Your feet are tired from waiting tables all day, but it’s late Friday night, your favorite time to shop at the super-duper Walmart. You find a couple of things you need to try on for size. You walk to the fitting room. No attendant. The stalls are empty. You walk down the corridor until you reach number seven and enter it. You read the new sign tacked on the shiny gray wall: Shoplifting is not a prank, or a joke. It is a crime. Even for a first offense, you can serve jail time and pay fines up to $2000. So please, don’t incriminate yourself. It will haunt you for the rest of your life.
You struggle to zip the distressed, size nine Faded Glory jeans. Damn birth control pills are making you fat, but babies are preposterous. When you look into the mirror and see a twenty-seven-year-old bloated babe, you wince. But sex is still your best weapon in your ongoing battle with the Dick Squad, which you usually win, especially since you lowered your sights good and low. Rob thinks you’re letting yourself go to the dogs already. You met him three months ago, but it feels like a couple of lifetimes. He teases you about going to cosmetology school. Fuck him and all his uncles. One fine shimmering day, you will be a great hair artist.
You pull the purple sleeveless shell from the hanger, slip it over your blond hair. Your auburn roots are two inches long. Being blond hasn’t improved diddly damn squat. The purple shirt shows off the red tongue on your Rolling Stones tattoo. You turn your tattooed arm toward the mirror, look over your shoulder, and wink at yourself. You rip the tags from the shirt and jeans, stuff them in your pocket.
You grab the hanger with the Tweety Bird nightshirt—a gift for your daughter’s birthday—you can afford that—it’s only $8.92.
As you turn to leave the dressing room, you notice the last sentence on the Shoplifting is not a prank sign: It will haunt you for the rest of your life. You grab your Cosmos Café ink pen, and write in big block letters: IF YOU GET CAUGHT. Then you waltz with the Tweety Bird shirt all the way to the checkout. You pull out your last ten dollars and pay the oily-haired cashier. He hands you two shiny quarters. On your way out, you drop them in the vending machine. An icy can of Walmart cola clangs to the bottom. You pop the top and guzzle it, pretending it tastes like the real thing.
What mothers don’t know, they sure can’t tell you. And since your mama kept what she did know to herself, well then, Little Pilgrim, you really got screwed. She never talked about herself, what she thought, what she wanted. She quoted the Bible like she wrote it. She prayed like Jesus in the wilderness.
The word strong comes to mind. The word enigma comes to mind. The word facade comes to mind. The word frozen comes to mind. The word martyr comes to mind. The word trapped comes to mind. The word unfucked comes to mind.
Admit it. Your mama is a cave of imponderable desires.
What she didn’t know then and perhaps never will:
1. Sex is the cake, not the icing.
2. God’s love ain’t enough.
3. If it’s anywhere, Heaven is Here.
4. The neighbors don’t give a shit.
5. Blasphemer
God adores transvestites and the inventor of the donut. He marvels at little girls and wishes he were a boy. His favorite tree is loblolly pine. He bites his toenails. He hates like hell being an orphan. He’s proud of thumbs and long sharp thorns, but mourns every detached foreskin. He loathes bananas and snorts angel dust. He’s afraid of submarines and zebras. He regrets inventing sorrow, but waxes rhapsodic about the perfect weakness of gravity. Plus he really digs brunettes. You know the SECRETS OF GOD. Go ahead—tell every damn one.
If there’s a gene for exhibitionist, you have it. From an early age, you loved to shock people. That’s why you begged for those tap dancing lessons. If you make enough noise, some damn body will notice you. That’s all you ever wanted. Your mama, God bless her, wanted you to be a saint or a preacher, but your talents veered off in the opposite direction. You make shit up right out of the air. You see colors around people. Your daddy has that chartreuse neon glow and your mama shimmers with lavender light. Their colors look like shit together. You don’t understand why certain people are attracted to each other like helpless creatures. Carl Jung called it the anima and animus. You had to read that chapter three times before you understood the esoteric theory—that each of us carries an ideal image of the opposite sex in our psyches—that waits like a stick of dynamite to be lit by someone who resembles it. Just like your mama and daddy. Kaboom! Day and Night. Field and Plow. Moon and Sun. Your mama a fresh ream of paper, your daddy a bottle of indelible ink.
Your Recipe for Sorrow:
1 vile clock
2 pounds of regret
1 secret revealed
4 petrified dreams
3 shitty smiles
8 hateful words
1 biting sentence
2.5 paltry excuses
10 liters of sweet lies
Stir all the ingredients. Let dough rise for three days. Spread it out on a giant cookie sheet. Sprinkle with sea salt. Bake until crunchy. Crumble into pieces. Fling it to the yawing crows.
For twenty years you’ve been a poet, but you’ve never written a single poem about your deepest, ugliest, most unacknowledged phantom—your dear old man, braver than the bottle—stronger than nicotine’s ugly grip—the Big Star in the Silent Movie of Your Life—the man who never hugged you, who drunkenly fell down and often couldn’t get up, who cursed in his sleep, who never saw your despair because he was too damn intoxicated with his own. By the time you were born, he was a quart-of-whiskey-sad daddy, who lived in a pup tent pitched in Hell. Go ahead. Admit it. You owe him your poetic license.
All night long you committed adultery with an old lover as gorgeous as he was fifteen years ago when you fell in love. You couldn’t help it: his desire shocking—your hunger shameless—your tongues like wicks of candles burning into each other. You were in an unknown bed, in an unknown room, in an unknown hotel, in an unknown city—hell, it wasn’t even in this world.
Oh, the smell of lover’s love being made like patchouli—two fine glowing bodies praising God and the eternal fucking moment. As in life, there were intruders: aunts, uncles, his wife, your husband, sniffing around the bed as if you were invisible. I think you were, praise God—because they didn’t stop you. You clung to each other, his sweat like warm honey you licked from his chest.
Do you remember how you crawled under that huge blue bed and preached fiery sermons to your congregation of dust bunnies? Do you remember how you pleaded with your mom when she drove too fast? Your red hair sprung from your head like fresh cedar shavings. Your bright morning face clouded by worried eyes as you admonished her Swow down, Mommy.
You were the first miracle in that small town hell of hers. A bubble of perfection she endeavored to keep from bursting when you came into contact with all the sharp objects flying around her. Your bubble never popped. The sun forced its rays through your resilient membrane revealing your spectacular colors while the wind whispered your secret names: Yellow maiden, Purple poet, Green girl, Red surprise, Orange dream, White peacock, Black butterfly. Once and for all, you need to set the record straight. The stories about how you came into this world have been so poorly told that even now you don’t understand that, from the moment you popped out of her womb, you have been a bridge—never an obstacle—the final blue answer to the question, What is love?