Lifes Been Good to Me So Far Funny
Wednesday, May 31, 2006
she walked like a woman/but she talked like a man
gender is a funny thing.
i'm getting married in august--blessings fall thick and rich lately. we're planning as informal an event as possible, just two-hundred (gasp, groan) of our closest friends and family on a nearby farm. we'll get married in a little apple orchard on the grounds and our reception will include food, drinking, dancing, crouquet, badmitton, a sprinkler, maybe a slip-n-slide. it's going to be fucking hot. as such, i'm in the middle of trying to write an invitation that really screams "wear something comfortable; don't wear heels, for godssake, and don't wear anything heavy." it's a little harder than it sounds.
my mother and i went shopping for someting for me to wear at the wedding not too long ago. shopping together is not usually a particular blast, as our aesthetic sensibilities have been pretty damned different for, like, nearly my whole life. she goes around picking things out, ladylike, conservative things, and offering them for my consideration, and no matter how nicely i try to reject them, eventually she starts getting sad because she starts feeling like her daughter is some alien who just doesn't like anything she likes. so when shopping for the wedding started out by going pretty well, i was pretty surprised.
we were in the fitting room at marshalmotherfuckingfields, a store, like all others at the mall, i try to never ever enter, when she asked me, sort of offhandedly, would i be shaving for the wedding. later, after the period of stiffening and then fighting that ensued, when things had calmed down and she wasn't feeling so upset, she told me that she got freaked out originally because she had just been assuming that i would say, "yes, ma, of course i'm planning on shaving my legs and armpits for the wedding." how strange things are.
i haven't shaved in, i think, umm... let's see, if my friend jack will be six in july then i'll be divorced six years in september, which means that i stopped shaving five years ago. in that time, i've been to numerous family events, dressy and casual, all with my hairy armpits hanging out on hot days and my hairy legs kicking out in front of me if i haven't been wearing pants. you'd think she would have gotten some sense that i'm pretty committed to being hairy, but apparently for an event like a wedding, she just assumed that part of dressing up means cleaning up: having smooth, closely shaven skin.
she's not alone, of course, in being unsure of what to make of my decision and not entirely on board with it. a couple of my best girlfriends, including two who have made the same decision at earlier points in their own lives, bring it up from time to time. they always say something like, "girl, if you don't feel like you can wear short skirts with hairy legs, why don't you just shave, or get waxed?" i always have to explain that while i can't quite reconcile the two aesthetics--short skirts and hairy legs--i don't feel at all deprived by my deliciously natural legs, with their lovely little russian-peasant hairs that wave pleasantly in the breeze. i don't care enough at all at all to wear short skirts to even begin to consider shaving.
in the year following my divorce, although that loss was one of the most excruciating of my adult life, i got lucky and really embraced the opportunity to come into full contact with the degree to which i had bent myself around in an attempt to get my exhusband to keep loving me, or to start again, but either way, in order to get him not to leave. and of course, he totally left anyway. which was the best thing he could have done for himself, and for me, for a thousand reasons--being in a relationship which folks have outgrown or desparately need to outgrow, is toxic for everyone involved--not the least of which was the toll being a contortionist was taking on me. that first year out of our marriage, i experienced both the wonderful experience of unfurling my leaves and branches and growing out into the fuller me, and also years of loss and sadness about having squashed myself down so much in the first place.
one fight he and i had had in the last year or so of our time together kept ringing in my head especially. i can't remember anymore what the fuck we were actually fighting about, as fights by the eighth or ninth year together had a tendency to mushroom out into any number of topics simultaneously, but i clearly remember shrieking at him, in desparate rage, "you have no idea what women go through, how much work they do for their men!!!!!!!!!" at that point in our relationship, i shaved almost every day. not just my legs and pits, but my pubes as well. x, as we'll call him here, had no taste for natural pussy, or much for natural woman at all, at least during our marriage, and i did shave 'for him:' for him to love me, for him to want to touch me again, for him to think i was attractive, and so on. but really, i had been shaving like that for years.
shaving my body hair, in the case of my pleasure trail, bleaching it yellow, was for me about controlling the natural existence of my body as a location of desire and vulnerablity. it was about buying the self-hate packaged by the beauty industry as self-respect, that is sold to women at such great cost, but is increasingly being sold to men as well. i can accuse my expartner of being a jackass who didn't like to give head, who wasn't capable of loving a woman who wasn't just a man with a vagina, as any number of things, but even if any of that is true, i can't possibly with any accuracy, make him responsible for my own commitment to effacing my carnality, my desires, my imperfections, and my body. my dance with self-hate was rooted in events that transpired years, in fact a decade and a half, before i met him. as a little girl in an already anti-female culture, i was trying to get by in a violent household without being noticed, without needing any of the intimacy and comfort i couldn't really live without for very long. when my brother started touching me in sexual ways--i was seven; he, poor kid, was eleven--all that isolation and pain and hunger got wrapped up in sexuality and desire with a great big shame/self-hate bow, and that's where it all started.
right, but i was talking about the women in my life now occasionally trying to convince me to grow up and get busy with the razor. and i have a meeting in twenty minutes and three phone calls to make before my mentor gets here. so:
when my mother and my girls and my mother-in-law ask me why i don't shave, when my man's best friend asks me why i don't wear girls' shorts, why such a pretty girl acts so much like a man/boy, i'm beginning to realize i need a better answer for them than "because i don't (or do) want to," and that i also can't give them an answer both as long and as incomplete as the one i'm rambling through here. last term, a professor of mine in the grad program started pushing us to think about how we can tell people what our theses are about in two accurate, accessible sentences. he's pushing us to think about audience, too, to come up with a set of two-sentence answers, for use with the various kinds of folks who want to know: co-students, potential employers, professors, family, friends. this is what i need to develop for the myriad of issues, feelings, and principles that co-construct my choice to be a hairy woman in a culture that is more willing to accept love and sex relationships between people of the same sex than it is to accept complex gender behavior in terms of appearance and beauty.
so, how's a girl marrying a boy, who identifies most honestly as a transgendered person, as a top/bottom switch, as a jew and an american and woman and boy and girl and man, with no desire to change her physical gender, to explain to the various audiences in her life why she's hairy, in two or three accessible, accurate sentences?
hmmm....
Thursday, July 21, 2005
'cause here you are/standing there/loving me
i have lost count of how many times i have seen the sound of music. when i was a little girl, maybe eight, i won [along with a thousand other kiddlies] our local library's summer reading contest and was treated to a special, kids-only screening of the film in our downtown alt-movie house. we got to go to the movies without our mothers! at intermission, we got to have ice-cream in individual portion cups with disposable wooden spoons! and i was entirely lost in the flood as sister maria's cup of love ran over and transformed a chilly, emotional wasteland of a family led by a man who had given up on love into a giggling, singing, circus of happiness.
i got the soundtrack on tape for my next birthday, and i listened to it for years. i learned all the choreography from the movie, and made up new steps to the old songs in my basement when i should have been out playing in the sun.
and then, over the years of boyfriends and relationships gone wrong in high school i began to forget how good it felt to get lost in that dark theatre, in the dream that a positive attitude and undying faith in the idea that 'in spite of it all, people really are good at heart' would be rewarded with a love that would transform the embattled and lonely home of my childhood into a warm and welcoming place. when my marriage of nine years came to an end, the forgetting was complete.
but get this shit: two weeks ago, my lover and i ran off to our state's nature wonderland for the weekend of the fourth. we had a few days to relax with his family and his friends [gradually becoming our? friends], to doze and play in the sand and space out on the boat and eat and light fireworks and fires and ... saturday night, we sat on his beach watching the sunset [i shit you not] and smoking one of our last cigarettes. and then
he got down on two knees, took both my hands in his, and asked me. i said yes.
later that night, we stood in the parking lot of the local grocery store, waiting for his best girlfriend to snag chips and whatnot for the fire, watching the mayflies live their one day on earth, blended the kind of close together that makes your friends make the suggestion that you get a room every day of the year except the one on which you GET ENGAGED. i was humming it before i realized, and when i heard myself, i actually began to sing
nothing comes from nothing/nothing ever could/so somewhere in my youth/or childhood/there must have been a moment of good/because here you are/standing there/loving me/whether or not you should...
# posted by levittphillips @ 9:55 AM 4 comments 
Monday, May 30, 2005
i've been smokin' dope/snortin' coke/tryin'a write a song/forgettin' everything i know/till the next line comes along
writing is a mercurial lover. i am working on an essay right now that is resisting getting clearly onto the page. i took a break from writing about my past a couple years ago, and i've just come off that break to dip my toes back in and test the water temperature. i'm working on a book of personal essays and i desperately want to avoid writing an abuse memoir. i just feel like those stories are ubiquitous, and i don't think my story is sooooo unique that the world is suffering from not hearing it. and those books get written off as literature completely. they get dismissed as self-help or therapeutical self-indulgent exercises.
i have a lot of thoughts like that.
of course, in my right mind, i know that they are not actually thoughts but defense mechanisms. underlying the thoughts are a whole set of feelings that would prefer i just do what they tell me to rather than notice they're there. feelings like a certain glut of shame and her sister fear. i'm trying to write that which in its very nature seeks not to be known. i am trying to write about how i learned about desire, conflated it with need, and got caught in the tension between the combination and shame. i am writing about how i learned, much later, about desire and need as separate things, sexual and otherwise, and how i became aware of the tension with shame. i am writing about how it is now--the tension is almost entirely cut, and the resultant ease in my body and soul is the most palpable blessing in my life at the moment. it is the gratitude from which all other sense of awe and wonder now flows with such relative fluidity. awe and wonder even at such phenomena as the situational experience of shame.
the thing i am writing about , i guess, is the longgggg moment of my conversion experience. i did not find god, whateverthefuck that means, in a moment, although i have experienced short overpowering senses of existing totally in her. i have come through my own redemption in a process of years. redemption, that lovely christian concept, is not an adequate term here. as muriel rukeyser writes, 'it is not that one brings life together, it is that one will not allow it to be torn apart.' as such, i am in the jewish process of teshuva--the slow [re]turning to god--to the profound experience of myself as completely good, contained as my every sub-atomical particle is within the entirety of the divine.
sounds good, doesn't it? but given how much trouble god has had to go through to get me to hear this 'good news,' sometimes i think i must be a very old soul who's been reincarnated a gazillion times, or a very special learner for whom god has had to dumb things down to the form of a blunt instrument applied carefully and consistently to my heart. she just had to bypass my brain altogether--it's too thick.
and the blunt-instrument-to-the-heart nature of the lessons is what's making it so hard for me to write all the stuff that would flesh out the lovely bits about getting washed in the holy fire of baptism and coming out so clean and shiny. if i really want my work to work, i can't just write neat little sentences like 'i'm trying to write about how i learned about desire, conflated it with shame, and got caught perpetually in the tension between that combination and shame,' and hide behind them. that sentence begs all sorts of questions--how did i learn about desire, how did it end up all snared up with shame? and then i have to get real and explain that i learned about desire under my brother's touch. and although the shame bit is a no-brainer when you read that, if i really do want to [and i do] write about how i came to unwind the whole sticky ball of shit string, i have to write about how it got wound up--turn by turn. or at least some turns by some turns. damnit. writing that stuff out makes me feel a little nauseous and scared still. my brain catches wind of the feelings, and it starts cranking out the defense mechanisms dressed up like thoughts, and my writing gets very slow and labored and i rub my forehead and smoke a lot of cigarrettes in front of the screen.
man, fuck that. i'm an agile fucking intellect. i like writing--i like it soooo much more than i used to. even when it gets hard now, lately it slows down, but it doesn't screech to a halt smashed against a brick wall and leave me stunned and terrified to get back behind the wheel anymore. no it does not. i'm way fucking stronger than that. i especially like writing about my past now that i get that it's all an interpretive act anyway--craft is much more fun than confession. and so what if it does make me mildly nauseous--don't you always feel better once you finally go ahead and throw up? or almost always, at any rate?
i'll get a draft up here soon.
# posted by levittphillips @ 7:50 PM 0 comments
in search of our mothers' gardens
with thanks to alice walker for the title
as visitors in our mothers' homes
we run the social worker's risk
of scouring the scene only for evidence
of their victimization--
we immigrant daughters.
those middle-class violets
shrugged off their shrinking
natures onto the women presiding
over old-world gardens
on the old east side.
they saw the men, sweating
in old clothes, many times mended
and could hardly hear the sentences
through the accented words pouring
forth in a torrent.
and found the crying baby
in the dresser drawer
and the children running underfoot
made them dizzy; also the smells
in the hallway.
there were enough stories
of men striking out drunk
in the dark and women hiding
pregnancy holding out hope
that something could be done
to fill all the carefully
kept observation notebooks;
they did not need
details about deeply loved children
and miracle meals.
those pennies they carefully
saved are ignored; those pennies
organized out of our pay
are waiting to buy what we need
when we think that we can't.
as visitors in our mothers' homes
we run the social worker's risk
higher: in school we learned
the language they needed from us
at home is where we learned to be women.
the miracle meals and deeply
loved children must share space
in the notebooks we so carefully
fill with records of night beatings
and noise.
we are the mouths that
cried to be fed from the
dresser drawer and kept
our mothers awake with
pregnancy problems to solve.
we are the children running
underfoot yelling questions, reaching
for pot handles, outgrowing
shoes, hiding from social workers
under her skirts.
we older ones translate
our mothers for the social
worker's pen while trying carefully,
without hurting our mothers,
to edge off the page.
as vistors in our mothers' homes
we run the social worker's risk
of scouring the scene of the evidence
of the old-world gardens our
mothers made of our homes.
# posted by levittphillips @ 6:59 PM 0 comments
Saturday, May 14, 2005
there's a million ways to go/you know that there are
it's saturday night. i waited tables all day. the most beautiful thing happenned this morning, between my first table and my breakfast. a customer from yesterday lunch came in, an older man, heavyset, white hair, with his credit card receipt in hand. he had gone online and checked his debit account and been concerned that my coworker hadn't received his tip because his computer only reflected the amount of his meal. so now i owe him a free lunch. what a beautiful man--in my eighteen years in the restaurant industry i have never seen that happen.
so anyway, it's saturday night, eightish. if i make it out to the city, there's a cow suit with my name on it. one of my girlfriends is organizing a roller derby league in our area, and my manager's band is playing a benefit for her tonight. apparently he can't find anyone to wear the cow suit during 'cattle call.' my friend won't be there--she threw up three times before she had four tables this morning, and i can only assume she's crying in her bed right about now.
another friend is back in town for the weekend. she's been in new york the past few years, doing great things in graduate school, and saving the world. she's fulfilling her destiny, really. she's got the pussy to go along with the heart, and the brains. and, even though she's actually still a virgin at twenty-nine, she's got just enough of an evil streak to get things done. we're lucky she's fighting on our side. her visit is a sickbed visit--her old boss who believed in her enough to get her through her stay in our town and on to the next big thing is dying of gallbladder cancer. she wants me to go out to the bar when she gets back from dinner with his family. a local hottie with a nice voice is playing; her girlfriend lives with my ex-lover and two more of our friends. it ought to be a nice late-night riot.
i'm waiting for a phone call from the hospital. one of my women is on the cusp of giving birth. she and her husband are waiting to find out if her labor is going to be induced. this is one of those women you can't believe you're lucky enough to have--she's pulled me, kicking and screaming, back down out of my tree more times than i can count. and she's amazing--brilliant and brave and posesses one of my top two laughs of all time. i've sat with her through two abortions, one that lasted days and ended up in the hospital. after the last one, she muscled herself into accepting that she might never find a decent guy and have kids. and finally, like six months after that she met her husband. i would dearly love to sit with her tonight.
so tonight i have three increasingly lovely places to be. but i am tired, and my stomach feels like shit, and i have several pages yet to read and take notes on before monday morning.
when i offered to dance the cow this morning at work, i told my boss i might not be able to make it, given the baby and all. my girlfriend turned to him and said, 'don't count on it. stella never makes it out to anything anymore.' it's true, i gave up the life last year. ;) i hardly ever go out anymore--i see movies, i saw le tigre in november, and i've gone out to dinner here and there, and i saw my favorite folk singer in a church last weekend. that's about it. other than the round of events surrounding my friend's wedding last fall, i haven't been to a party all year comprised of people either i or my partner aren't related to.
it pulls at me sometimes; i get restless, and i hanker to dance til three. i worked at the same bar for eight years, and just left last year; every once in a while i get up with my boyfriend at seven and it blows my mind that for years i've been going to bed at that hour. and god, i have had a blast: all manner of late night firework adventures, terribly important conversations with very serious people about urgent matters of philosophy and life and death debates about records, blow-the-top-of-your-head-off sex with men i was no good for. i haven't seen all the bands i want to, but i've seen my fair share of shows of the variety that complete a life. i have an enormous loose collection of fascinating friends and acquaintences--muscians, artists, smarty-pantses, rednecks and queens, soccer moms and anarchists. i spent my first decade of adulthood spinning in a whirl of adventure and late nights.
the other night i was restless, and i had it in my head that my sweet, normal boyfriend was the reason i was being deprived of my cutting edge, exhilirating, hip, now lifestyle. 'i can party like a rockstar,' i told him, 'i've had nights that started with a dinner party at one house, moved to the band at the bar and from there to the club until three, and finished watching the sun come up over breakfast at the local diner.'
he looked a little anxious, and shook his head. 'i just couldn't ever manage that.'
i cocked back to look down my nose at this philistine anchoring me to the couch. just before i opened my mouth, the past year pushed itself into my consciousness. it's been such a sweet year, full of getting up in the morning and going to sleep at night, grateful dead sex and t-rex sex and joan jett sex. i've been eating good food, and going to the gym, and working my brain more than my poor, tired, waitress body. i'm learning to play chess, on my way to grad school, and listening to records. i've had time to read, and courage to write, and i no longer ache inside and out from constricting my self within other people's expectations and hunkering down in a permanent defensive crouch.
one more deep breath, and i realized that of course the philistine with the beautiful smile wasn't the reason i had stepped back from the whirl. somewhere in the middle of my divorce stress, fear, and deep lonelinesss had turned the whirl of excitement into more of a tilt-a-whirl of desparate self-medication. and last march, one of my dearest-heart oldest friends stepped off the ride. when she hung herself, my ability to keep up with the pace just stopped. the night before her funeral friends brought me home to their house, and i found myself in their garage, smoking cigarettes, not thinking, just hurting. the long body of our friendship was playing in my head--skipping school with her in ninth grade, the radiance that came off of her all those nights when she'd come to my bar after getting off work at hers to hug me close, tell me i looked fine, and get me through another night. inevitably, i'd return to the pictures i'd drawn of her hanging in that shitbag hotel room, and the very real images of her laid out at her viewing earlier that afternoon. and the most important part of her legacy to me cut deep through to my heart--had things been not so very different, it could just as easily have been me lying in that fucking funeral home instead of her. we shared the same wounds, and we'd been keeping faith as we struggled to stay out of them over the years. i suddenly saw what a slippery slope depression is, how easy it is to fall off the cliff of self-loathing into the end. in that moment, my life changed.
i looked for a while, and when i found a new job, i quit the bar. i ended a relationship with a man i still love very much, because we were just twisting each other in knots. i pulled back little by little from the social scene that i had more or less been addicted to, and really started to prioritize the relationships in my life that were authentically reciprocal. little by little i gave up being a perfect friend, and a perfect waitress, and finally, after a lifetime as its slave, i gave up perfection altogether. i started waking up in the morning, rather than going to bed with the sunrise. and i said yes to this man, this sweet man, the very phillistine sitting on my legs on the couch whose feelings i was about to hurt and start a fight with for no reason.
i said yes to him because he listened deeply to me, because he thought carefully about things before he said them, because i found myself laughing, really laughing with him more and more. because he was a loyal, kind, hardworking man. because he had a real moral center and a good, open, tender heart. i said yes to him because i knew he really would be my friend even if he never got into my pants, and that he'd be happy with that. i said yes to him because being with him felt good. saying yes to him was not saying no to my previous life, it was saying yes to the life i am building now. and change is always strange, and sometimes i get restless, and hanker to get my party on and rockstar till the break of dawn and to blame my man for my choices when i lose track of why i made them and how good they've been to me.
i cocked my head back to look down my nose at this philistine who was anchoring me to the couch. i opened my mouth and laughed. 'thank god you couldn't manage all that, my love.'
my woman called. i've gotta go burn her some cd's. the way i see it, you need sade when you're in labor. i might make it out to the bar tonight, although i'm pretty damn sure i'm not gonna make it all the way out to the city. if i get there, it'll be sweet to hug my old friends close for a minute, and tell them how hot they look. i'll shake it for a little while, maybe. and then i'm gonna sneak out early, and get my ass home. god knows it'll be past my bedtime by then.
# posted by levittphillips @ 5:00 PM 0 comments
Saturday, May 07, 2005
every important call is a close one
we were sitting in the last local coffee shop with a smoking section, and my professor smiled and shook her head. "going to graduate school is a good decision, stella. it means you're taking yourself seriously."
man, i love how that sounds. i've been trudging my way through college for six fucking years, in that you-can't-even-think-about-graduation-you'll-go-insane kind of way. trudging isn't the right word, exactly. i love going to school, it's just that i go so slowly that i couldn't think beyond going to class the next day for the past few years. i started the last semester in the home stretch of my teaching certificate, but a few weeks in i started listening to all the teachers i've had over the years who kept telling me to consider a master's degree, if not a phd. and now i've changed my major, and i'm all set to graduate in december and start grad school next year.
and it's so exciting and i can't wait. but lately i've been thinking second thoughts. i'm in a relationship, a good one, and i think i might be getting married again, and that's part of it. my boyfriend came home tonight with a nasty case of food poisoning, and i started thinking about how i would be able to take care of him if something happened to him. if i were teaching high school i'd have a) an actual income and b) good health insurance. if i were in grad school, i'd have to drop out and start waiting tables double time. even then, i don't know if i'd be able to support us adequately, not to mention pay for health care and whatnot. and this man is a good man, and he's honestly the first person i not only could see myself having children with, but that i actually really want to have children with. and kids cost money. a lot of money.
plus, i really do love teenagers. they are enormous fun to play with and talk about ideas with. and i'm a good teacher, and teenagers deserve every good teacher they can get, especially in this age of every child left as far behind as possible. i've got a stack of lesson plans in my office and my head that i'm excited to play out.
but if i go to grad school i'll be teaching also. two composition sections per semester in grad school and then i'm hoping to teach at my alma mater and the local community college. and i'm cooking plans for my own business offering writing and art workshops with an art friend of mine. and i'd get to write and even publish if i get my master's. i suppose i could do so anyway, but it would be a lot harder.
being at a crossroads is wonderful and terrible at the same time. the grad school path beckons me in so many ways. but i could finish my teaching certificate and then do grad school a little at a time and maybe get into the community college after i finish. i'd definitely have a bigger retirement nest egg if i did it that way. christ. i'm too tired to be thinking about this shit anymore tonight. and my man needs some tea.
# posted by levittphillips @ 10:07 PM 0 comments
Wednesday, May 04, 2005
standin' in the shower/thinkin'
my exhusband has resurfaced as an actual person who generates his own lines in my email inbox lately. it's an interesting development from the self-scripted conversations i've been having with the character-exhusband of my own construction these past four years. a dear friend, the only one we've both maintained an authentic relationship with following the divorce, finally decided to do a little meddling and to date we've exchanged some old family photos and approximately eight paragraphs. it's been really very nice, in a sweet mundane way that seems to threaten no major interaction, positive or negative. i definitely feel a little lighter for it.
but in one email i sent, i included one sentence, a parenthetical sentence mind you, that i later recognized as artifice. it was coded to say 'i'm doing well, and i don't want you anymore.' it was ego, not authentic. and it should be, and is, no big fucking deal at all at all. but of course, after a really fabulous day last week spent reading and daydreaming and having an absolutely fascinating and exciting coffee with one of my favorite professors of all time, i found myself in the shower obsessing about that one bad line in an otherwise lovely week.
and i thought, good god, fuck that. surely with a little discipline and heartfelt intention, i can find more fun things to slide around in my soapy head. so, in the spirit of self love, here are a few thoughts about one of the teachers who have changed my life:
i have always read voraciously. as a child, books were my escape and the stories i wrote constantly in my head were the space i carved out in which i could exercise some control in the development of my life narrative. over time, my escape has expanded and transformed my life and from it the work which i treasure so has grown.
my first semester in college i took literature 240--childrens' literature. my professor was a sweet, profoundly caring little woman. in response to my enthusiasm for her class and my chagrin at discovering that she didn't teach anything else i could take, she graciously allowed me to be her assistant teacher in her basic writing courses. these classes were the ones you take in college if your writing skills don't qualify you to take college composition. the exit requirement for one is the production of one nearly error free paragraph, for the other, a nearly error free five paragraph essay. in those courses i learned so much about my own writing process and from watching sue teach i not only learned an infinite amount about teaching, i also came to know that this is what i wanted to do when i grew up.
as valuable as all that is to me, sue changed my literary life most profoundly in that first semester. as she taught us how to read picture books with little children in such a way as to create a life-long love of reading in them, she forever deepened my relationship with text. she showed me how to savor every drop of a text, how to hold bits like the library of congress entry in my mouth and let its flavors dissolve slowly on my tongue. to begin so slowly with a text that all parts of it have time to be revealed. in essence, she taught me the speed of poetry. i can never thank her enough.
# posted by levittphillips @ 1:34 PM 0 comments
Sunday, May 01, 2005
pussy galore
biggest compliment you can give someone, it seems, is to say they've got huge balls. drives me out of my fucking mind. balls. balls, for chrissakes. testicles, much as i love them, are soft, vulnerable little sweeties. they wouldn't hurt a fly, and all they want to do is help people get off. pussy, on the other hand...
there is no power like that which we posess in our first adult years. at nineteen, my friend celia was the sexiest woman i have ever known. she was stunning--fine features, dark brown skin, and solid as a goddamned mountain. she moved so quickly, with such precision and grace, not only in body but in mind as well. she could give and take a punch, and she knew it. her laugh was easy, pure clean, and frilled, and her wit was mercilessly sharp and dark.
she ran off from albuquerque when i did, and i never got the full story on the next year and a half. i know she and her boy crossed the country on their thumbs a few times, spent six months in a homeless shelter in denver, and i have a few other slivers of my version of her memories left spinning in my head. but that's about it. other than the fact that my friend celia, black and radiant and shining power, spent a month of her nineteenth year living in nigger flats, arkansas as the guest of a white man.
that is power. that is pussy.
# posted by levittphillips @ 10:38 PM 0 comments
out of the black/and into the blue
we worked at this gas station on mountain. it was an allsup's. there wasn't a deli case; instead we had freezer up front that held burritos and whatnot, and an entire case of corn dogs. we stole those corn dogs, two or three a night. i always swirled mine in mustard.
the manager told my boyfriend not to fuck with the shoplifters--it wasn't worth the trouble. "But if anyone gives you any shit," he lurched drunkenly and slammed the bat on the counter, "you pull this out and come across this goddamned counter at them. And you don't stop until they're down in the grit in the fuckin' parkin' lot." Tom spent a lot of his nights off sitting in his car out front of the gas pumps, drinking, and waiting for something to start. Nothing ever did while we were there, but that kind of thing leaves an impression.
we went to a lot of meetings in abq. there are forty-thousand people in the young people's division of aa in abq new mexico. that's forty-thousand alcoholics under the age of forty in one city of 800,000. forty-thousand recovering alcoholics. the guys we lived with were so fucking burnt desparate that they used to brag about their tradition for newcomer's first program birthdays. on someone's first sobriety anniversary, these guys would give the newbie a cake, a bottle of jack, and knife. the birthday drunk would pour out the booze, and use the knife to cut the cake.
# posted by levittphillips @ 10:22 PM 0 comments
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