A Tortured Metaphor

People are like ice cream bars. They have a hard layer on the outside and soft stuff underneath. And when you get to the end, you have to do a balancing act so the whole thing doesn’t slide to the ground.

Also, some people have a crumbly coating that makes them special.

A Question

You can tell a lot about a man if you ask him this question: Which do you believe in the presence of more: extraterrestrial life or ghosts?

The man who answers, ‘extraterrestrial life,’ but then proceeds to insist that, certainly, somewhere out in the universe exists a tiny, amoeba-like creature, some space protozoa, and that that qualifies as extraterrestrial life -- this is a man who will give you much grief in argumentation. He will dig small holes into the battleground for you to fall into, until you are driven mad by his reason.

The man who answers ‘ghosts’ is at heart a romantic, and, more importantly, loyal. You can trust him to remember you after you have died, or, if you have died under troubling circumstances, that he will not allow you to be banished from people’s memories, no matter hard they try to relieve themselves of that “unpleasantness.”

The man who refuses to believe in either, even in the hypothetical sense, is a man better left for another woman.

A man once told me in the future, when the universe at last rummages through its coat and empties its pockets of living mysteries, it will be possible to be haunted by the ghost of an extraterrestrial killed by an angry mob simply for its scaley skin or the strangeness of its huge, milky eyes.

8th Avenue Afternoon

Asian Hair Stories: I. Hair, Eros, Time

Twice I have found long, black strands of hair at his apartment that do not belong to either of us. My own hair is short, stopping at the shoulders, so I know the hairs belong to another woman, his ex.

The first hair I found between the pages of a magazine that had wedged itself between his mattress and the wall. I found the other one sweeping up a broken glass when I tore a hedge of dust and dirt loose from the end of the broom.

Two weeks ago I came across a single pubic hair about three-quarters of an inch long, jagged like a cartoon lightning bolt, on his bathroom floor. I picked it up and placed it on my palm. There is not a lot of variation in Asian pubic hair. Even so, given the amount of time I knew to have passed since the two of them were intimate, the hair was, in all likelihood, mine. Yet I could not help probing it, as one would an insect flailing on its back. I stretched it straight between my fingers, as though its full length would divine its true owner.

I have heard stories about this woman before, in the way that one finds out about exes in the skiffs and pivots of idle conversation. I know, for example, that she thought Godard was a crashing bore; that she smoked Newport Ultra-lights before she quit; and that she used to work the register at her parents’ convenience store and was held up by a junky who threatened to beat her head in with a two-liter bottle of Coke.

Once he had gotten very angry with her and poured a glass of water over her head, which he felt very bad about later. On a separate occasion, she had gotten very angry with him and thrown a plate of spaghetti across the room at him.

Jack Gilbert has a poem about finding a strand of his wife’s hair while repotting a plant years after she had died. Because her name was Michiko, her Asian-ness made her more interesting and real to me.

The ex’s hair, too, holds more perverse fascination for me because she, too, was Asian. This is where the ethnicity of the man is important.

Her hair was the irrefutable, biological confirmation of her presence on earth, in his life. The power of hair is that it is both dead and alive.

It is as weightless through time as the woman it belongs to, suspended in the anecdotal margins. Like most men, he takes care not to complement her when he mentions her to me, not that he needs to. The trigger of jealousy is to know that love is love, even if it disintegrates.

A cluster of hair, like the nest you find clotting the drain of your bathtub, can be gathered between your fingers and tossed away. It is the individual strands that have a way of burrowing like a worm, deep into your guts. You will not know it is there until you have no appetite, until your skin cleaves to your bones.

I have started to grow my hair long in order to torment my successor. It must be very long so there can be no mistaking what is mine.

Asian Hair Stories: II. The Knot

The accident happened, stupidly, like this: She clambered on top of the hood of a friend’s car and pretended to be surfing. The car jerked. She was 16 years old. She has been in a coma ever since.
Her mother, Chang Tai Tai, was a friend of the family’s. I did not know her very well; even though we were the same age, we didn’t attend the same school, so I saw her only at certain social gatherings. I thought she was a little full of herself. But in truth she was simply prettier than me, and wore more stylish clothes, which I envied.

In the first few months after the accident, we took shifts at her bedside so if she woke, the first person she lit on would be someone she recognized. But as the years drew on and she remained stubbornly comatose, we began to lose our resolve. When her high school boyfriend was married, no one mentioned her at the wedding.

I would not think of her for long stretches of time, then her face would break the surface without warning: When I sent a text message to a girlfriend, or as I lay on my side with my leg wrapped around my husband’s – a catalogue of technological inventions and sensual pleasures I enjoyed and that were stolen from her as she slept her sick sleep.

Her mother continued to visit her daughter every day. Rotated her limbs. Cut her fingernails and toenails. Gave her sponge baths. For her birthday and to welcome the new year, she rouged her daughter’s cheeks and painted her lips. And she cut her hair, keeping up with the prevailing trends with the help of fashion magazines.

Chang Tai Tai was very proud of the tensile strength of her daughter’s hair, an inherited trait passed down from generations of women on her side of the family. In her native village, her ancestors’ hair was used to make calligraphy brushes, whose fluidity, she claimed, inspired poetry about love, war, loyalty and sacrifice that could make the upper shelf of a general’s lip tremble.

This kind of talk the community endured with polite smiles, as they did her lackluster shrimp toast. We understood these boasts were her way of keeping her daughter’s foot in this world. We no longer even bothered to wish in private that the girl die quickly for her sake.

She was 26 when her family at last consented to remove the tubes that were keeping her alive. Several weeks later, Chang Tai Tai sent friends and family a three-coin lucky knot plaited with her daughter’s hair. When I received mine in the mail, my children howled in exaggerated disgust. My husband insisted I throw it out. I wrapped the knot carefully back in the rice paper it came in and slid the box in the attic.

A rumor began circulating that Chang Tai Tai was seen shopping at Ranch 99 Market wearing a wig woven from her daughter’s hair.

I, for one, do not believe it. How much hair can a person grow, after all, in her lifetime?

Asian Hair Stories: III. The Ponytail

I once dated a Japanese man whose hair reached down to the middle of his back. We met at an art opening in the Meatpacking District for a Japanese artist who had eschewed the ponderous, epic oil paintings of his past for crayon drawings and water colors of dogs. His dog portraits represented a return to a more elemental and innocent exploration of art’s possibilities, he said through an interpreter.

My lover did not have a beautiful face. He did not have an ugly face either, but without his hair, you would not have found him memorable. I don’t say this to be mean-spirited, but as a statement of fact.

At one point in the evening the artist gave a short, live performance of his crayon drawing, accompanied by a recording of dogs barking in Central Park, the source of his inspiration. Several people in the audience barked in encouragement. The artist gripped a violet crayon in his hand and drew an outline of a dog on a canvas of butcher paper that had been draped across a board balanced on top of two saw horses.

My Japanese man stood watching with his hands in his pockets, a bemused look on his face. That look had my first, middle and last name on it, plus a few I hadn’t yet been called.

It is the way of women to feel they can touch a man’s hair without his permission, because it is assumed he will appreciate the attention, unthinkingly, like a dog. If we were at a party and became separated, I would find him with a strange woman pulling lightly at the end of his hair so I knew he could feel the tug all the way to his scalp. When I approached and introduced myself, these women would look me up and down with just the slightest movement in their eyes, calculating what I had or didn’t have on them.

Because I didn’t know Japanese and his English was not quite fluent, at times it seemed we talked with the sophistication of a pocket dictionary. Ordinarily, this would have bothered me. But I had recently emerged from a relationship freighted with tweedy attempts at adult compromise that amounted to nothing. By comparison, these simple dialogues were a relief. Our limited speech made sex more torrid, too; Woman in the Dunes without the existential subtext.

It feels foolish to say it now, but over time I became convinced that his hair would undo us. The longer it grew, the more women he seemed to attract. They insinuated themselves with questions like, “What conditioner do you use?” or “Are you Native American? Eskimo?”

At first I teased him about cutting it. He joked that he would if I agreed to wear dresses made of sack cloth. My entreaties grew more insistent; still he refused. Finally I threatened him with an ultimatum set for the end of the month. I remember lying next to him in bed with my clothes on. When the clock struck midnight and he did not move, I rose, put on my boots and walked out the door.

I have not spoken to him since, although I did see him once, from behind, as I approached a traffic light on Broadway. I recognized his long ponytail immediately, the rough way he ran it through a rubber band so a snarl of hair caught around the elastic.

I made no effort to get his attention. When the light changed, I let him get far ahead of me. If you had told me I would one day have an encounter with only the back of his head, I would have laughed in your face.

Let’s say if you had to divide men up as vampires, werewolves, zombies or ghosts, he was a ghost.

Tales of Auspicious/Inauspicious Numbers

I.

The daughters despised their stepmother, who dressed them in second-hand polyester jumpers and swore she would light them on fire if they mouthed off.

Who fed them a diet of old rice and nitrates. Who read them H.P. Lovecraft as bedtime stories. Who gave them blunt, asexual bowl cuts, she said the better to serve their brains to chingaderas.

Who seduced their father in calculated increments, measured by the rising slit in her cheongsam and the extension of her Mimi melisma-karoake, matched by a half-lidded gaze that could take your raw meat and cure it.

At first it was an accident: They fed her four servings of her favorite chicken curry. Her stomach lurched, blew out its tires and rolled into a ditch.

Then they lined up her embroidered slippers four in a row at her bedside. She twisted her ankle coming down the stairs.

They lit four candles at dinner. An expensive spa treatment left her skin looking sallow and waxen. Four artfully arranged rice crackers on a saucer choked the bird in her singing voice.

For her birthday, a four-hour miniseries made for Canadian public television on the damming of the Yangtze River heaved sandbags under her eyes.

Their spoken word performance of corrupted Lorca, Four in the Afternoon, drove her writhing to her bed.

When she begged for their mercy, the daughters laughed: Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha.

II.

Every morning he set his alarm for 8 am. He made love to his mistress at 8 pm. He arranged his sectional couch at an 8 o’clock angle. He opened an 88-cent store in Little Saigon that sold Mexican label toothpaste, biscuits, mesh pan scrubbers and devotional candles. He arranged to be buried eight feet into the ground. He squeezed his wife’s breasts religiously eight times before he went to sleep.

He ordered custom-made placemats that said, I 8 Already from the Internet. The direct translation of his cell phone number was prosperity guaranteed prosperity, more easy prosperity twice and long life.

When the neighborhood gave way to tapas joints and yoga studios, his business began doing poorly. Eight loans and eight losing blackjacks hands later at the San Manuel Indian Bingo & Casino, he lost his lease.

His wife called him an asshole eight different ways in two languages. His mistress did not return the eight messages he left on her answering machine.

By the time we found him, he was living beneath an underpass, cooking beans in a butter cookie tin over a fire. When he saw us approaching, he beamed widely. The underdeveloped lot of eight teeth left in his head spelled out, I am the luckiest man in the world.

III.

For every four times you say no, I will say yes eight times.

I Forgive You

I forgive you, anthropology.
I know you just want to learn how
others live and make their meaning.
I know you long to be invisible
with your notebook and long lens,
cataloguing the human panoramic
before it ends.

I forgive you, fashion.
Absent plumage, antlers and hey you hues
the human form yearns
to delight, ravish, amuse.
Runway confections that come to pass
Are variations on the baboon’s face,
the baboon’s ass.

I forgive you, winter.
I played your mind games last year.
You’ve got the hours in a headlock,
My expiration date tattooed
on your knuckles. I get
black lung breathing in your air.

I forgive you, science,
for believing that you are the only truth.
I, too, have wanted desperately to prove
myself empirical to one who doubted
the origin of my combustions.

I forgive you, public opinion research.
I know you are simply trying to get a grip on
what people want and who they are.
It’s not your fault that, anonymous or not,
what they say is not what they thought.
We all want to get good
with God when we reach the crypt.
Who knew the Lord would send
His scouts by phone
to test us off a script.

I forgive you, poetry,
for not making a goddamned dime.
It’s not your fault that people feel
they must eject you
from their mouths
in that sing-song inflection that is the cue
for a normal person to leave the room.
I forgive that no one wants to read you
even though you actually get them
there faster than dial-up prose:
You defeat linear tyranny
by more than a nose.