Computer

So I'm having some computer trouble at the moment as well as being in the middle of a move to a new neighborhood in Chicago. Unfortunately, the second half of Jessica is currently inaccessible, as are the notes for the collab novel. Even if I could work on them, I haven't actually had the time. hopefully I can recover these next week when things calm down.

This collab thing is taking longer than i expected. To everyone who was interested, its still happening if you're still interested.

green copper teeth

her mouth was full of all sorts of things
of wings and sins and setting suns
speaking of broke-back bitter men
who lend their mended, quaking hearts

to anyone, anyone at all.

literature is dead.
painting is dead.
poetry is dead.
rock and roll is dying, if its not dead already.
sculpture is dead.
jazz is dead.
god is dead.
hip-hop is looking pretty frail.
idealism is dead.
realism is dead.
television is dead.
the internet is brain-dead.

what's left?

Jessica, Pt 1

I know I haven't been blogging much, but that doesn't mean I haven't been writing. Here's a taste of what I'm working on. This is just the first part. There should be one or two other pieces of it. Its taking a bit longer than I expected, but after this I'm going to try to pound out the first part of the collaborative novel if anyone is still interested in working on it with me.

No one's going to read this, its too long for the internet.

---

There was a knock, a thump, a loud quaking that echoed through the house, echoed through my bones and out of my mouth and now—charging through the living room, charging through my life, bounding into the table and knocking the television to the floor with a crash—now there was a hippo in our kitchen.

Normal people didn’t live like this. I knew normal people, I was friends with normal people, grew up with them, visited their homes and they did not live like this. They had dogs and cats, maybe a gold fish or a turtle that would die after a few weeks, but they didn’t live like this. They didn’t have hippos in their goddamn kitchens.

It was standing there looking at me with its waxy marble eyes, rolling and waving like cellophane. It opened its mouth like a shovel. I was eating an apple, a big red one, and the hippo wanted it, wanted it now. Feed me, it wanted to say. It wanted to say feed me but it was a hippo and hippos can’t speak so it just sat there with its bulging eyes rolling and its big open mouth waiting for me to feed it already. Feed me. Feed me, already!

I reached in the fridge and threw Jessica—that was its name, the hippo, it was Jessica the Hippo—a whole raw onion. The mouth closed and without a twitch, without a swallow or any movement of its throat at all, it opened its mouth again. It was empty. Feed me. Feed me! It was staring at my apple again.

It’s not like we didn’t have dogs and cats or goldfish or terminal turtles in dirty tanks. We’d had all those animals, hell we’d even had some snakes and a horse and a wounded baby elephant that had wandered onto the grounds from off the savannah. But we also had this hippo, this fucking hippo Jessica. It knocked over the goldfish bowl, stepped on the snake, ate one of the cats. The turtle had died on its own, that one was my fault. Its name was Paul Newman. I guess I shoulda cleaned Paul Newman’s cage or fed Paul Newman more often. I sort of forgot we had Paul Newman for a few weeks until Paul Newman started to smell up the place. I was paying too much attention to Virginia Woolf, the elephant, which eventually healed enough to wander back out and try to find her family again. But man, oh man, riding around on Virginia Woolf had been a lot of fun. It made Jessica jealous, made her steam and roll and eat a cat, anything to get our attention, but Jessica also never let us ride her anymore. No, no Jessica made Mom massage her before she would go to bed. Virginia Woolf was fun and self-sufficient, and also a stream-of-conscious writer of some repute. Jessica was needy because Jessica was a fucking hippo that was standing right in front of me with her big mouth hanging and waiting.

I took a bite out of my apple and threw her a bunch of just-purchased bananas. Her mouth closed and automatically reopened empty. Now we had no bananas.

“Oh come on.”

Jessica nudged into the kitchen table with her shoulder, sending a plate to the floor. Feed me.

“Fuck!”

“Watch the language!” Mom yelled from her bedroom.

“Fuck!” I whispered.

Jessica bumped the table again, this time with her ass, and a knife went clattering among the shards of china on the floor. Sure, mom heard the curse word, she always did, but didn’t seem to care that her kitchen was being ground down, chewed up and trod upon by a thousand-pound beast with a horribly empty, thundering belly.

Jessica dug her face against me, dug her lower teeth into my stomach. It was sharp but the pressure was what hurt. Jessica knew what she was doing though, she had never really wounded any of us, not me or mom or Dad, just the cat. But she knew how to scare us to get what she wanted. Or at least she knew how to scare me. Her eyes rolled and she kept pushing her head into my chest, forcing my back into the cabinets, forcing my spine against the handles and just pushing pushing, feed me! Give me your apple, give me your fucking apple, give me your life come on, come on. Feed ME!

“Fine,” I said. She pushed harder. “Fine!” I took a last bite from the apple and threw it into that open wheelbarrow of a mouth. She closed it on those huge wet hinges and backed off. She tumbled off through the door, into the living room and back outside. “God,” I said. “I only got to eat half that apple.”

Now I wanted a banana.

You might think it would be fun but having a pet hippo is just about the worst thing that can happen to a teenager. Having a pet hippo is just about the worst thing that can happen to anybody. Its worse than getting pregnant at the age of 13. Its worse than starting up a healthy and expensive meth addiction. Its worse then shooting out your eye with a BB gun. Its worse than getting kicked in the head during a soccer match and its worse than showing up at school naked. Its not fun at all. Hippos are not fun.

But I didn’t always think so. At first I thought Jessica was the greatest thing ever to exist in the entire world. Dad found her washed up as a baby on the side of the river. The previous week had brought heavy thunderstorms that bloomed with electricity and lashed heartache down on us. The river flooded and the floodwaters stole Jessica from her pod, from her hippo family, and brought her to us when she was just a day old. As Dad came in from the rain that day, his coat wet and slick with what he told me were the tears of heaven, we saw a little slug that quivered in his hands, a slimey little monster that he nestled like a child.

The glow on Dad’s face was eternal, I wish I had a camera that day because the picture in my memory of his glowing mouth, his burning brows and his cracking eyes has faded badly with age. Its edges are smudged, blurred, the frame is yellowing and its been covered by years of greasy, oily fingerprints but its still the only image of Dad that I cherish, that I crave, that I try hard to remember. How exciting it was! A strange new animal to play with, to live with, to hug and hold and love!

Dad’s happiness was inspiring, it made me happy, it made me excited, it even made Mom happy. She said she hadn’t seen him smile so big for so long since the day I was born. She said she thought his face was going to crack open, spilling the inside into plain view on the outside, teeth outside lips, tongue rolling over chin, brains spilling out all over the places, and he would be too hideous and horribly deformed to love. She would have to kick him out into the cold, cruel world and he would wander the Earth, trod upon the dirt of every continent, an endless stranger always riding on the back of his faithful hippo.

Mom was a little skeptical of Jessica at first. She was right to be. What a stupid idea it was to have a hippo live in our house with us. Of course it would eat everything, of course it would smash everything, of course it would be a huge financial burden but she eventually gave in. Dad made all kinds of arguments, even laying out the biblical metaphors at work, how Jessica was just Baby Moses washed up on the banks of the Nile by God himself. Either way, how could we turn away Baby Moses when he, or she, might still lead the Jews out of bondage?

Well, we couldn’t really. But mom wanted to know what that would that make Dad in his own metaphor. Wasn’t Moses found by Pharaoh's daughter? Did that make him Pharaoh’s daughter?

“No, of course not … I’m, um, you know. I’m the head of this family so I’m Pharaoh I guess.”

“So you’re evil, Jonah? Is that what you’re saying?”

“No, I—”

“You’re going to get a plague of boils and toads for enslaving the Jews, my dear. And just who are these Jews she’s going to be freeing from your tyranny? Other hippos?”

“Don’t be ridiculous, Miriam.”

The man posits Moses as a baby hippo and he asks mom not to be ridiculous. This is my family. This is why we have Jessica as a pet. Because these people are insane. Dad finally decided that he was actually Noah, our house was an ark and we had saved Jessica from the flood of God’s fury. He kept the part about her being Baby Moses too but it didn’t make any sense, it never did, none of it and he didn’t care.

Ultimately, it wasn’t Dad’s poorly-thought metaphor that brought Jessica into our house, it was the little worm herself. She was too small, was too cute and silly to hate, to kick out into the cold. Mom felt sympathy for such a tiny, defenseless animal. Mom was infected by Dad’s enthusiasm like a sweaty, ravaging virus. At the time, I was thrilled to have a new plaything, it was like having a new little sister to dress up and have tea parties and adventures with, a new playmate to abuse and reuse. They agreed that they would tend to Jessica till she got old enough that she could live in the wild again. Just like we did later with Virginia Woolf, only Jessica never left. Mom and Dad got attached, way way way too attached.

Mom walked into the kitchen. Her eyes were small but always kind, the crow’s feet getting deeper and more defined with each year, little canyons carved out of her flesh by a river of misplaced smiles and programmed hospitality. She had on a floral-print sleeveless shirt and the faux-denim pants with the elastic waistband again. I had tried to explain to her the horror of elastic waistbands—“Mom, Hitler wore elastic pants.”—but she just wouldn’t listen. In fact, she got a little angry. She still had the blonde, unkempt bob that she’d had for the last four years because she said she it looked good without her even having to think about it or fuss with it. Mostly it just looked very plain, like she didn’t spend very much time thinking about it or fussing with it, like she didn’t spend very much time trying to look nice. Mom walked into the kitchen and she looked upset.

“What was the big ruckus in here?” She saw the smashed plates and silverware on the floor, the table shoved into a corner and the chairs splayed about in unknowable patterns. “What did you do in here Jessica? It looks like you threw a temper tantrum.”

“No,” I said. Did she really think that I did this? We had a hippo in the house and she really thought I was the one breaking dishes? “No, Mom. No. it wasn’t me. It was Jessica,” I said. But that was my name too. I was Jessica, Jessica the Girl.

“Jessica, I heard you from the other room. I heard you scream the f-word and start throwing the dishes around. I heard you. Don’t act like I’m stupid, Jessica. Don’t act like I can’t put two and two together. Why did you do this?”

Dad used to be a game warden, this was the reason we had all the animals and how he knew how to tend wounded beasts like Virginia Woolf when they turned up. Dad had a strict policy, a strict philosophy that all his animals have real people’s names, real people’s lives, real people’s personalities. He would never rob them of their primal dignity with dopey names like Bobo, Pokey, Rover or Mr. Cat.

Mom was watching me. Her bob had a big clump of blonde hair sitting strangely on the back of her head, unnoticed, uncombed. “Mom… I didn’t! Jessica came slamming through here looking for food again. Again, mom! I fed her only a half-hour ago. She ate all those new bananas you bought. She ate the apple I was in the middle of eating.” Mom gave me a skeptical look. Arched eyebrow, arms folded, hip angled forward, elastic pants. “I swear! Look she knocked over the TV in the living room again too. Again, mom!”

She held that position for a minute just looking at me. “I can never tell if you’re lying to me anymore, Jess. When you were little I could always tell. There was always a guilt in your eye. You were always sad when you lied, like you didn’t want to lie, like you didn’t want to do it but you did anyways. Like you were forced too. But I can never tell anymore. You’re so … you’re so blank to me.”

Virginia Woolf was an elephant. Paul Newman was a turtle. Joey, Johnny, Dee Dee and Tommy were our dogs, collectively known as The Ramones. Tony Blair was a snake. Copernicus was a fish. George Bush was a chimp we had for a year before a neighbor took him in. And Jessica was a hippo. But Jessica was me too. We were both their children. We were both Jessica. None of them, none of us had any primal dignity.

“Mom! I’m not lying. I wanted to watch that movie I rented tonight. Right? Why would I smash the TV? I can’t even lift that thing.”

She kept looking at me.

“Look, where did the bananas go?” I showed her the empty fruit bowl. “You honestly think that in a wild fit of, I don’t know, teen angst or something I just ate up all the bananas in one sitting?” She looked like she was trying not to smile. “Jessica, it’s Jessica. Come on, Mom, how many times has she smashed the TV before?”

The logic was this: Dad was reading a Virginia Woolf book when he found the elephant. He always liked the Ramones. When he found Jessica he was beaming, burning, blazing with joy and tenderness in a way that Mom said she hadn’t seen since they first brought me home from the hospital. It was the same expression, the same mood painted all over his rain-soaked face. So they gave her a real person’s name like all the other animals. So they gave her my name. So they called her Jessica because she was just like me. She was Jessica the Hippo. I was Jessica the Girl.

Mom unfolded her arms. “Ok, ok. Fine.”

“You believe me?”

“I believe you.”

For the first year Jessica was only about the size of a dog, cute and sweet and kind of slimey. I loved her, I loved so much it hurt my head, made my eyes swim, and my heart shrink and my teeth vibrate just think about it. I didn’t know the difference between hippos and hippies so I would dig out Dad’s old Jimi Hendrix and Doors albums and play them for her. She didn’t like them at all. Not even a little bit. I kept asking Dad why she didn’t have any tie-dye shirts or smoke drugs and make peace symbols. He explained that she wasn’t a hippie, she was a hippo, a hippopotamus, that she was a river-horse, but she looked more like Jabba the Hutt than a horse to me. That’s the reason she hated the Grateful Dead. Turns out that Jessica only likes hardcore gangsta rap. So I would open the windows in my bedroom and blast Biggie Smalls and she would shimmy and shake in the front yard, rolling in the dirt and tearing up the grass and just having a great old time. Not exactly dancing, totally off-beat but just having fun and loving the rhyming tales of ludicrous violence and silly drug-dealing. So that was fun for a while.

Because she was so small Mom and Dad let her in the house all the time, they let her in their bedrooms and even put her in a little washbasin on their bed to sleep for the night. It was soggy but they stuck with it because they loved her. That was until they found out that hippos mark their territory by spinning their tails while defecating to distribute their excrement over the greatest possible area.

The first time their bedroom was covered in hippo shit they were mad but confused. The second time, she was banned from that side of the house. Mom felt bad about kicking her out of what had become her home, so she started tucking her in at night on the front porch, she started massaging her before bedtime. After she sprayed the front of the house, Dad built her a little shed in the back yard that she could spew poo over all she wanted. And she did. The kids from the ranch down the street started calling our place ‘the hippo outhouse.’ Needless to say I had few friends. And she still came in the house whenever she wanted.

Mom was picking up the pieces of the dishes that Jessica had smashed.

“Oh dear, this was a good set too. Your Aunt Jean gave us these three Christmases ago.”

I got a trash bag and held it out while she dropped in jagged shards of porcelain, once something, now nothing.

“Sorry Mom.”

“Oh it’s not your fault.” She picked up a large piece, half a plate, like she was holding a broken and battered moon. “Hold the bag open a little more, dear?”

It dropped with a clatter onto the other broken fragments, chipping into two or three smaller pieces.

“Now what will we do when Aunt Jean comes to visit? She always looks to make sure her gifts are in use.”

“Mom, Aunt Jean hasn’t been here since she gave you those plates.”

“Yes, Jess, but what if she comes this year.”

“She won’t. Remember what happened last time?”

Mom sighed. “I always hope she’ll forgive us for that, forgive Jessica.”

“Well, it was Uncle Johnny’s own fault. You don’t taunt a hippo with food unless you want to get a broken arm or worse.”

Uncle Johnny was an idiot. I was glad he and Aunt Jean has stopped visiting. Mom was always urging them to have kids, even though Aunt Jean was nearing menopause. I was also glad they had never had kids. I wouldn’t wish that misery on any child.

“Jessica. Don’t talk about your family that way.”

“Mom, he’s not even related to us. He’s not even Aunt Jean’s first husband.”

“It was kind of his own fault, wasn’t it?”

I nodded. She smiled and threw another broken dish in the bag.

the past is poetic.