Mothers Day is typically not a drinking holiday, but why the hell not, I say.
Sometimes when I’m less scared, I find solace in imagining I’ve written a book that’ll be pinned down and dissected like an old frog in some future high school class. The teacher will scrape out every insignificant word like cake batter at the bottom of the bowl, look for recurring imagery or symbolism, and ask the bored students, “So, what do you think she meant by…”
The teacher will wait for an answer but the students in the year 2190 will all be looking at the holographic clock levitating in front of the wall. Ten minutes before the bell to ring. She’ll scan the room, holding a fiftieth edition of my marked up, tattered paperback to her chest, “Okay, you, Jean-Luc Picard.” The teacher will point to a boy in the back whose life I’ve affected like a brush on the arm long after I’m beyond dust.
What will he say?
“I think that people who are geniuses or supposed to save the world, well, they’re not usually real good at one-on-one family stuff and we’ve got to cut them some slack for it, because somebody’s got to go out and make good movies, write poetry, paint paintings, or make sure we get the right to vote, get a good education, and sit anywhere on the bus on the way back to our decent housing.”
“CARPE DIEM!”
“DO IT NOW, DON’T FACE A LIFE OF SOMEDAYS!”
“FACE YOUR FEAR AND FREE YOURSELF!”
“LIVE LIKE IT’S THE LAST DAY OF YOUR LIFE!”
… These one-liners become platitudes fast because so many of us are so fucking miserable that we print them on tea bags until we roll our eyes and go “whatever.” Thoreau on a bottle cap and Confuscious on your sandwich wrapper.
We even commercialize hope.
“She was my best friend, the kind of person you fall in love with creativity-wise/as long as you don’t get confused and fuck things up by doing something like actually sleeping with each other.
We’d met a few years earlier in art school when she had started leaving little fan notes next to my work in open studio. We became fast friends because nothing inspires fascination and loyalty like fascination and loyalty coming right at you.
We stayed up working in the studios all night… We’d drink too much coffee and get incredibly jittery. By four or five in the morning our hands were bouncing around like crickets, and we’d pass out wherever we were. We never looked very attractive the next day waking up under fluorescent lights as students walked in for classes, but I never felt more a love. I felt beautiful and powerful with hair squashed on the side of my head, smelly armpits… And dries up drool running along my cheek.
Even though my tits were covered in ink and paint, they never felt perkier because these were the passion marks/ the hickies of creativity and I was proud.
We’d take a whore’s bath in a bathroom sink… And keep right on going to a new day.
It’s a different kind of love. It’s not like domestic bliss love. Something else is what is is/ like wanting to hang out and laugh and you think they’re so fucking great you can’t believe it. It can be confusing because there’s definitely a sexual undercurrent, but you don’t want to live or go grocery shopping with them. You want to make things/ talk about loud important things with them. And stomping down the street together, you feel like two warriors, laughing with grotesque abandon.”
-An excerpt from Flaming Iguanas, by Erika Lopez
“Once a little boy sent me a charming card with a little drawing on it. I loved it. I answer all my children’s letters — sometimes very hastily — but this one I lingered over. I sent him a card and I drew a picture of a Wild Thing on it. I wrote, “Dear Jim: I loved your card.” Then I got a letter back from his mother and she said, “Jim loved your card so much he ate it.” That to me was one of the highest compliments I’ve ever received. He didn’t care that it was an original Maurice Sendak drawing or anything. He saw it, he loved it, he ate it.”
- Maurice Sendak
Future child, that’s me. Hello. It’s nice to meet you.
I don’t feel white, gay, bisexual, black, or like a brokenhearted Puerto Rican in West Side Story, but sometimes I feel like all of them. Sometimes I feel so white I want to speak on twang and belong to the KKK, experience the brotherhood and simplicity of opinions.
Sometimes I want to feel so heterosexual, hit the headboard to the point of concussion, and have my crotch smell like bad sperm the morning after. I want the kid, the folding stroller. Please, let me stand forever in a line with my expensive offspring at Disney World.
Sometimes I want to be so black, my hair in skinny long braids, that black guys nod and say “hey, sister” when they lass me by in the street. I want the story, the rhythm, the myths that come with my color.
Sometimes I want to live with my hand inside of a woman so I can hear her heart beat, wake up with her smell all over me in the morning, and still feel as clean as I did the morning before/ I want her to talk about her childhood until I go insane from pretending I didn’t stop listening four hours ago.
Other times I wish I was born speaking Spanish so I could sound like I look without curly-hair apologies.
But I try all that and I quit it, and I try again. Really, I want to get this individualistic-thing down. I want to walk across the football field alone without looking like the last one picked to play soccer. I never was a cheerleader. I was a slut on my own with the thinking that if a tree has a good time and no one’s around to hear it, it’s not a slut. But sometimes you do need another tree around to double-dare you, or else you might end up doing nothing but watching TV when no one’s around.
-Flaming Iguanas by Erika Lopez
I had a house while you were gone. The week after you left me, I found a couple acres near Sarilla Park. I had a house while you were gone- a house with silver shutters and a driveway laid in marble and thousands of rooms to fill and miles of space to fly. And I tried to believe it: it was better without you… I was safer alone.
No, I’d give it all for you. I’d give it all for you by my side once more. Oh, I’d give it all for you. I’d give it all to hold you again, to feel I’m completed, to know there and then that all that I needed was you to fight the fear… And now you’re here.
I took a trip while I was gone. I cashed in all my savings and bought an Eldorado, drove to Tennessee. I took a trip while I was gone. I drove across the country and I stopped at lots of diners and I stares at a million stars and thought I could touch the sky. And I tried to believe it: I was better without you… I was finally free.
No, I’d give it all for you. I’d give it all for you by my side once more. Oh, I’d give it all for you. I’d give it, ‘cause the mountains I climb get higher and higher. I’m running from time and walking through fire and dreams just don’t come true… But now there’s you.
God knows it’s easy to hide, easy to hide from things that you feel and harder to blindly trust what you can’t understand.
God knows it’s easy to run, easy to run from the people you love and harder to stand and fight for the things you believe.
Nothing about us was perfect or clear, but when paradise calls me, I’d rather be here. There’s something between us that nobody else needs to see. There were oceans to cross, there were mountains to conquer, and I stood on the shore, and I stood on the cliff, and the second before I jumped, I knew where I needed to be.
Oh, I gave it all for you, I gave it all for you by my side once more. Oh, I gave it all for you. I gave it ‘cause it’s harder to touch the things that are dearer. I love you too much to trust something clearer. I know I fell too far… But here you are.
Hey Eugene, do you remember me? I’m that chick you danced with two times through the Rufus album Friday night at that party on Avenue A: whee your skinhead friend passed out for several hours on the bathroom floor, and you told me you weren’t that drunk, and that I was your favorite salsa dancer you had ever come across in New York City.
Eugene, Eugene, Eugene, I said hello, Eugene. Are you there, Eugene?
Hey Eugene, then we kissed once we lobbed your friend into the elevator and went to write my number on a soggy paper towel, and the car went down, and when we had finished making out, we noticed that your skinhead friend was gone, long gone. And you looked into my bloodshot eyes and said, “Is it too soon if I call you Sunday?”
Eugene, Eugene, Eugene, I said hello, Eugene. Are you there, Eugene?
Oh yeah. I said hello (hello) Eugene, are you there, Eugene? (tell me, are you there?) I said hello (hello) Eugene (Eugene) Eugene (Eugene) Eugene (tell me oh).
I said hello (hello) Eugene (Eugene). Does any of this ring a bell, Eugene?
