rubber bands

hair hangs over my face
brushes my neck
annoying
I consider getting up and checking
the drawer in the bathroom
where I put the big card of black
covered bands for my hair
weeks ago when I bought it
dammit, I'll be able to find this
how much bigger could it be?


of course
the drawer probably has the
nail strengthener I've been looking for
in every drawer in the house
including that one
for days
pink manicured nails cracking, peeling
no lady I

there will be no bands
meanwhile
I'll have to get up
damnit

I lift my right wrist
there it is !
Next to the silver bracelet
I have been wearing for days
I learned about just putting on some piece
and leaving it until I am tired of it
from Mexican women

Praise my mother!
I tie back my hair




Suddenly Mother's wrist is there
she picked up rubber bands all over the house
from the rolled newspapers
Daddy brought home


Los Angeles Mirror
or the The Herald, The Times
or the evening
Los Angeles Examiner lying
on the green lawn with the rosebush in the middle
when Daddy got home in the evening scented with ocean breeze

Daddy dug the hole in the middle in the lawn
and planted it the little bush with his own freckled hands
it was still there when they tore the house down
to expand the magic elementary school across the street
with the huge pine in front

my brother hung from the highest branch one Saturday
three stories up
we children just looked
Phillip's hanging!
I prayed he wouldn't fall

Anyway she picked up those bands
and safety pins from the baby's diapers
all over the house
stuck the pins to her shirt
and pulled the bands over her right wrist
they were always there
except when she put on her heels
to run to the bus for work

I have no clue what she did with the rubber bands
the pins as I said
were for the infinite diapers
of nine children
one after another
from age 30 to 40
I'm sure they removed the bands when they carried her hemorraging
from the house over and over
I pull back my middle class hair
and think of my mother
my dad and his infinite newspapers
magazines
Life, Look, Saturday Evening Post

sitting on the stool in the kitchen
talking to my mother
drinking
and reading
man of the house
we children waited silently for him to finish
so we could have the comics
the magazine

he brought us back
Little Golden Books
from his evening walks
Mother hid James Baldwin under her mattress because
he was not okay reading for children
The Fire Next Time
I stole it, read it while she was at work
put it back

9/11 and Pearl Harbor

Harry Truman kept a sign on his desk: The Buck Stops Here. If someone had decided during his administration to bomb New York City off the face of the earth and Truman had not been able to stop it, he would have held himself personally responsible. He ran for office on the idea that he was the best man for the job, and he considered that to be a very high expectation indeed. He was a competent, responsible adult. That is: he was a very conservative, old fashioned adult.
Conspiracies are notoriously difficult to carry through successfully. Pearl Harbor was bombed, and the American people have always held our government partially responsible for that tragedy. We had intercepted the information; we simply did not think bombing our fleet out of the water was the most likely thing the Japanese would do. It seemed unlikely. Our government was mistaken, and many Americans have consistently considered that mistake deadly and inexcusable, but no has ever had the gall to put forward the theory that the devilish Japanese were so innately evil and superior that our ability to govern ourselves according to our own constitution was in question. We honored responsible adults in those days and did what we needed to do and came home and raised our families as best we could. We considered caring for our children and each other what adults did, even if the commitment sometimes made us very unhappy for long periods. People stayed married for the children.
Our Beloved Leader and his backers have never themselves taken responsibility for the horror of their own incompetence in terms of the the surreal fact that commercial airliners flew out of Boston carrying women and children as well men and into the World Trade Center in New York City. He has snatched citizens off the streets of major cities , denied Americans the basic right of Habeas Corpus, and whipped the citizens of this comparatively open society into a frenzy of paranoia without admitting that the success of that loony plot was unlikely in the extreme and an incredible illustration of his administration's utter incompetence. People look to fascism to protect themselves with a strong competent leader when they feel themselves under uncontrollable and incomprehensible threat. We now have a proto fascist government, and I am no alarmist. I never think a successful disaster is the result of a conspiracy. Conspiracies mostly just fail; they are too complex. The best explanation of any phenomenon is usually the simplest that covers all elements of the question; that is never a conspiracy unless the government is run by irresponsible, paranoid proto fascists. There you are.

Elmo Comforts

 
 
 
 

La Fortaleza

 

 

Maggie

Mollie sat on the cot against the back wall of the Health Office holding the large syringe high in her right hand, feeding Ellie formula through her tube, watching her closely and chatting with Nurse Ester. It had been a busy morning of bruised knees and doctors who did not return calls. The two women were relaxing a little in the quiet. Someone knocked on the door, and Carla walked in holding little Maggie's hand.
Maggie had appeared in the school about a year ago at the same time as Lola. She was small for her age and slender with a thin, pale face and the smile of an angel. She spoke English when Mollie said, Hi in the hall, but chattered with warmth if Mollie addressed her in Spanish. Maggie and Lola had immediately been taken up by a group of giggling girls in their Upper Academic room at Jone's school for he Visually Impaired. and Mollie loved to watch the little group chattering in the halls and bathrooms. They seemed so ordinary and third grade, standing in a row at the sinks,washing their hands or walking down the halls arm in arm, marching around the yard in a big circle. Mollie was embarrassed that she could not tell these girls apart. They were both silly, shy, and the same age. They took turns telling Mollie the Spanish word for bracelet over and over when Mollie admired their gold chains or pink Hello Kitty jewelry. Pulsera
Mollie said, Hi, Maggie, what's up? Maggie looked up at Mollie and said, My leg hurts. Maggie had been a perfectly normal six year old in first grade at her neighborhood school until the headaches started. At first, the clinic doctor had said that it was probably nothing and suggested that Maggie was still adjusting to school. The headaches were just tension, and Maggie would stop having them when she adjusted. Maggie was a sensitive child and the baby of the family. He recommended a nap for Maggie after school, but the headaches did not get better. Maggie loved her teacher, and she was reading very well, but the headaches became blinding. Finally, the doctor scheduled an MRI and discovered that Maggie had a malignant brain tumor.
She had surgery immediately and spent months recuperating, first in the hospital where they checked her temperature and blood pressure a dozen times a day. The nurses removed the bandages that covered the open wound in her head to check that the jagged mark running over her bald skull to assure that it was healing correctly. Maggie's teachers came to visit almost every night after school. They brought Get Well cards made by Maggie's class and talked about what the children were reading. Miraculously, Maggie recovered her cheer and looked forward to going back to school; the doctors told her that she would be fine soon.
When she went home, she was visited every week by a special teacher from the district and learned to listen to the stories from her reading program on tape and figure out who the stories were about and what the action was. She could soon tell Mrs. Geoghan why she liked the stories. Of course, she always liked the stories. She learned to count unifex cubes and little bears without being able to see them. The surgery had left her intelligence and charm intact but taken her vision.
Fortunately, she was young, and she was alive. Her whole family prayed in gratitude before she slept every night. Thanks to Mrs. Geogahan, her mother did not let her get away with much, but Maggie learned to see her mother's face with her hands. She learned to eat with a fork by thinking of the plate as a circle with marks at the top and bottom and each side. Her mother told her where everything was, and she scooped with a spoon or stabbed with a fork. When Maggie could get out of bed, nothing was ever moved in the house again so Maggie would not trip. She learned to get around using the walls as guides.
After while, Maggie started at Jone's at the same time as Lola and became part of the gang of giggling little girls in hallways and bathrooms. They had to be separated in the classroom so they would pay attention to their braille reading and math. She took Orientation and Mobility with Ms. Isabel. She learned to find her way around the school using the walls and then a long cane. She learned to run on the playscape and get yelled at for riding the tricycles too fast. She learned how to read a braille map and tell North from South and East from West.
Now she was sitting on the chair next to Nurse Ester's desk with her feet swinging, telling Ms. Mollie that her leg hurt. . Nurse Ester got up from her desk and looked at Maggie's right leg. She asked Maggie if she had fallen on the yard or bumped into anything. Maggie said, No, but she had told her Mom about the pain, and her Mother had told her it was nothing and given her ice to put on the spot. Nurse Ester asked when that happened, and Maggie said, at Christmas. It was now March. Nurse Ester ran her hand up Maggie's leg and found the bump. She asked, Is this where it hurts? Maggie said, Yes. Mollie said, Nurse Ester, give Maggies some ice for the bump. It well help her feel better. The nurse looked up at Mollie and said, Yes. She went to the tiny freezer they kept medicine and water in, got an ice pack, wrapped it in a paper towel and gave it to Maggie to put on the lump. Maggie knew the Nurse and Molllie always put ice where it hurt. Ester said to Carla, Maggie can go back to class and hold the ice as long as she wants it. I'll call her Mother. Maggie left with Carla and her ice pack.
The last of the formula disappeared into Ellie, and Mollie slowly poured in two ounces of water to clear the tube. Then she removed the tube from Ellie's stoma, put the syringe and tube down on the tray in front of her, and covered Ellie's button. She took Ellie's hands and helped her off the cot. She removed her gloves and took Ellie to the sink to wash their hands. Nurse Ester called Maggie's mother and told her she needed to pick up Maggie and that Maggie could not return to school without a note from her doctor. Mollie walked Ellie back to class, watching her trail the wall independently and occasionally saying, a la derecha or vuelta, por favor.
Maggie came to the Spring program and sat with her parents in the audience. She had her right leg removed at the hip, hoping to stop the bone cancer. Her teacher visited her twice a week in the hospital and took braille get well cards made by her friends. She talked to the other girl gang members on the phone, gossiped, giggled and told them she was scared of the surgery. Nurse Ester visited her class to help the children understand and cope without too much fear. Every child in the class knew he or she was delicate; they had all seen lots of doctors and hospital rooms. The district sent a counselor trained on crisis management.
Maggie was taught by a different Itinerant teacher and started to learn her braille contractions and where a comma went. The news spread around the school that Maggie had an infection, then that she had recovered and was being fitted for a prosthetic leg. In late June, Maggie walked on her new leg with a mask on her face to keep out germs into the music room to sit with her class for music class. The teacher played major and minor chords, and the children identified them. She taught them a folk song from India about a mother who loves her baby. The children sang. Maggie sat and smiled and smiled. Molllie stood at the music room door and watched.
Mollie said nothing to anyone; she did not attend the funeral because she felt she belonged with the kids while they were in school. She did not cry, but she no longer felt that anything was more than she could stand. She never again said, Why me? She fed Ellie every day, covered bruised knees, soothed bumped heads, and put up with idiocy with as much patience as she could. When Maggie's parents came for her last report card and her backpack, Maggie looked them in their ashen faces and said, Maggie was beautiful child. I'm so sorry. She did not say, I know your pain.

Notes on the Paranoid Construct

The human brain is an organ; if it did not function to promote the survival of the animal, it would not exist. The mind is a function of the brain; no one knows whether the human mind perceives reality or even whether there is reality. The mind perceives what it perceives. No one knows whether Christ actually ever lived; if he did live, no one knows why St. Paul, who certainly did live, chose to use this rather obscure Jewish cult to promote his strange world view. For two thousand years, human beings, who use their brains to make sense of perceptions and sensory input, have chosen to use the odd writings of this misogynist to make sense of what they either do not, in fact, understand, or simply choose not to understand.
In the same way humans, in order to go on sensing whatever they sense and to believe they have some control of what they perceive to exist, choose to believe that there is order in the universe and that they can perceive and understand that order. Whether or not the order exists, humans evidently have a biological need to find it or impose it. They must also validate these beliefs by either convincing other humans of their interpretations or imposing those interpretations on other human beings.
Humans are organisms; therefore they function in response to both their own natures and to external stimuli. All conscious human beings are biologically required to find order; the individual order will be determined by the interaction of the individual's physical brain and sensory input Something happens at the same time as something else. It rains more than usual; the river overflows; different plants grow; a monkey is seen to eat a plant and not die. A miracle; god has sent manna to feed his people. The story is told over and over and over; someone learns to write grocery lists from someone else; someone else realizes the flood story can be written. Five hundred years later, someone realizes the power, majesty, and good ness of god can be shown from this miraculous monkey story. Order prevails; god knows all; the death of your daughter from cholera is caused by the fact that she did not serve her father fast enough. Truth has been found. Order, religion, god, no insanity.
A child's father tries to beat the family dog to death in the bathroom on Sunday afternoon with a board from the yard because the father believes that dogs love you if you are good. This dog is proving him to be bad; the dog must die. The child stands outside that bathroom door until someone beats it down and lets her in. She picks up the dog in her arms; she lays him on her bed; she cleans up the bathroom. She has the balls of god. She is a true lover. She needs her dad; this is inconceivable. It did not happen; it is never mentioned again. When she comes home from the school the next afternoon, the animal is gone; life goes on. Dinner is served; her older sister holds her in her arms in bed to protect her from the screaming. The child grows up to believe the world is evil and out to get her. Is she irrational? Crazy? Her body freezes sometimes on the floor. She cannot eat although she is hungry; she cannot smoke although the craving is tearing at her brain. She sees patterns of evil everywhere, and her brain folds. Her hands shake; she is terrified and furious. She is paranoid.
She believes everyone is talking about her; the joke is everyone is talking about her. The two things have almost nothing to do with one another. She would believe that whether there were anyone else alive or not. She is from a big family of lovers; they talk whether she cares or not. Both things are true; different sets of facts. She believes the people at her job hate her and are plotting against her; she believes she is lesbian; she believes her doctor gives a fuck. The people where she works are a major international oil company; of course they are absolutely corrupt and they plot day and night. They are in fact more paranoid than she is. That is irrelevant to her belief that they are evil. She would believe that whether they were or not. That is her illness. She likes sex; she may or may not be lesbian; that is also irrelevant. Her doctor would for sure sell her out for a bigger office any day of the week, and he is probably studying her. If it kills her, too bad; she was crazy and dispensable. But for his career to work out, she must believe he cares. Order, hers and his. She is paranoid; he is not. He is middle class, white American, and he believes firmly in Jesus. Her suicide is incidental and acceptable in the name of research. Money will be made. He is sane; she believes he does not want her dead. She is crazy. Both organisms reproduce; both eat, sleep, and find order. Both work; one suffers agony; the other exploits it; life goes on or not.

Dinner on Larchmont

I looked for you across the street where the shade is.

I said we could walk up and down the street and look at all the places, but this is where everybody wanted to eat.

Well, the other side has the shade.

You're under the umbrella anyway. You were born and raised here. I can't believe you have so much trouble with the sun. I love it. I love summer.

tyle="font-style:italic;">They had pushed two tables together under umbrellas, taking up the sidewalk and making it hard to look at the beautiful and strange people passing by on the street. The young, enthusiastic Mexican American waiter with a blue stripe in his hair and a long apron over his dress shirt and tie asked, Everything all right? Do you need a few minutes?

No, we're ready.

Mollie ordered five cheese ravioli with cheese sauce. M thought about the horrendous fat content of all that cheese. No vegetables. Mollie had already had a mastectomy and skin cancer. She was sitting there in a shirt and tie. The shirt was dark and heavy and covered her arms.

I'm going to the dermatologist Monday to have more skin cancers burned off.

Why are you sitting in the sun. Do you have on sun block?

No.

My god, trade places with me. Are you nuts?

When the waiter came back with large glasses of ice water and lemon, Mollie said

, I love your hair.

Mollie had kept her hair very short,really short, since it had grown back after the chemo. > short.

The waiter said,

thank you.

So how was Utah?

Mollie said<

/span>, You know we're DAR.

What's DAR?

Mother said that to me once. I looked at her. M raised her eyebrows.

Uncle Fred has documentation!

What's DAR?

Daughters of the American Revolution. You know, like the huge rancho your Dad's family lost to his brother during the Revolution? I know. Fred's Mormon. He's traced our family back to medieval France. You know Manuel here is pure French with a little Catalan mixed in. From Maximilian ,poor guy Everybody who is not Irish in the world is French. Lucky for our children, they're both. By the way, did you know the Spanish are Celts? Never mind that the Celts died out long before Whoever the Conqueror. Manuel's and my children are nearly pure Celt. Irish and Spanish. Both sides from France. What more could they want? They are natural kings. Our family is very old. They know in Utah. They have documentation. You know every single family in the world is exactly the same age.

>Jo said<

/span>, and your point would be?

Uncle Fred has documentation. Not what they have on the internet. They have a secret site that only Mormons can use. He showed me. We have three ancestors that came over on the Mayflower.

If every family that came over on the Mayflower really did...

Those families are all interrelated, you know.

If every family that came over on the Mayflower really did, it would have had to be the Queen Elizabeth. You know how small those boats were? Anyway the people who came on those little boats were not the cream of society. I want to be from the family that financed the trip. Also, where are the mansions in Connecticut where our fellow DAR live that we intermarried with? I need to get to know them. Did Uncle Fred's documentation happen to document that schizophrenia has run in the family since medieval France?

The Celts have not died out!

Yes, George, they have, their culture, too. Oh, and they were in most of Europe, not just Ireland. Also, the reason hardly anybody but the British bothered to conquer the island which is right there across the North Sea is because it wasn't worth the trouble. Even Joyce called it the sow who eats her own farrow. But we sure can the fuck talk. English isn't even their own language and look at the writers!

revision

Primo Levi was middle class
studied engineering
Clean, orderly forces
Counterforces
Bridges, scrapers of the sky
Some black man invented the elevator
So the people could ride the little cars to the top

Black men in uniforms pushed the buttons
Yes sir
And the people at the top shuffle their papers
Behind smoked glass
No sun, rain, shadow
Only the papers and the insurance companies
Doctors
Psychiatrists and their tribe
Corner offices

That bitch is incompetent
I have to get rid of her
She shakes and weeps with her hands on the keys
The whore, the bitch

Levi became a brilliant thinker
And poet
The Nazis did it
Good for them

Primo Levi fought death for years
Then he jumped from the staircase
Lover



Note: By 2007, The Economist had declared that "a good rule in most discussions is that the first person to call the other a Nazi automatically loses the argument."[14] And in October 2007, the "Last Page" columnist in The Smithsonian stated that when an adversary uses an inappropriate Hitler or Nazi comparison, "you have only to say 'Godwin's Law' and a trapdoor falls open, plunging your rival into a pool of hungry crocodiles."[15] (Godwin's Law, Wikipedia, 1/2/2007)

Me and Barbie

I am so old that I have next to no feelings or opinion about Barbie, the doll. My parents essentially did not want me to participate in popular culture at all, and saw to it that I did not in so far as they could. I was and am a good girl, so I simply did not, which further excluded me from pop culture. I tend to look at it from the outside and sort of analyze, which the Catholic church with its long history of intellectual leadership, carefully and insanely taught me to do. Essentially, I don't care what anyone does, but I do look at it with an analytic approach. The best classes I ever had in thinking were in English literature, theology, and algebra at St Michael's Catholic school for girls. For the record, the church also formed my aesthetic sense, based on this same long tradition.

Of course, that was completely nuts for an institution descending into an insanity of power hunger. By the way, as far as I can tell, no one on Earth is stupid enough to teach literature that way any more. Now professors tell you what to think; you memorize and spit it back, but the damage had already been done as far as I was concerned. I get my A unless the professor is insane and gets my attention at the same time. That is hard, but not impossible. Then I think exactly what I want. I also read what I want. That helps me to think.There are actually a few other people like me, minding their own business, making their own judgments, rolling along, despite the subversive originality of their thought.

Back to Barbie. My younger sisters were teenagers when Barbie's hard face appeared in toy stores. By then, Mother and Daddy had thrown in the towel, and my sisters both had Barbies in abundance. When my children came along, I was determined that they would be as happy as I could arrange for them to be. I really didn't care much whether they could think. Thinking clearly has been forced on me by pain, and I damned well did not want that for anyone I loved. However, the idea was that guns were bad for little boys, and people should not waste their time on TV, which kind of made sense to me. No TV, no guns. TV is boring anyway. Well my son started sneaking down the street to watch Speed Racer; we bought a TV. My older brother gave my son a real gun for his 10th birthday. The kid was furious when I took it away; he has still never forgiven me; we gave him toy guns for Christmas. Towel thrown in.

I thought Barbie was a poor model for young girls, but I could not stop Manuel's family from lovingly giving my girl every variety of Barbie doll they could find. I read Bettleheim. He was not always wrong, whatever he did to actual parents and children. When a person wants something, there is always a reason. If they get the thing, they can think or feel about the thing and what it means to them. Little girls are running over lines of princess Barbie's in their mothers' cars. They are real American middle class girls. That means something. Something to think about. By the way, my children were so beloved and spoiled that they never gave that red bike a thought; they knew they could have the moon if it could be found and bought. They decided for themselves what to think, and they still do. They make lots of mistakes, like all of us, but they don't actually go out and shoot strangers' babies to make them free.







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Wednesday, March 05, 2008


art, pain and conformity

La Fortaleza

The legend is that La Fortaleza was first automated tortilla factory in the city. It was located on Spring street on the parking lot across from La Placita. Manuel's dad owned it, and the family lived in the rooms above the factory. Manuel was born in those rooms more than sixty years ago. La Fortaleza kept the entire extended family going during the Depression. Manuel's dad got extra flour and bean rations, as well other necessities of life during the war because he produced food for the community, and he shared with Manuel's mom's family who lived all over the city. One of Manuel's aunts, Tia Elo, lived in a house on Bunker Hill and took care of Manuel and his brothers so that his mom could work. When they were old enough to push a broom, the three brothers went to work in the factory for nosotros. When he retired, Manuel's dad sold the factory, and here it is, on north Ford street in East Los Angeles. We pass it on our way to various restaurants we frequent on the real East side of Los Angeles.

The factory had a store front that sold tamales, and other things besides tortillas. Ramon Barragan of Barragan's restaurants worked there as did the original owner of the the Nayarit, restaurant on Sunset Blvd which may or may not still exist. Manuel's brother, Justino, remodeled the Nayarit for the daughter after the founder died, and we went to the invitation only grand opening. I was pregnant with my daughter. The people recognized my husband on the street and called him Jimenez. He was the son of the great and rich Don Jimenez. The ladies on the street in Echo Park talked about how young and sweet I was, what a good couple we made. Manuel's dad terrified me, but I am easily terrified. He was delighted that we got busy right away and produced two lovely, blond, blue eyed Jimenez grandchildren.

Westlake and MacArthur

Daddy was absolutely furious when they changed the name of Westlake Park to MacArthur Park. He stood in the kitchen while my mother cooked or put away groceries and just ranted. They used to stock the lake in Westlake park with tiny fish in summer. My older brother used to take his little fishing pole on the street car and go fishing. He would bring home a pile of tiny fish, which my mother would patiently clean and fry in margarine. I wish I could say butter,but we ate the cheapest margarine in the market. I liked the taste of it until I got married and had to eat real butter.
Anyway, she fried the tiny fish in margarine, and we ate them for lunch with potatoes and whatever else was around. When my younger brothers were old enough, Dick, my brother, would take them with their little fishing poles to catch tiny fish in MacArthur Park. My Dad grew up in L A; he knew the city like the palm of his hand, and he hated to see the name of the old park change to honor a general. They don't stock the lake anymore, I don't think, but the drug dealers are under control, and people picnic there with their kids, and the new gentry jog in the evening. Of course, the old gentry are the reason the park and lake are there at all. My Dad was the old genty, and when I saw this wonderful name in such nice, square text in the middle of that rectangle right there on that lovely old building renovated within an inch of its life, I had to have the picture to remember my Dad.