SIBERIA/LA

it doesn’t sound like fighting, but the man is round shouldered and he talks loud. the dog pushes aside the vertical blinds and stares out at him, our neighbor standing in his driveway talking loud at somebody. it’s 7 a.m. and i want to get up and write, but i’m having a hard time. the new sheets are soft and it’s not so hot this morning and i miss jude, who is lying in bed not two inches from me. we didn’t see each other all day yesterday and our phones were cut off because we hadn’t paid the bill and she couldn’t send the secret naked pictures she took at work to remind me of the places i call home.

last night we switched sides on the bed and i kept getting confused in my sleep and turning the wrong way, turning to where she would be, turning to the mirror, to a dark undefined reflection of myself and of streaks of blue vertical lines coming through the window.

“did you walk the dog this morning,” she asks.
“i don’t remember,” i say, “i don’t remember when i walked her.”

she turns, throws her right leg around my body and holds me.

“did you use soap on your hair,” i ask, thinking about her walking into the shower last night before bed and complaining about not having any shampoo, showering because i told her she should. i couldn’t handle the smell of her sweat last night, sour like everything that goes bad in this small apartment. i loved sweat in new york, tickling my arms as it dripped down from my short sleeves down the inside of my elbow as we carried bags of groceries and a bottle of veuve clicquot we couldn’t afford down the steps of the union square station on to the sticky platform above the rat infested train tracks. i loved sweat then when it was the glue that kept us stuck on each other’s skin, kept our bones from falling like bent twigs into the fire, kept our lips from letting loose the words and the bluebirds we held inside, even when the alcohol was too much and i was standing on second avenue, screaming at the 300 pound bouncer outside bar none to come get some, even when later, walking down the narrow steps at the 14th street station to the L-train, she took a roundhouse right that just missed my chin because j. had disrespected her by putting her very large tits on my head. but there was no sweat though that early morning, our apartment glowing blue from the late moon or early sun, our clothes smelling of cigarettes and spilt lagers, when she jumped out of our mattress on the floor screaming, carrying a blanket to the futon where she dropped, her back to me, and i said to come back, to take it back, this thing we call our bed, this thing we call beauty, and as she moaned drunk on the futon i grabbed my bag and walked out into the 4 a.m. bushwick pavement, walking past the roasted chicken in the middle of the street and camus’s rats in the garbage bags. i was so sure at that moment that where i was headed toward was the edge of the world welcoming me with a wooden sign nailed to an old church pew, where creeks flow louder than birds or round mexican neighbors and meet at the base of a willow tree. and when the phone rang 3 hours later finding me asleep on a bench at union square park, a cop walking by as i smoothed my hair and wiped the spit from my chin, not bothering me because he too knew that i didn’t make it far enough, she asked where i was, where did i go. and i found my way back to the steps, to the train, to the ground beneath my ground.

she buries her face into my chin.

“i used the hotel shampoo we took from stardust,” she says. i hold her, pull her to me as the dog crawls up behind her. “you slept more with her than with me,” she says.

and i tell her that i was confused sleeping on this side of the bed, that i kept turning the wrong way to look for her, that my body remembers all the past journeys of nights, that i lost myself again in the dark, in my sleep, because it is hard to wash the blood of the dead from my skin with alcohol and hotel shampoo, and i hold her, hold her until there is no more need to care

this morning

about anything.

So those were the Brooklyn Days…(not to be confused with Harlow Roberts’s Hollywood Years and New York Times)

It’s sticky this morning like it was last night and it reminds me of New York, of Prospect Park, of Jude’s apartment in Brooklyn, of wanting nothing more than to get back in her bed and fuck until there was nothing else either of us wanted. She says I told her I loved her in my sleep on the second or third night that I was there.

I was there on a week long hide-out. “Let’s fuck for 48 straight hours,” we said to each other. Well, in between food/water breaks and passing out and walks to the park, we didn’t quite make it 48 hours straight, but we came as close as possible. I don’t know how much weight we lost in sweat that week. What happened was…

I was lifting another vodka rocks to my lips when my body just said stop. It was at a stupid bar on St. Marks where I once got into a fight with 6 Sacramento Kings’ fans, until some friends pulled me off and reminded me that there were 6 of them. The bar was always too crowded, the bartenders not too nice, too many TV’s going on at once either showing sports or bloopers or something or the other. It was a Friday night I think, but it was around 4 a.m. and the crowd had disappeared. We sat by the window and a beautiful friend who was with us, wearing her boots and a black skirt, kept mentioning that she didn’t like to wear panties. Anyway, this is where the vodka thing happened. I was in mid lift, the glass almost to my lips, when I could just hear my body saying, “Enough.”

After dozing off for a bit on a friend’s bed for a few, I hopped on the N uptown and headed home.

I was living in an 8×8 in Astoria in Queens. I took a nap and then headed back downtown to grab my bag, which I’d left at school, something I did whenever I’d go drinking ever since the laptop incident at Grassroots (lost it in one borough, found it in another, more in a later blog post). It was a drizzly day in May and I decided to take a walk after I picked up my bag. I walked uptown on Broadway, then 3rd Ave, across to the West Side, just walking, staring at all the tourists and all the fast moving New Yorkers and the tall buildings that blocked off the sky and the meat-on-stick carts on the sidewalk. New York is beautiful when you’re not looking at the inside of a bar. And I walked for 4 hours in the light rain trying to make up for all the nights I missed out on the city.

And when I got back to the apartment, I sat on my bed in the dark and watched Godard’s “Band Of Outsiders (Bande a Part)” and cried because I wanted so badly for my life to be a French New Wave film and I sat in the dark when the movie ended and stared at my clothes that hung from hooks on the walls and listened to the phone ring over and over, people wanting me to come out, to drink again, but I couldn’t, I couldn’t go out, I couldn’t answer the phone, I couldn’t.

At midnight, the phone rang again. It was Jude. She’d landed in Jersey. She’d returned from her family Vegas trip and wanted to say hello. And I told her I’d meet her at her apartment in an hour.

I told her I was never leaving her room. Then we fucked. And laughed. Cried. Fucked. Ate French cheese and crackers. And fucked. And one night in bed, I told her that we’d won, we’d won this game, that there was no more shame, no more regret.

So here we are this morning on the other side of the country, in an apartment not much bigger, still naked and sweaty, another weekend of screaming and fighting and laughing and writing behind us, and I hear people speaking Spanish outside our window and the dog scratching on the floor. And I tell myself again. We’ve won. Everything.

It’s Wednesday morning, 9 a.m., and I’m sitting here naked, still trying not to read too much news and trying to get rid of the last few remnants of Game 7 still left in my brain.

Jude’s just poured me some wine. It’s better to drink wine before brushing your teeth so the toothpaste doesn’t fuck up the taste of the already cheap wine. It’s grayish out and it smells like garbage in our apartment and the dog wants to jump up on our bed and eat her own hair.

My brain is fried this morning and while we were still laying in bed, I was telling Jude who was mostly asleep that I wished we didn’t have to sleep at all. She asked me why. Because my legs go numb, I said. I mean mostly numb. It’s been happening for about 20 years now. I’d wake up in the morning, get out of bed, and fall straight on my face.

But no sleeping would mean one less thing we’re good at. We’re really good at it. Jude’s better. She’s the best I’ve seen.

I was going to write something about Brooklyn this morning, about hanging out in Prospect Park, about her tiny room in Park Slope cluttered with books and plays, about how we couldn’t wait to run back into that room and into her bed to fuck in the relentless sticky heat. About fucking, sleeping, drinking, writing, and fucking again.

But instead, here’s this, a numb-legged note from a 9 a.m. drunk, waiting for a reason to leave the apartment today.

Jude and I walked outside yesterday to Wilshire and Manhattan Place, then a block over to Western, where some young Korean guys were rapping (not bad) and a mass of people were walking through.

We’ve actually never seen so many people before. Ever.

So when we got home, we turned on the television to get a bigger helicopter picture of the march, just to see how big it really was, and kept having to listen to these damn news folk saying there were “thousands” of people demonstrating around the country.

THOUSANDS? That’s like saying I have $12 in debt.

There’s a bittersweet feeling over me today. I mean, just seeing that many people gathered for ANYTHING is a humbling, an enlightening, a redeeming experience, where I remember again that I’m alive and I’m human.

But there’s this other part of me, the part that can’t watch any news anywhere without feeling sick, the part where I had to go out after all the marchers had gone back home so I can drop $45 to fill up the car before gas hits $4 per gallon by the end of the week, that part that keeps telling me that we can’t win. We just can’t win.

So, all I can do for tonight is go over my parents’ house and watch the Lakers get rid of the Suns tonight on their High Definition television and wait for the all Los Angeles second round series. All seven games on the corner of Figueroa and Olympic.

Maybe hundreds of fans will come to the game. Dozens, even.

Check out my friend Kate’s wonderful piece on the day’s events.

I haven’t been this sad about the basketball season coming to an end in a while. Last year was such misery, the 2 and 19 stretch to end the season, listening to morons talking about how Clippers play real basketball, listening to my father curse at Tierre Brown, or as he liked to call him, “that damn number 5,” before stomping up the stairs to his bedroom. But this season, this one’s been special.

After Lamar Odom makes a sweeping reverse lay-up in a game last week, coming from the left side down the baseline, then using his 6-10 frame and long left arm to come up on the other side of the basket for two points, he has a big smile on his face that reminds me that they’re kids, big kids out there, just playing a game. We all make big O’s with our lips and stare at each other with approval. My mother has the same smile as Lamar and she says that this has been a good season. She talks about Kobe’s 81-point game, still shaking her head about it because she was there in the living room with us that night watching the game against Toronto, on her feet as she walked back and forth from kitchen, so nervous that she couldn’t sit still. She’s like that the whole game during the playoffs. And after each basket that night, she clapped her small hands together and let out a “Waaaahhhh!” And she’s talking about it again as my father tries to figure out how we can get rid of Luke Walton. “It’s been a good season,” she says, and stands on the two bamboo sticks that my father got her. She does this every night, balancing herself on the bamboo, swinging her arms up and down to lower her blood pressure, all part of my father’s plan to keep her healthy and alive for as long as he can.

My father curses again as he sees Luke Walton enter the game and he digs into the Easter candy basket that Judy’s mom has sent, pulling out a yellow marshmallow bunny.

“What is this?” he asks.
“Sugar coated with sugar,” we tell him.
He eats it anyway and says, “This is all sugar.”
“How’s the fatso doing?” she asks.
“Shaq’s washed up,” I say.

Luke Walton holds the ball for five seconds, afraid to throw a simple pass, and that’s enough for my father. “That damn number 4,” he says and gets off the couch. He stomps up the stairs to his room.Our family moved to America in 1980, twenty-six years ago already. I can track the history of my family in this country by Lakers seasons. Magic returning from his injury filled second season only to throw up a last second air-ball in the lane against the Rockets in the playoffs. Sending Norm Nixon to the San Diego Clippers for a rookie named Byron Scott. Dr J dunking on Michael Cooper. Firing Paul Westhead and hiring Pat Riley. Losing to those ugly white guys on the Celtics again. And losing. Then winning. And the day I woke up at 4 p.m. and walked through the campus of UC Irvine to get to my film class, finding a seat in the back row where all the black, Hispanic, and Asian students sat, which was all of six, only to leave when I got sleepy again, returning to my dorm to a ringing phone. It was my mother, worried, her breath short, saying, “I was worried about you, I thought you’d be heartbroken.” And I sat there confused until she explained to me that Magic had AIDS, Magic had AIDS, and she was worried that I was wandering around with a broken heart because Magic had AIDS, and I hung up and went to sleep, dreamed of eating chicken fingers in the cafeteria with some red punch.

She gets off the bamboos and sits down again, smile as big as these kids playing basketball, and when the game ends we leave, first my brother, then us, and my father runs down from his room to say goodbye, making sure we don’t forget the soap he’s given us, the pretty and fragrant soap he spent the weekend making in the bathroom. He’d given them to us before dinner before the game, a red one and a blue one and one shaped like a bear. Clear soap with little white chunks inside.

“What’s that?” I’d asked him.
“Soap,” he’d said.
“What’s that inside?”
“Soap.”
“Your dad makes soap now,” mom had said. And we’d looked at each other.

He is now standing at the door waving goodbye as my mom hits him with an elbow, reminding him that he’s forgotten to put his teeth back in and we make the short walk across the front yard with the new roses toward the gate, the soaps in my hand smelling like fruit and I look back over my shoulder and see him running back into the house to find his teeth and mom leaning against the doorway. It has snuck up on me, the season’s end. This sweetest and saddest season is coming to an end, this season of cleaning with soap made by hands once strong enough to crush bricks, this season that gave us an 81-point miracle, leaving us to gather in a cold room inside a yellow house for each game that followed, praying for one more blessing to come.