, (singlewhitefemale). In da BAG!
When I regained consciousness I was sitting in my mom's house, staring at my phone, praying for the call that would end my vertigo and return me to anti-slip shoes and caked food on my forearms from carting around dirty plates for several hours a day. It never came. Since I had already chewed off my hands in week one, I hammered my feet into flat planks just to give myself something to do other than anything that could actually be helpful.
That weekend I returned to Santa Barbara to work yet again at my old restaurant. People started asking me why I didn't just move back. I started asking myself the same question.
In week four I got a phone call for an interview at a Greek/Mexican fusion cafe in San Luis, and I felt the blood coursing through me shake off the weight of anxiety and adrenal dread it had been dragging through my system. This interview went much, much better. I actually said some good things about myself, and I was only sweating a very minimal amount. Within two hours, I was employed, and I felt like Edward-Cullen-style sprint-running through a forest with heavenly sunlight reflecting on my diamond-sparkling white vampire chest. You know that feeling. C'mon.
Last week, week five, I started at my new job. The owner had me come in for three days and basically stand around and be a big waste of space. The only skill I perfected was saying "behind you!" whenever I realized I was blocking a hurried worker's route to a table with an armful of plated food. I clocked out each day after only a couple of hours, and I realized that the other skill I had perfected was giving myself a big worried crease between my eyebrows from all the fretting I was doing about not actually making any money. I was appointed two weekly shifts: Tuesday and Thursday lunches. **deepening of said Worry Crease**
I got a call for a job interview at a healthy-ish cafe practically next-door to the one where I'd just been hired. You know, it's funny how trying to find a job in this shitbag economy has changed my perspective so much. I used to always think that since I'm someone who works hard, I'd never have any trouble getting a job. Dude. Being unemployed mind-fucks you. I don't even know WHAT I believe anymore. As I was getting ready for this interview, I found myself staring at my reflection in the mirror. It was one of those moments where if you're a heroin addict in a TV show, you shoot up while your baby's crying in the next room and you look deep into your dark-circled eyes and grasp the bathroom sink to steady yourself in a room slowly slipping into a shaky oblivion. True introspection time. I gazed objectively at the thirty bright-colored beaded necklaces I'd roped around my neck, dangling upon a yellow floral blouse tucked into a super-girly high-waisted black skirt with pockets. My feet sweated in glittery silver flats. Bright pink lipstick. Curly ringlets in varying stages of faded hair-dye bouncing around my head. I looked like the most chipper fucking person on the planet. I felt utterly no connection to the person looking back at me for approval.
The owner of this cafe was a sharply dressed man (the uber-femme scarf lazing about his neckline reeked of sophistication) with cutting eyes and a smile that dared you to call it out on its insincerity. He exuded all cold energy. Which was weird, because he was flashing a handsome grin the entire time and seemed to be saying only nice things.... At least his chilly aura cooled my sweat glands for the duration of my time with him. I guess maybe I should've thought about what questions I might have to answer in these interviews before I was actually sitting there faced with them. Even though everything he asked me was completely standard material for a person seeking employment as a server, the questions were knocking me off my feet with profundity.
What would your coworkers say about you if I were to ask them what you're like?
I think my eyebrows got lost up in my bangs. Hm. Huh. My coworkers, eh? Hey, I miss those guys! I used to have friends!! I wonder what they WOULD say about me! They're so nice. I wish Santa Barbara and Encinitas would just move to San Luis already. I'm tired of not having friends here. Poor, poor me.... Oh. Fuck. The guy is looking at me. I need to give him an answer. Oh shit. Wait, where am I? How long have I been sitting here?!!
I finally heard my mouth say something along the lines of, "I think they would say I'm a hard worker. And that I am usually smiling... so... very, uhh, positive. They were... sad to see me go? I think? And that's... yeah... that's... yeah... the answer." I ended every response with some statement of finality, announcing the temporary end to my rambling because there was no meat to any of my statements and I could tell that that the useless bit of information I'd just shared needed to be wrapped up with a bow for him to recognize it as something tangible. As I left the restaurant after my interview, I instantly felt like the cheery necklaces at my throat were constricting my airway with their heavy optimism. I went home and changed into pajamas in all shades of gray.
The thing I never knew about unemployment was how much it fucks with your head. You're supposed to go out there and present yourself to the world as this desirable marketable object, when inwardly you're experiencing the biggest bout of self-doubt and uncertainty of your life. Hearing myself try to SELL myself to these strangers, I start freaking out behind the words coming out of my mouth. Should I even be hired? Would I hire me??? Who the fuck AM I??? Where do I fit?!! The vultures of insecurity start circling my head and dive-bombing my consciousness with jabs of discontent. And all of a sudden, I don't want to be going through the motions of all these formalities. I just want to look the interviewer in the face of his heart and say with a big sigh, "Look, I am feeling really lost right now because I just moved here and it would really help if you could give me a job so that I can calm down and feel enough stability to allow me to make some art because right now I am FREAKING THE FUCK OUT and it's really hard to be creative when my mind is on red alert with the stress of being jobless and penniless in a new town. Aight?"
But... you can't say that. You have puff up your chest, putting on airs of confidence and self-worth, praying that you possess the most potent pheromones and that your feathers will shine brighter than your competitors' so that you can be the lucky chosen one to serve food to pretentious tourists for minimum wage plus tips.
Week six. I have lost myself in The Sons of Anarchy. I spend entirely too much of my jobless time fantasizing about motorcycle clubs and mad amounts of ink, yo, and sexy muscular men shooting bad guys while simultaneously ashing their cigarettes. Mentally this week I became Jax Teller's "old lady" and was crowned princess of the SamCro clan. In reality I guess I picked up an extra shift at my new job and actually made a little bit of money. And I am leaving tomorrow (AGAIN) for Santa Barbara (AGAIN) to work for the weekend (AGAIN) so that I won't get arrested for not paying any of my bills. Maybe it's good to get away for a couple of days. As much as I love Santa Barbara, being there reminds me that I've already milked it for all that it has to offer me. (Wow, what a gross, un-veganly sentence. A sincere apology goes out to Santa Barbara's non-consenting teats.) It's nice to return to SLO with a fresh set of go-get-'em eyes and a mouth foaming with eagerness for new opportunities, though.
Well. Here's to week lucky number seven. As for now? I've gotta go. I have a date with Jax to watch season 4 episode 3 of his show.
We're kind of in love.
You're jealous.
Bitch.
Friday, September 30, 2011
Saturday, September 24, 2011
Senorita Guerita
It's already driving me crazy that I can't make the en-yay symbol above the "n" in the title up there. Faaahck. I'm not sure how long I can look at that before I just delete this whole post out of frustration.
Well. Anyway. I've been speaking a lot more Spanish lately. Yep. I'm preeeeeetty much just a bad-ass now. I'm going to take you on a little journey to the very beginning of my history with the Spanish language. For me, it all started when I was in the eighth grade. Since I quit marching band after seventh grade (which I realized later was a mistake cuz there were actually hot nerdy band guys in high school, damnit), I was able to actually choose my elective class for my second year at the junior high. This was a big deal-- while I had been tripping over my shoelaces and accidentally bashing people in the jaw with my flute case, everyone else had been bonding over the generic set of elective classes, gaining coolness levels by not caring about the quality of their freshly sanded wooden bowls but more about who made-out with whom in the photo lab's Red Room. I was giddy with fourteen-year-old girl adrenaline at the prospect of rubbing elbows with non-nerds in a class other than P.E. (We called Phys Ed "PE." I'm sure that's self-explanatory, but it just occurred to me that maybe it's not. But I mean... it is. Right?) I was so tired of seeing the same faces in the desks around me in every classroom-- all the same honors students taking school a *little* too seriously in our rush to be perfect mini-adults before our balls even had a chance to drop. I yearned for a fresh batch of blood to mix with, to hear the gossip of the more sexually advanced, and to develop crushes on the "bad boys" that I otherwise never had a chance to be around.
As I daydreamed about tossing flour into the air with all the other care-free students in Home Ec, pretending not to be super pumped about learning to make a pie crust in a perfect rendition of Snow White's lacy artistry... my mother was discovering that Spanish was going to be offered as an elective for eighth graders for the first time at our school. My powdered sugar dreams slipped soundlessly through the cracks of my doughy fingers and morphed into "suenos" before they hit the floor. Yet again, I was signed up for an elective that was surely to house every helplessly nerdy try-hard student and myself. Thanks Mom.
I was surprised to find that the variety of students in my Spanish class was actually more diverse than every other class of mine. It seemed all kinds of moms had forced their kids into taking an academic course as an elective. I scanned the mixture of jocks and druggees, until SHE crossed the ugly off-blue carpet in one sturdy quarterbacker's stride and took the the center of the room.
"Hola, ethtudianteth. Mi nombre eth Thenora Borrith de Barthelona. Thoy la profethora de ethta clathe."
We stared. Some of us may have even clapped. There she... towered. At least six feet tall. Probably closer to eleven. White as can be, with a mommish style radiating a faint yet terrifying glow of sheer power and strength. Within half a minute, she had the attention of every hormone-rattled brain in that room. I honestly can't explain the hold her presence has over people. I mean, here I am actually TRYING to explain it, and I realize that it just sounds stupid. But... when she speaks in a room, you feel like you'd better listen to what she's saying, or else you're either going to get a spanking from her seriously intimidating forearm or you're going to miss out on a sentence that will be crucially important to you later in a life-or-death situation. Yeah. I guess that's the best way I can describe it.
I lapped up every word that lisped out of Senora Borris de Barcelona's lips. Though I must say that it was difficult, especially at first, to distinguish between what SHE was physically saying with her mouth and what she wanted US to say with ours. Her Castilian accent caused much confusion. I distinctly remember going through the numbers that first day: "Repeat after me. THERO."
"Thero."
"No no no, I say THERO, you say CERO!! Okay? THERO!"
"Sssss--uhh--ther...o.... Thero?"
"NO! SAY-RO! CERO! SSSSSS-ERO!! I SAY THE 'TH' SOUND, NOT YOU!"
And it was fine until we got to numero "doth" and had to go through it all over again. Eventually the Thenora had to just abandon her usual accent and give it to us straight-up. After every lecture she gave she would lean her shadow over our desks and shout "WRITE IT DOWN!" in case any of us were so caught up in watching her large arm swoops that we forgot to take notes. We started referring to her (secretly) as The Borris. We all loved her. Well, and we feared her. I more loved her than feared her though, and inwardly I aspired to be as Spanish-ly savvy as she. I slurped up that vocabulary as if it were Nantucket Nectar lemonade (I didn't drink booze for another four years, so I had a pretty solid addiction to lemonade, and this particular brand was my bottle of choice). I got a raging boner when I discovered that the same grammatical rules I had devoted my heart to in English existed for the Spanish language as well. I could NOT get enough.
Freshman year of high school I entered Spanish 2 with a different instructor, and she chose me as her Student of the Year the first month because I was the only student to turn in a flawless paper for our initial essay. At the lunch thrown in the awarded students' honor, she found out I was a freshman and then seemed upset that she'd chosen me. I was too busy waving across the room excitedly at The Borris to be bothered by the fact that my own teacher was pouting, though. The glorious Borris sat a good four feet above the student trying to have a presence at her side. I felt a kick of jealousy for the girl she had chosen.
I took Spanish for the next three years in high school. Incidentally, The Borris was my teacher for all of them. I was thrilled. However, this is the reason that after taking five years of Spanish, I could still go into a group of Mexicans and be positive that they were speaking Mandarin. I essentially learned text-book Spain-Spanish with a Castilian accent. I studied Nineteenth Century novels and absorbed the culture of The Borris's experiences from living in Spain for eighteen years. I could write ten-paged essays about the politics of Don Quixote, but when a woman stopped me on the street and asked me directions to "El bano?" I dropped to the ground and played dead. On many occasions, I resorted to idiot-status sign language and squeaks of exasperation when confronted with someone who only spoke Spanish. Finally, maybe after four painstaking minutes scraped by, I would bust out a sentence in semi-perfect-but-perfectly-helpful Spanish, and the person would do a double-take and then I'd run away before the stress of it all gave me a heart attack. I just always worried too much about making a mistake with words. One thing I don't like is ANYTHING I AM NOT GOOD AT. True story. Swimming (although that may have more to do with the whole bathing suit thing). Video games. Marathons. The list goes on and on. And when it comes to language, I am very, VERY self-conscious. I actually feel a great deal of disappointment in myself because of the fact that I constantly end sentences and phrases with prepositions. This drives me crazy. I highly doubt anyone else cares, or that anyone was even listening to what I was saying or writing in the first place. But to imagine messing up entire sentences PUBLICLY makes me want to put on all white and go rock in a corner somewhere. Fuck that, lady you go find the bathroom yourSELF.
I took a dozen more Spanish classes at UCSB. They were less intimate than our sessions with The Borris. I didn't really care for any of the professors. They didn't really care for me. I didn't try to distinguish myself from my peers, and my learning curve tuckered itself out. In my linguistics class, I all-but phoned in my presence. I waltzed into class late one day, texting my boyfriend at the time about dinner plans (omg lol ttyl), only to find people reciting poems in Spanish that they'd memorized. I looked at my peers' faces to make sure I was in the right class, then hastily made an exit before I had to try to make up some "Rosas son rojas" shit. When did I lose my zest for the language??
It wasn't until I graduated from college that I actually put my eight years of studying the Spanish language to any use. No, I didn't travel to Europe and go running with the bulls. I was busy sucking the teat of the service industry in hoity-toity downtown Santa Barbara, whose entire back-of-house staff is dominated by talented chefs from Mexico. When you go to a restaurant in Santa Barbara, you are greeted by the young hot hostess with the dangly earrings and the side-swept bangs. She leads you to a table, where your surfer hunk of a server lists the evening's specials to you. He directs your difficult questions to the nicely dressed, slightly older gentleman with the manager's smile and efficient demeanor. When your inquisitions have been satisfied, the dreamy server returns and shakes his sun-streaked locks from his eyes as he jots down your order and you settle into your seat and wait for your food to materialize. As a patron, what you don't know is that because you changed five hundred things about your order, your server is about to have the most complicated language barrier battle of his life. Imagine being a chef, standing in front of a hot flame in an overheated kitchen in a warm town, cooking food to-order for hundreds of customers with different modifications on each ticket. Then imagine stressed-out servers shouting important specifics at you for each ticket in a language that is secondary to you. The amount of tension created by this scenario is quadrupled by the fact that the kitchen staff all have access to many sharp knives. It was this extreme environment of terse, mixed-up communication that forced me to reach into my supply kit and pull out my Spanish vocabulary. Granted, half the time the guys in the kitchen laughed at me and corrected me because many of the words I was accustomed to were either outdated or nonexistent for SoCal Spanish. However... after a certain amount of effort on my part, I was gradually accepted as a pseudo-Spanish-speaker, and a camaraderie formed between my Mexican coworkers and me. They started referring to me as la Senorita Guerita, and I proudly translated anxious new servers' requests to the kitchen, joking with the chefs at the doe-eyed unilingual lass's expense. Jajaja.
Because I prided myself so much on being a part of the Mexican community at my restaurant in Santa Barbara, I was utterly thrilled when, after our company Christmas party last year, a group of the guys from the kitchen asked me to go with them to their bar, La Copa. My female coworkers were NOT so happy about this invitation, and immediately started mom-ing me and warning me that they'd ground me if I even THOUGHT about going there, yadda yadda yadda. We'd all heard the stories from that bar. That was where the guys got so drunk that we wouldn't see them for days and all of a sudden a random cousin of theirs would be working for them until they got their shit together again. That was where married men had mistresses, and single men had hookers. And some single men had MALE hookers. And (singlewhitefemale)'s did not belong. Buuuut... in the good ol' Christmas spirit, heightened by a few yard-long Hefeweizen influences, I grabbed the arm of mi mejor amigo de la cocina and told him that as long as he would keep an eye out for me, I would go. Note to everyone: you should always, ALWAYS listen to your girl friends when they're telling you not to go do stupid drunken shit.
La Copa. Well. First of all, there were only five women in the whole bar. I was one of them. And incidentally, I was the only non-prostitute one. Aaaand the only clueless-looking white girl sitting there with a Corona in her hand and a posse of grinning Mexican dudes around her. It would have been an insecure seventh-grader's dream for the amount of guys coming up and asking me to dance with them. Well, it wasn't exactly like they asked me. They just poked me on the shoulder and nodded at the dance floor, and then stood there waiting. I said "No gracias" like a hundred times before my friend started telling them I was with him and that they needed to stop asking. Five minutes later, the same exact line of guys started asking again. I was more than a little weirded out at that point. I sat glued to my barstool of safety, my arm pressed firmly against my friend's, which I had decided was "home" in this situation. When my own coworkers started asking me to dance, I started nervously giggling and saying no, while a cold sweat was glittering across my hairline. I pressed harder against my friend's arm, willing my "home" to get up off his ass and take me to my real home. He committed an epic friendship fail and told me to dance with one of the guys. Sergio, my favorite dishwasher. Okay. Nothing against Sergio. He's a good guy. Very sweet. We joked around all the time at work, and he always helped me when I was being macho and trying to carry too much stuff or was in danger of dropping anything (which was always). So really, nothing personal, Sergio. It's just that I was watching one of my married coworkers grab the breasts of one of the hooker-ladies and squeeze them like those stress-relief balls that my boss had to keep in his desk after he had an anxiety-induced heart attack. And I was watching men on the dance floor grabbing the asses of the other hookers and putting their fingers under the ladies' skirts and I started panickinganditstartedfeelingtoowarminthebarandIjustneededsomeairandnoSergioIdon'twannadancewithyouand-- all of a sudden I was being led by Sergio to the dance floor. This is it, (singlewhitefemale). Just remember: nosenoseNOSE! groingroinGROIN!! I smiled fakely at Sergio as I discreetly practiced flat palm thrusts behind my back. As I tried to gauge whether or not I could truly smash his nose into his brain if necessary, Sergio placed one hand in my left and the other on my upper back/shoulder area. Keeping a good two feet between our bodies, he began to shuffle side-to-side to the mariachi band. I raised my eyebrows in confusion. I looked back into my junior high references, sticking back the self-defense lessons and selecting instead memories from the school dances. We were replicating the exact junior high dance that everyone jokes about, only this time instead of my preteen hormones being annoyed by the distance between us, I was fist-pumping my joy behind his neck. As I looked around, I became aware that other than the guy feeling up the hooker next to us, everyone else was mimicking our modest sway on the dance floor. Was it the traditional Mexican bar dance? If so, halle-fucking-lujah.
When we got back to the bar everyone was slapping Sergio's back in approval and they had all bought me like five hundred Coronas. I looked at their smiles skeptically, but saw in them such a genuine sense of generosity and welcoming. I realized this was the first time I was hanging out with them on their turf, and I was the only girl from the restaurant to dare to enter the super sketch-town place they frequented. I smiled back at them, picked up one of the beers, and pretended to drink it. (Come on. I might really like beer but I'm not a comPLETE idiot. That one creepy guy was coming back to tap me on the shoulder to ask me to dance again, and I needed aaaaaaall my wits about me.) A half hour later, I was chatting up a storm with all the guys and not caring if I floundered on my Spanish at all. I felt truly accepted. So when I jokingly leaned in to the lady of the night who was letting my married coworker get all kinds of handsy on her and said in my form of Spanish, "What are you doing, you're WAY better than him!" I expected everyone else to laugh along with me. This was not the case. Mister Married shoved away from her and got in my face, yelling obscenities in Spanish and thrusting his finger at my nose. My friend jumped in front of me, trying to calm him down. Tears filled my eyes as I tried to explain that I had been just joking, and my false sense of comfort shattered around my feet. Everyone in the bar was fixated on the stupid white girl causing a bar-brawl about a hooker. I decided that was probably the best time to go. My friend grabbed me and shoved our way to the exit. About twenty hands tugged at me on the way out. Not in an aggressive way, but more in a solicitous way, as if I had just been playing hard to get the whole night by telling them I wasn't interested. I followed one of the grabby hands up to the face it belonged to and saw a pair of eyes that legitimately just had a question mark there. Like, eh eh? Maybe? In the blur around me I shook my head in slow motion, and he dropped his hand, a new shadow of defeat taking over his features. Then, we were outside, pushing past more throngs of curious hombres, and scrambling into a cab. After I heard my seatbelt click in safety, I turned to my friend. "Well, tonight I learned that you should never insult a Mexican in front of his hooker." He laughed at me, shaking his head.
"Estas loca, Senorita Guerita." Then he pulled a Corona out of his pocket and started to sip on it, gazing out the window at the fuzzy Christmas lights.
Well. Anyway. I've been speaking a lot more Spanish lately. Yep. I'm preeeeeetty much just a bad-ass now. I'm going to take you on a little journey to the very beginning of my history with the Spanish language. For me, it all started when I was in the eighth grade. Since I quit marching band after seventh grade (which I realized later was a mistake cuz there were actually hot nerdy band guys in high school, damnit), I was able to actually choose my elective class for my second year at the junior high. This was a big deal-- while I had been tripping over my shoelaces and accidentally bashing people in the jaw with my flute case, everyone else had been bonding over the generic set of elective classes, gaining coolness levels by not caring about the quality of their freshly sanded wooden bowls but more about who made-out with whom in the photo lab's Red Room. I was giddy with fourteen-year-old girl adrenaline at the prospect of rubbing elbows with non-nerds in a class other than P.E. (We called Phys Ed "PE." I'm sure that's self-explanatory, but it just occurred to me that maybe it's not. But I mean... it is. Right?) I was so tired of seeing the same faces in the desks around me in every classroom-- all the same honors students taking school a *little* too seriously in our rush to be perfect mini-adults before our balls even had a chance to drop. I yearned for a fresh batch of blood to mix with, to hear the gossip of the more sexually advanced, and to develop crushes on the "bad boys" that I otherwise never had a chance to be around.
As I daydreamed about tossing flour into the air with all the other care-free students in Home Ec, pretending not to be super pumped about learning to make a pie crust in a perfect rendition of Snow White's lacy artistry... my mother was discovering that Spanish was going to be offered as an elective for eighth graders for the first time at our school. My powdered sugar dreams slipped soundlessly through the cracks of my doughy fingers and morphed into "suenos" before they hit the floor. Yet again, I was signed up for an elective that was surely to house every helplessly nerdy try-hard student and myself. Thanks Mom.
I was surprised to find that the variety of students in my Spanish class was actually more diverse than every other class of mine. It seemed all kinds of moms had forced their kids into taking an academic course as an elective. I scanned the mixture of jocks and druggees, until SHE crossed the ugly off-blue carpet in one sturdy quarterbacker's stride and took the the center of the room.
"Hola, ethtudianteth. Mi nombre eth Thenora Borrith de Barthelona. Thoy la profethora de ethta clathe."
We stared. Some of us may have even clapped. There she... towered. At least six feet tall. Probably closer to eleven. White as can be, with a mommish style radiating a faint yet terrifying glow of sheer power and strength. Within half a minute, she had the attention of every hormone-rattled brain in that room. I honestly can't explain the hold her presence has over people. I mean, here I am actually TRYING to explain it, and I realize that it just sounds stupid. But... when she speaks in a room, you feel like you'd better listen to what she's saying, or else you're either going to get a spanking from her seriously intimidating forearm or you're going to miss out on a sentence that will be crucially important to you later in a life-or-death situation. Yeah. I guess that's the best way I can describe it.
I lapped up every word that lisped out of Senora Borris de Barcelona's lips. Though I must say that it was difficult, especially at first, to distinguish between what SHE was physically saying with her mouth and what she wanted US to say with ours. Her Castilian accent caused much confusion. I distinctly remember going through the numbers that first day: "Repeat after me. THERO."
"Thero."
"No no no, I say THERO, you say CERO!! Okay? THERO!"
"Sssss--uhh--ther...o.... Thero?"
"NO! SAY-RO! CERO! SSSSSS-ERO!! I SAY THE 'TH' SOUND, NOT YOU!"
And it was fine until we got to numero "doth" and had to go through it all over again. Eventually the Thenora had to just abandon her usual accent and give it to us straight-up. After every lecture she gave she would lean her shadow over our desks and shout "WRITE IT DOWN!" in case any of us were so caught up in watching her large arm swoops that we forgot to take notes. We started referring to her (secretly) as The Borris. We all loved her. Well, and we feared her. I more loved her than feared her though, and inwardly I aspired to be as Spanish-ly savvy as she. I slurped up that vocabulary as if it were Nantucket Nectar lemonade (I didn't drink booze for another four years, so I had a pretty solid addiction to lemonade, and this particular brand was my bottle of choice). I got a raging boner when I discovered that the same grammatical rules I had devoted my heart to in English existed for the Spanish language as well. I could NOT get enough.
Freshman year of high school I entered Spanish 2 with a different instructor, and she chose me as her Student of the Year the first month because I was the only student to turn in a flawless paper for our initial essay. At the lunch thrown in the awarded students' honor, she found out I was a freshman and then seemed upset that she'd chosen me. I was too busy waving across the room excitedly at The Borris to be bothered by the fact that my own teacher was pouting, though. The glorious Borris sat a good four feet above the student trying to have a presence at her side. I felt a kick of jealousy for the girl she had chosen.
I took Spanish for the next three years in high school. Incidentally, The Borris was my teacher for all of them. I was thrilled. However, this is the reason that after taking five years of Spanish, I could still go into a group of Mexicans and be positive that they were speaking Mandarin. I essentially learned text-book Spain-Spanish with a Castilian accent. I studied Nineteenth Century novels and absorbed the culture of The Borris's experiences from living in Spain for eighteen years. I could write ten-paged essays about the politics of Don Quixote, but when a woman stopped me on the street and asked me directions to "El bano?" I dropped to the ground and played dead. On many occasions, I resorted to idiot-status sign language and squeaks of exasperation when confronted with someone who only spoke Spanish. Finally, maybe after four painstaking minutes scraped by, I would bust out a sentence in semi-perfect-but-perfectly-helpful Spanish, and the person would do a double-take and then I'd run away before the stress of it all gave me a heart attack. I just always worried too much about making a mistake with words. One thing I don't like is ANYTHING I AM NOT GOOD AT. True story. Swimming (although that may have more to do with the whole bathing suit thing). Video games. Marathons. The list goes on and on. And when it comes to language, I am very, VERY self-conscious. I actually feel a great deal of disappointment in myself because of the fact that I constantly end sentences and phrases with prepositions. This drives me crazy. I highly doubt anyone else cares, or that anyone was even listening to what I was saying or writing in the first place. But to imagine messing up entire sentences PUBLICLY makes me want to put on all white and go rock in a corner somewhere. Fuck that, lady you go find the bathroom yourSELF.
I took a dozen more Spanish classes at UCSB. They were less intimate than our sessions with The Borris. I didn't really care for any of the professors. They didn't really care for me. I didn't try to distinguish myself from my peers, and my learning curve tuckered itself out. In my linguistics class, I all-but phoned in my presence. I waltzed into class late one day, texting my boyfriend at the time about dinner plans (omg lol ttyl), only to find people reciting poems in Spanish that they'd memorized. I looked at my peers' faces to make sure I was in the right class, then hastily made an exit before I had to try to make up some "Rosas son rojas" shit. When did I lose my zest for the language??
It wasn't until I graduated from college that I actually put my eight years of studying the Spanish language to any use. No, I didn't travel to Europe and go running with the bulls. I was busy sucking the teat of the service industry in hoity-toity downtown Santa Barbara, whose entire back-of-house staff is dominated by talented chefs from Mexico. When you go to a restaurant in Santa Barbara, you are greeted by the young hot hostess with the dangly earrings and the side-swept bangs. She leads you to a table, where your surfer hunk of a server lists the evening's specials to you. He directs your difficult questions to the nicely dressed, slightly older gentleman with the manager's smile and efficient demeanor. When your inquisitions have been satisfied, the dreamy server returns and shakes his sun-streaked locks from his eyes as he jots down your order and you settle into your seat and wait for your food to materialize. As a patron, what you don't know is that because you changed five hundred things about your order, your server is about to have the most complicated language barrier battle of his life. Imagine being a chef, standing in front of a hot flame in an overheated kitchen in a warm town, cooking food to-order for hundreds of customers with different modifications on each ticket. Then imagine stressed-out servers shouting important specifics at you for each ticket in a language that is secondary to you. The amount of tension created by this scenario is quadrupled by the fact that the kitchen staff all have access to many sharp knives. It was this extreme environment of terse, mixed-up communication that forced me to reach into my supply kit and pull out my Spanish vocabulary. Granted, half the time the guys in the kitchen laughed at me and corrected me because many of the words I was accustomed to were either outdated or nonexistent for SoCal Spanish. However... after a certain amount of effort on my part, I was gradually accepted as a pseudo-Spanish-speaker, and a camaraderie formed between my Mexican coworkers and me. They started referring to me as la Senorita Guerita, and I proudly translated anxious new servers' requests to the kitchen, joking with the chefs at the doe-eyed unilingual lass's expense. Jajaja.
Because I prided myself so much on being a part of the Mexican community at my restaurant in Santa Barbara, I was utterly thrilled when, after our company Christmas party last year, a group of the guys from the kitchen asked me to go with them to their bar, La Copa. My female coworkers were NOT so happy about this invitation, and immediately started mom-ing me and warning me that they'd ground me if I even THOUGHT about going there, yadda yadda yadda. We'd all heard the stories from that bar. That was where the guys got so drunk that we wouldn't see them for days and all of a sudden a random cousin of theirs would be working for them until they got their shit together again. That was where married men had mistresses, and single men had hookers. And some single men had MALE hookers. And (singlewhitefemale)'s did not belong. Buuuut... in the good ol' Christmas spirit, heightened by a few yard-long Hefeweizen influences, I grabbed the arm of mi mejor amigo de la cocina and told him that as long as he would keep an eye out for me, I would go. Note to everyone: you should always, ALWAYS listen to your girl friends when they're telling you not to go do stupid drunken shit.
La Copa. Well. First of all, there were only five women in the whole bar. I was one of them. And incidentally, I was the only non-prostitute one. Aaaand the only clueless-looking white girl sitting there with a Corona in her hand and a posse of grinning Mexican dudes around her. It would have been an insecure seventh-grader's dream for the amount of guys coming up and asking me to dance with them. Well, it wasn't exactly like they asked me. They just poked me on the shoulder and nodded at the dance floor, and then stood there waiting. I said "No gracias" like a hundred times before my friend started telling them I was with him and that they needed to stop asking. Five minutes later, the same exact line of guys started asking again. I was more than a little weirded out at that point. I sat glued to my barstool of safety, my arm pressed firmly against my friend's, which I had decided was "home" in this situation. When my own coworkers started asking me to dance, I started nervously giggling and saying no, while a cold sweat was glittering across my hairline. I pressed harder against my friend's arm, willing my "home" to get up off his ass and take me to my real home. He committed an epic friendship fail and told me to dance with one of the guys. Sergio, my favorite dishwasher. Okay. Nothing against Sergio. He's a good guy. Very sweet. We joked around all the time at work, and he always helped me when I was being macho and trying to carry too much stuff or was in danger of dropping anything (which was always). So really, nothing personal, Sergio. It's just that I was watching one of my married coworkers grab the breasts of one of the hooker-ladies and squeeze them like those stress-relief balls that my boss had to keep in his desk after he had an anxiety-induced heart attack. And I was watching men on the dance floor grabbing the asses of the other hookers and putting their fingers under the ladies' skirts and I started panickinganditstartedfeelingtoowarminthebarandIjustneededsomeairandnoSergioIdon'twannadancewithyouand-- all of a sudden I was being led by Sergio to the dance floor. This is it, (singlewhitefemale). Just remember: nosenoseNOSE! groingroinGROIN!! I smiled fakely at Sergio as I discreetly practiced flat palm thrusts behind my back. As I tried to gauge whether or not I could truly smash his nose into his brain if necessary, Sergio placed one hand in my left and the other on my upper back/shoulder area. Keeping a good two feet between our bodies, he began to shuffle side-to-side to the mariachi band. I raised my eyebrows in confusion. I looked back into my junior high references, sticking back the self-defense lessons and selecting instead memories from the school dances. We were replicating the exact junior high dance that everyone jokes about, only this time instead of my preteen hormones being annoyed by the distance between us, I was fist-pumping my joy behind his neck. As I looked around, I became aware that other than the guy feeling up the hooker next to us, everyone else was mimicking our modest sway on the dance floor. Was it the traditional Mexican bar dance? If so, halle-fucking-lujah.
When we got back to the bar everyone was slapping Sergio's back in approval and they had all bought me like five hundred Coronas. I looked at their smiles skeptically, but saw in them such a genuine sense of generosity and welcoming. I realized this was the first time I was hanging out with them on their turf, and I was the only girl from the restaurant to dare to enter the super sketch-town place they frequented. I smiled back at them, picked up one of the beers, and pretended to drink it. (Come on. I might really like beer but I'm not a comPLETE idiot. That one creepy guy was coming back to tap me on the shoulder to ask me to dance again, and I needed aaaaaaall my wits about me.) A half hour later, I was chatting up a storm with all the guys and not caring if I floundered on my Spanish at all. I felt truly accepted. So when I jokingly leaned in to the lady of the night who was letting my married coworker get all kinds of handsy on her and said in my form of Spanish, "What are you doing, you're WAY better than him!" I expected everyone else to laugh along with me. This was not the case. Mister Married shoved away from her and got in my face, yelling obscenities in Spanish and thrusting his finger at my nose. My friend jumped in front of me, trying to calm him down. Tears filled my eyes as I tried to explain that I had been just joking, and my false sense of comfort shattered around my feet. Everyone in the bar was fixated on the stupid white girl causing a bar-brawl about a hooker. I decided that was probably the best time to go. My friend grabbed me and shoved our way to the exit. About twenty hands tugged at me on the way out. Not in an aggressive way, but more in a solicitous way, as if I had just been playing hard to get the whole night by telling them I wasn't interested. I followed one of the grabby hands up to the face it belonged to and saw a pair of eyes that legitimately just had a question mark there. Like, eh eh? Maybe? In the blur around me I shook my head in slow motion, and he dropped his hand, a new shadow of defeat taking over his features. Then, we were outside, pushing past more throngs of curious hombres, and scrambling into a cab. After I heard my seatbelt click in safety, I turned to my friend. "Well, tonight I learned that you should never insult a Mexican in front of his hooker." He laughed at me, shaking his head.
"Estas loca, Senorita Guerita." Then he pulled a Corona out of his pocket and started to sip on it, gazing out the window at the fuzzy Christmas lights.
Sunday, September 4, 2011
Burning (Wo)man
Well, today has been interesting, to say the least.
I had just bid adieu to my brother and his girlfriend who were visiting this weekend, when my fairy godmother of sorts rushed in the front door shouting that her husband J is in the hospital with a staph infection from the Burning Man festival and that he might lose his leg.
A little Back Story. I have known SA my entire life. She is THEE most positive, energetic, magical person I have ever met. She is eleven hundred feet tall with a larger-than-life personality and a heavy Texas accent that swoops to the ground and back when she says her own very southernly-sounding name. Oh SA. I have written about her before. When I was very young, probably nine or ten years old, I had to write a paper on my "hero." I picked her instantly. Though I was too young to really understand or remember most of it, I knew that she'd battled breast cancer and she'd come out of it with both fists still swinging, leaving the cancer to die in a ditch somewhere with a bloodied lip and a bruised ribcage. The cancer had taken one of her breasts, but from it she'd gained the strength and wisdom to be a beacon of glittery magical hope for all the women around her who unfortunately fell victim to the "C" word as well. I remember hearing her say with pain on her tongue, "You can't choose the other seven." She was referring to the statistic that one in seven women in America is diagnosed with breast cancer, and she was devastated to find that women around her kept getting infected with the same disease she had just overcome. Even though my head was mostly filled with relationship gossip from the latest Babysitter's Club novel, I was touched through to the very tip of my soul with the realization that she would willingly endure all the chemo in the world if it would spare the rest of us around her. I think that was the first time I noticed the halo of white light hovering around the tips of her newly-budding curly locks. I knew I'd found my hero.
I call SA my fairy godmother because as far back as I can remember, she's been POOF!ing into existence at my front door with whatever exactly it was my family and I needed most. Most of my clothing until age eighteen was supplied by the hundreds of Hefty bags that she'd hauled into our living room over the years. It was like a holiday every time her bouncing silver ringlets bobbed by the window, and all four of my siblings and I would crowd into the tiny living room with our pink faces lifted expectantly and our little fingers ready to pick through the piles in the official Sorting Ceremony (Harry Potter, anyone?). We would sift through the treasures, making piles for each member of the family according to who could yell, "I CALL DIBS!" the fastest or the loudest at each displayed item. This process was usually accompanied by homemade acorn waffles from my mom's kitchen and SA's exclamations of delight when my mom handed her a plate full of them topped with homemade strawberry syrup. "I must have done SOMEthing right in my life to be here in this moment," I recall her saying between mouthfuls of my mom's culinary genius. To this day, I repeat those words whenever I'm overcome by love or joy or any overwhelming nameless sentiment, and I always send a silent prayer of gratitude her way.
I wish I could say my prayers had worked. Or maybe I just didn't know what I was supposed to be praying for. Or maybe they DID work, and that's why the results from the biopsy she just had to have came back negative, proving that she ultimately (hopefully) has had the last laugh with her cell-blackening foe. I couldn't fist-pump any sort of response to that bit of news, though, because before my gallery show opened this week SA informed us all that she has two brain tumors sinking their wretched claws into a large portion of her cerebral matter. My mother, my little sister, and I all stood around her in the reverberating echo of all of our hearts hitting the floor and skidding to a halt under her shaking six-foot frame. We wordlessly placed our six hands on her head, willing whatever healing power we possess to wrap itself around her well-being. Willing God, Goddess, The Cosmos, The Powers That Be-- whatever entity is responsible for beating down resilient fairy godmothers-- to please, please spare this woman any unnecessary turmoil and please, please help her to defeat this brutal beast like she has so many in the past. And oddly... once we all recovered from absorbing the awful news, we all felt instantly that she would come out of this a victor. If anyone can overcome two brain tumors, it's SA and her rainbow aura of butterfly wings that hovers behind her, whispering a tribute to her healing powers and capacity for love.
The next day we went to lunch at the Big Sky Cafe in San Luis Obispo so that SA, also vegan, could get her organic, locally-grown, sustainable vegetable platter. She sat at the head of the table, her own head haloed by a circular tile pattern in the wall behind her, telling us stories of her experiences as a psychiatric nurse in a prison ward. She told us that she could will herself to give medical help to any criminal except for an animal abuser; that, to her, there was no forgiveness for taking out violence on an innocent animal. I held her words in the palm of my hand and then slowly, quietly tucked them into my pocket as I gazed at her pale face lit up by my fiery respect. She then added that if she had to tend to a child molester, she would "pack his balls REALLY tight" when... packing his balls... although I just realized I don't know what that even means, medically. So many stories spilled from her lips during that lunch, and we all sat transfixed by her experiences. Well, no, my sister Hannah and my mom were laughing hysterically, while my brother-in-law and I kept giggling nervously and looking from side to side at patrons chewing their food while SA yelled out yarns about wiping poop off of old mans' shriveled penises and how no one else would help the black doctors back in Texas when she was training because they all considered them "n---ers!" and such. Apparently she was THEE only white nurse who would sit at the lunch table with the black doctors and nurses, and because of this she returned home one day to find the KKK setting things around her house on fire. Jesus. By looking at her, you would never know that this bubbly woman with a memorable Southern drawl and size 11 ruby red slippers has in fact looked the Devil in the face during an arm-wrestling match and walloped Him into defeat.
So today, when SA came bursting through the door with a half-crazed expression, her voice breaking and her frame shrinking into vulnerability, we saw that she can bear any amount of pain or struggle on her own behalf: but to witness her husband of thirty-four years, her "gem," SUFFERING.... That was her breaking point. I slipped my purse over my shoulder, my hand into hers, and said, "I'm coming with you." Anything to stop the smiling woman with two brain tumors and a large scar for a left breast from crying.
Now, because of SA's current medical condition, she jokes that she's ALLOWED to be forgetful. But what the fuck's MY excuse?? There I was, helping her to scramble around her house grabbing the particular items that her husband J had requested from his hospital bed, and every two minutes we both had to stop and stare at each other with blank expressions, muttering, "What was I just looking for??" After about an hour of this, we decided we'd collected all the most-essential requests, and we headed back to the hospital, our arms laden with wicker baskets full of phone chargers and positive wishes.
On the drive back, I sat there patting SA's hand and sipping her home-brewed kombucha tea from a large Mason jar. She looked at me (while I nervously looked at the road she was ignoring) and said that I drank the tea like an addict. This was after I'd confessed that my bad drinking habits are mostly to blame for the thirty excess pounds ruffling around my body frame. I couldn't take offense to her words because SA herself is a recovering addict and is in her 27th year of sobriety. She is an avid member of AA and sponsors many people into a happy sober existence. She squeezed my fingers and announced that she was taking me to her next meeting. I screwed the lid back on the jar and started squirming with my internal discomfort. Is she right? Does she see through me to the things I've shrugged off and put on the back shelf of my consciousness? Or is she merely projecting onto me the struggles she's witnessed and experienced in her own life of overcoming a massive drug addiction? I can't know the answer. Because even as I know that I am not in danger of harming myself and am in fact in the healthiest mental state I've been in since I can remember... I know that I can only achieve so much when I am constantly handicapped by hangovers and financial duress from exhausting all my expendable income on "going out." I shudder at the slap I feel to my pride when I imagine actually attending an AA meeting. Actually admitting, to the WORLD, that I might just maybe belong in one of them. My mom and sister say they're curious and would eagerly attend one of the meetings just to see what goes on behind those anonymous doors, but... I literally shake in my hemp-hewn boots just THINKING about it. I turned to SA: "Okay, I'll go with you to ONE meeting... but I'm NOT introducing myself." She just smiled, called me "her little drug addict," and said I didn't have to do anything I didn't want to do. And left me to work out my inner demons.
Hm. I do believe everything happens for a reason. I am so glad I was here in San Luis today, here at my mom's house to answer the door when my heartbroken hero needed a shoulder to lean her shaking hand on as we marched down the hospital corridors. When she thanked me for helping her get through this one day, for writing down everything that she needed to remember so that her tumors couldn't push the information into oblivion, I looked up at her face lined with both determination and love. Gazing up at her soft blue eyes sparkling with tears and triumphs, I realized that if all I have to overcome is a roomful of strangers being privy to my affinity for Hefeweizen and cheap white wine, then, well, I can damn well put on my really large big-girl pants and do it. And as she hugged me again and I wrote my phone number in huge font for her on a scrap of paper in case she needed any moral support or note-taker in the days to come, I thought to myself, "You know what (singlewhitefemale)? You must have done SOMEthing right in your life to be here in this moment."
I had just bid adieu to my brother and his girlfriend who were visiting this weekend, when my fairy godmother of sorts rushed in the front door shouting that her husband J is in the hospital with a staph infection from the Burning Man festival and that he might lose his leg.
A little Back Story. I have known SA my entire life. She is THEE most positive, energetic, magical person I have ever met. She is eleven hundred feet tall with a larger-than-life personality and a heavy Texas accent that swoops to the ground and back when she says her own very southernly-sounding name. Oh SA. I have written about her before. When I was very young, probably nine or ten years old, I had to write a paper on my "hero." I picked her instantly. Though I was too young to really understand or remember most of it, I knew that she'd battled breast cancer and she'd come out of it with both fists still swinging, leaving the cancer to die in a ditch somewhere with a bloodied lip and a bruised ribcage. The cancer had taken one of her breasts, but from it she'd gained the strength and wisdom to be a beacon of glittery magical hope for all the women around her who unfortunately fell victim to the "C" word as well. I remember hearing her say with pain on her tongue, "You can't choose the other seven." She was referring to the statistic that one in seven women in America is diagnosed with breast cancer, and she was devastated to find that women around her kept getting infected with the same disease she had just overcome. Even though my head was mostly filled with relationship gossip from the latest Babysitter's Club novel, I was touched through to the very tip of my soul with the realization that she would willingly endure all the chemo in the world if it would spare the rest of us around her. I think that was the first time I noticed the halo of white light hovering around the tips of her newly-budding curly locks. I knew I'd found my hero.
I call SA my fairy godmother because as far back as I can remember, she's been POOF!ing into existence at my front door with whatever exactly it was my family and I needed most. Most of my clothing until age eighteen was supplied by the hundreds of Hefty bags that she'd hauled into our living room over the years. It was like a holiday every time her bouncing silver ringlets bobbed by the window, and all four of my siblings and I would crowd into the tiny living room with our pink faces lifted expectantly and our little fingers ready to pick through the piles in the official Sorting Ceremony (Harry Potter, anyone?). We would sift through the treasures, making piles for each member of the family according to who could yell, "I CALL DIBS!" the fastest or the loudest at each displayed item. This process was usually accompanied by homemade acorn waffles from my mom's kitchen and SA's exclamations of delight when my mom handed her a plate full of them topped with homemade strawberry syrup. "I must have done SOMEthing right in my life to be here in this moment," I recall her saying between mouthfuls of my mom's culinary genius. To this day, I repeat those words whenever I'm overcome by love or joy or any overwhelming nameless sentiment, and I always send a silent prayer of gratitude her way.
I wish I could say my prayers had worked. Or maybe I just didn't know what I was supposed to be praying for. Or maybe they DID work, and that's why the results from the biopsy she just had to have came back negative, proving that she ultimately (hopefully) has had the last laugh with her cell-blackening foe. I couldn't fist-pump any sort of response to that bit of news, though, because before my gallery show opened this week SA informed us all that she has two brain tumors sinking their wretched claws into a large portion of her cerebral matter. My mother, my little sister, and I all stood around her in the reverberating echo of all of our hearts hitting the floor and skidding to a halt under her shaking six-foot frame. We wordlessly placed our six hands on her head, willing whatever healing power we possess to wrap itself around her well-being. Willing God, Goddess, The Cosmos, The Powers That Be-- whatever entity is responsible for beating down resilient fairy godmothers-- to please, please spare this woman any unnecessary turmoil and please, please help her to defeat this brutal beast like she has so many in the past. And oddly... once we all recovered from absorbing the awful news, we all felt instantly that she would come out of this a victor. If anyone can overcome two brain tumors, it's SA and her rainbow aura of butterfly wings that hovers behind her, whispering a tribute to her healing powers and capacity for love.
The next day we went to lunch at the Big Sky Cafe in San Luis Obispo so that SA, also vegan, could get her organic, locally-grown, sustainable vegetable platter. She sat at the head of the table, her own head haloed by a circular tile pattern in the wall behind her, telling us stories of her experiences as a psychiatric nurse in a prison ward. She told us that she could will herself to give medical help to any criminal except for an animal abuser; that, to her, there was no forgiveness for taking out violence on an innocent animal. I held her words in the palm of my hand and then slowly, quietly tucked them into my pocket as I gazed at her pale face lit up by my fiery respect. She then added that if she had to tend to a child molester, she would "pack his balls REALLY tight" when... packing his balls... although I just realized I don't know what that even means, medically. So many stories spilled from her lips during that lunch, and we all sat transfixed by her experiences. Well, no, my sister Hannah and my mom were laughing hysterically, while my brother-in-law and I kept giggling nervously and looking from side to side at patrons chewing their food while SA yelled out yarns about wiping poop off of old mans' shriveled penises and how no one else would help the black doctors back in Texas when she was training because they all considered them "n---ers!" and such. Apparently she was THEE only white nurse who would sit at the lunch table with the black doctors and nurses, and because of this she returned home one day to find the KKK setting things around her house on fire. Jesus. By looking at her, you would never know that this bubbly woman with a memorable Southern drawl and size 11 ruby red slippers has in fact looked the Devil in the face during an arm-wrestling match and walloped Him into defeat.
So today, when SA came bursting through the door with a half-crazed expression, her voice breaking and her frame shrinking into vulnerability, we saw that she can bear any amount of pain or struggle on her own behalf: but to witness her husband of thirty-four years, her "gem," SUFFERING.... That was her breaking point. I slipped my purse over my shoulder, my hand into hers, and said, "I'm coming with you." Anything to stop the smiling woman with two brain tumors and a large scar for a left breast from crying.
Now, because of SA's current medical condition, she jokes that she's ALLOWED to be forgetful. But what the fuck's MY excuse?? There I was, helping her to scramble around her house grabbing the particular items that her husband J had requested from his hospital bed, and every two minutes we both had to stop and stare at each other with blank expressions, muttering, "What was I just looking for??" After about an hour of this, we decided we'd collected all the most-essential requests, and we headed back to the hospital, our arms laden with wicker baskets full of phone chargers and positive wishes.
On the drive back, I sat there patting SA's hand and sipping her home-brewed kombucha tea from a large Mason jar. She looked at me (while I nervously looked at the road she was ignoring) and said that I drank the tea like an addict. This was after I'd confessed that my bad drinking habits are mostly to blame for the thirty excess pounds ruffling around my body frame. I couldn't take offense to her words because SA herself is a recovering addict and is in her 27th year of sobriety. She is an avid member of AA and sponsors many people into a happy sober existence. She squeezed my fingers and announced that she was taking me to her next meeting. I screwed the lid back on the jar and started squirming with my internal discomfort. Is she right? Does she see through me to the things I've shrugged off and put on the back shelf of my consciousness? Or is she merely projecting onto me the struggles she's witnessed and experienced in her own life of overcoming a massive drug addiction? I can't know the answer. Because even as I know that I am not in danger of harming myself and am in fact in the healthiest mental state I've been in since I can remember... I know that I can only achieve so much when I am constantly handicapped by hangovers and financial duress from exhausting all my expendable income on "going out." I shudder at the slap I feel to my pride when I imagine actually attending an AA meeting. Actually admitting, to the WORLD, that I might just maybe belong in one of them. My mom and sister say they're curious and would eagerly attend one of the meetings just to see what goes on behind those anonymous doors, but... I literally shake in my hemp-hewn boots just THINKING about it. I turned to SA: "Okay, I'll go with you to ONE meeting... but I'm NOT introducing myself." She just smiled, called me "her little drug addict," and said I didn't have to do anything I didn't want to do. And left me to work out my inner demons.
Hm. I do believe everything happens for a reason. I am so glad I was here in San Luis today, here at my mom's house to answer the door when my heartbroken hero needed a shoulder to lean her shaking hand on as we marched down the hospital corridors. When she thanked me for helping her get through this one day, for writing down everything that she needed to remember so that her tumors couldn't push the information into oblivion, I looked up at her face lined with both determination and love. Gazing up at her soft blue eyes sparkling with tears and triumphs, I realized that if all I have to overcome is a roomful of strangers being privy to my affinity for Hefeweizen and cheap white wine, then, well, I can damn well put on my really large big-girl pants and do it. And as she hugged me again and I wrote my phone number in huge font for her on a scrap of paper in case she needed any moral support or note-taker in the days to come, I thought to myself, "You know what (singlewhitefemale)? You must have done SOMEthing right in your life to be here in this moment."
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