UNDERNEATH

I had a dream I was sliding down a stair bannister that kept going, forty, fifty stories down. At the bottom was a place in the middle of Earth similar to hell I suppose. There was a dark stage, and aisles so narrow that you could not walk in between the seats. You got around by crawling on your stomach underneath the seats.

I crawled right up to the stage which was raised, and in the side of the short platform wall there was a small door. I knew that this door would offer no escape, but there was no room to turn around so I had no choice. I went in. The space underneath the stage was occupied by featureless life forms, crowded together, pinkish fat beating blobs. They wanted to eat my sexuality and my soul, to feed evil in the world above.

AN EVERYTHINGSEXUAL COSTUME

I can't remember which mystery novel I read that has this ending: a girl and her beau are in her apartment. She has nothing to cook except an egg. They are hungry and decide to share the egg, but before it makes it to the frying pan, she accidently drops it. They look at the egg on the floor and laugh, and then they kiss.

Freddy and I went to a Halloween party last night. I went as the Pink Panther and he went as a pink fairy princess. He hates dressing up, he hates acting. We argued for an hour about what he would wear, so I didn't hand him his costume (which consisted of just a wand and a tiara) until after we had arrived and he had gotten suitably tipsy.

This was the first night that we left our daughter in the care of someone else. I was miserable and wanted to go straight home to be with her.

We met a couple who used to live across the street from Freddy, and they seemed surprised to see him with me and learn that we had a daughter. The husband, Matt, said to Freddy, "I always thought you were gay." I asked him why.

"Your hair, your clothes."

This is funny, because I cut Freddy's hair myself, and I'm not very good at it. Also, Freddy wears rough construction-worker clothes usually, not a tiara and wand.

But people often think that he is gay, either gay or European. We stopped at a cosmetics counter where I purchased a present to send to my cousin in Japan, and the cosmetic attendant said to Freddy, "You're European, right?"

Freddy laughed. "I'm from Nebraska."

"Oh, well, I guess it's 'cause you dress well. Most American men don't know how to dress."

In this instance, he was not wearing his work garb, rather an old white shirt of my father's monogramed on the breast pocket with "JWP".

I have gotten so used to it that I don't notice his peculiar mannerisms, but they seem to confuse other people who want to be able to place him in a clear stereotype. I know he looks gay; gay men fall all over him. I know he looks Germanic; he went in and of airports in Amsterdam and Berlin without ever showing his passport once (so much for airport security). I think blue-eyed tall blondes still get special treatment over there for advancing the human race.

He is the gayest straight man and most European Mid-Westerner you will ever meet.

************

I am confused for everything but what I am. I remember a school teacher who thought I belonged on the bus with the Down's Syndrome kids, and a boy in Arizona who tried to speak Navaho to me. I've had several people mistake me for being Russian (is it how I dress?)

Yevtushenko, the Russian poet, thought I was Mexican. He is a huge flirt, and he said, "If I vas your lover, I vould leek vacamole out of that dimple on your cheek."

I had no idea what he was talking about. "Vacamoley? What's that?"

"You don't know Vacamoley?!"

His teenage son had to explain. "He means Guacamole."

GUESTS

Well, Hermann from Vienna is here. I haven't slept, and am queasy off of Mozart Kugeln. I cannot stop eating them. There are 16 left.

When Hermann the Organist leaves tomorrow morning, Freddy's parents will come, bringing balalaikas and toys. Then two of Freddy's mischievous friends from his art school days are arriving from London.

Little Z enjoys visitors and handles them very well. But I get nervous and while they are here, and notice and concentrate intently on dust on the table legs or a dead fly in the water reservoir of a potted African violet, having no understanding of what they are saying as their lips move.

The next best-selling science fiction novel will have to wait.

********

I am still trying to get used to having a new person around all the time in my home. Having been here only three and a half months, Little Z feels to me at times more like a visitor, not a part of me. Sitting with her and shaking a rattle, I catch myself thinking about other less important life forms, such as mutating viruses and Henry Kissinger. And I feel guilty.

But when I am putting her to sleep and humming, and she starts humming along with me, it's as if she is still inside me.

IT'S ALRIGHT THAT IT'S ALL WRONG

I've never mentioned that I have a sister, Selene. She is here. And if you need titillating, here.

TRAVELING WITH BABY

Our trip east last week was not relaxing. Freddy knew it wouldn't be, and pleaded that for our baby's sake, we convince my eager mother to keep activities to a minimum. But I was the one who just had to see all seven gables on a particular ramshackle in Salem.

On the morning of that day my mother offered Freddy the front passenger seat and gave him the map, and Lenny closed his eyes momentarily in relief because my mother gave bad directions. She doesn't give the wrong directions, but she gives the right directions ineffectively, after the turns and exits have already been passed.

She and I sat in the back with Little Z and tried to entertain her with toys. We hadn't yet made it onto the highway before my mother started feeling carsick. I asked Lenny to pull over so that she could switch seats with Freddy. But she said no, she would be fine.

In the course of two more blocks, she became several shades greener.

The thought of her unnecessary martyrdom makes me crazy, so I yelled from the back, "Stop the effing car!"

Lenny was sore about my interrupting his sing-along with "The Horse with No Name," but he is a little intimidated by me so he obeyed. We pulled into a McDonald's and mother looked up when the car stopped with a brightened visage.

"Maybe I should eat something?"

I asked her what she had had for breakfast.

"Oh, just some chocolate ice-cream."

She would later claim to me in private that ice-cream hadn't really been her breakfast food of choice, but that she had wanted to consume as much of the carton as she could to prevent Lenny, who needed to lose weight, from engorging himself on it later.

"Mom, I don't think that McDonald's food will make you feel any better. Why don't you switch seats with Freddy?"

"But Freddy has such long legs. Maybe I should drive."

"No! 'Cause then all of us would get carsick."

Hurt by my meanness, she finally agreed to switch seats with Freddy. Lenny resumed driving and was on the highway singing to Carly Simon's "You're So Vain" when I heard my mother moan. I touched her shoulder from behind.

"Mom, are you okay?"

"I'm fine."

Lenny stopped singing. "Yuki, do you want me to stop? There's an exit coming up."

"I'm fine! Just go!"

She was not fine. She rolled down the window and panted.

I yelled from the back, "Pull over!"

Lenny continued his musical artistry, "...I bet you think this song is about you, don't you, don't you, don't you..."

"Geezus fucking christ Lenny, pull the fuck over! She's going to be sick!"

Lenny swung over onto the right shoulder and I handed my mom a diaper (unused) into which she puked. I am glad I had come prepared. To think that Freddy and I had actually worried about how Little Z would handle airplanes and cars.

But my mother had brighter moments too. We went to a time-share in Connecticut and I left Z with Freddy while my mother and I enjoyed the indoor aquatic center. My mother is crazy about water even though she can't swim.

The large complex was nearly empty because it was a weekday, so we had two large roman baths and a pool complete with slides and cheesy islands of rocks and ferns to ourselves. We were sweating in the hot bath under a waterfall when an elderly couple and their grandchildren entered the natatorium. The wife looked displeased, but her husband made eye contact so I smiled and said hi. He responded by looking away quickly and frowning.

My mother glided away in the steam and I followed her. She had a secret plan.

"Let's go down that water-slide."

The grandchildren were gleefully sliding down two simple white-washed slides and splashing into the cold pool water. I admit that I wanted to join them, but had pushed the thought away. So I was mildly tentative at my mother's proposition.

"Why?"

"Because I want to. We'll go slide into the cold water, make one round around those islands, and then rush back in here for a final warm dip before it's time to get ready for dinner."

"Okay."

I followed her down the slide, yelped at the shock of cold water, and followed her circumnavigation of the pool. We giggled as we rushed back into the hot bath, where the elderly couple was still soaking. The old lady pulled on her husband's arm and said, "Come on, Jacob," and they glared at us as they got out of the water and dried themselves off with bleached towels.

IN MEMORIAM: BIRDS

Do you think, as Kurt Vonnegut says, that earth's immune system is attacking us? Or that pate will no longer be on my daily menu? I'm not sure which premonition is worse.

Disposing of grand ideas, and the delusions of grandeur they accompany, I scrapped my selfish twiddlings and have started a sort of Inspector Clouseau-meets-sci-fi story about a girl who blunders her way out of a run-of-the-mill viral epidemic. Writing this is much easier; two chapters finished today when the other project is still twiddling itself on its second paragraph. The best part is I'm having fun. Thank you to an unnamed English professor who came to the rescue.

I can always return to twiddling myself; it's never too late unless you're dead.

When I am dead, I would like to be a bird. One that flies. Not Jonanthan Seagull, preferably a bird of prey.

Germane:

H5N1

The situation in Romania

THE PRECIOUS PINEAPPLE

I am sewing a pineapple costume for Little Z. A yellow balloon body, and a spiky green hat.

In northeastern coastal towns, when sailors returned from long voyages to exotic locales, before the inventions of the telegraph and telephone, they put pineapples on the doorsteps of their friends and relatives as gifts that signalled their safe arrival. These fruits, much smaller than what we are used to seeing today, became a symbol of prosperity. So much so, that trendy furniture of the time was carved with pineapple motifs.

Can you imagine, a drizzly October evening in a gloomy Massachusetts town interrupted by the burst of a tiny pineapple? It is split nine ways amongst all the family members. You get only one bite, but the tang and the sweetness is almost enough to quench your sensual needs for the rest of your gray childhood.

WHILE THEY SLEEP

Notes to self: like a rat in the wall knawing on cardboard for its nest.

I have started writing about a woman who lives in two spaces of thought, neither of which is known to be true. Each is an escape from the other. Once is increasingly mundane, and one is increasingly violent. A little Jekyll and Hyde like, but it is not her personality that changes, it is her environment. All of it happens in front of the laundry.

Stuck from the onset with questions of which point-of-view I should use, and stalled for hours on the very first sentence, I spat out four different beginnings with three different women. I know that I need an end before I have the right beginning. That's how I always write short stories: knowing the ending, it's a matter of getting to it fast and decisively. But I have a feeling it's different with novels, where speed isn't essential and often detrimental. I've never had the patience for description and detail. I think of mood setting as being in the order of the words, not in the insertion of adjectives.

Do you write like you read? When I read, I impatiently skip over anything that threatens to pull into "and beyond the central square, above the rows upon rows of right-angled structures occasionally punctuated by a lone steeple, one with the knowledge of its existence could imagine that he could make out the outline of the mountain, but even with this knowledge, the purple line of haze could be attributed to a thin cloud. A visitor without the knowledge of the mountain could not imagine it, and would not even be able to instinctively feel its presence..." I read that, and it just sounds like "blah, blah" in my head. I disliked writing it as much as I dislike reading it. Maybe the blah blah was the whole point. Maybe my novel will be two pages long because I don't know how to read or write.

But anyway I met Freddy for lunch and he held our daughter while I frantically searched in a used book store, constrained by the five minutes Freddy had before he needed to leave to show up for an appointment, for the names of novelists who I have heard I should read. I grabbed five or six books and on my way out the door, knew I had made a mistake. I detested the writing in each of them.

I have now scanned the first page of most every book in my collection, which is a stupid thing to do. Freddy says I need an outline. I wince. I just need a beginning, that's all. We are both right. After the first paragraph finally came into being (no doubt, it will later become a paragraph somewhere in the middle, or be cut away entirely) I was excited enough by its birth to plan a future for it.

I am sorry, but I am becoming less and less aware of the audience. This I say, but like all my passions, and directives, and codes to live by, it will be im-profoundly short-lived.

AD LIB TO SELF

The terrible thing about blogging, I've found, is the loss of revision. I seldom spit out something I can proudly give my real name to without lots of corrections and stewing and crossed out lines and tiny illegible scratches in the margins and wonderfully satisfying crumples of paper growing around me.

This place is a mess of false steps, and so awful to me, is the fact that once I've posted I cannot erase or go back and change because somebody has already read it and it's time to move on to the next post.

The immediacy of blogging fills me with apprehensive stuttering almost as badly as the act of speaking. "No, that's not what I meant, and that's not what I meant either. What I meant was this...fuck, no, that's not right either." When I can't think of the right word, I stop mid-sentence and clam shut. Or I get defensive and angry. The blanks where subject and verbs should be, where meaning should be, are more numerous than the articles and prepositions surrounding them, a mad, mad lib.

I wonder if at some level, learning music has hampered my wit. I have the luxury of time, being given a limited series of notes, already carefully chosen and strung together by a genius composer. Put on the spot, instead of hovering, I can proceed with confidence because the next measures in time are predetermined. I have practised for hours and months my plan of attack, and even my emotion and mood are pre-selected and manipulated to serve the performance. I have to trick the music into sounding improvised and natural, but it is anything but.

During the period of practice I find a solution or interpretation through experimentation, which means that I go through many mock performances of playing the piece the wrong way before I find what I like. I don't think that I am creative in the same way that I've seen other people be creative--I've never been able to come up with something entirely new, only work with what is already in front of me. The way I produce and find my poem is through making lots of mistakes and tripping over my feet. The only thing that makes me creative is my fearlessness of making a fool out of myself.

In private, with no one watching.

But the stimulus for keeping this up, here, (the only place I can improvise and still have some leeway with the amount of time between words or notes before there is a noticeable stammer), is my effort to redeem myself of the foolishness of yesterday's post. Sometimes I dread it, I think, "Oh god, do I have to try and look stupid again?" More often I think, "I know I can do better, because that sucked, and if it sucked, that means I know how to be better." After all, I spend more time cooking or changing diapers than writing a few paragraphs, so it's really not a huge sacrifice. Though it should be. To be good.

*******

And also, when you don't have time to think about it, it's more like life than art, which is the point, but it's an often ugly one. I can't revise events, not even in my mind if I write them down accurately which ends up serving memory too correctly for the soft filter.

Writing is revising.

So what is this, exactly?

IN MEMORIAM: TWO ETHANS

After they have farted under your sheets, sucked on your nipples, squeezed a pimple on your ass, they are friends for life. There's a light-hearted camaraderie in having exchanged saliva, and though the sexual relationships didn't last, you feel compelled to call them up every few years or so out of curiosity and little bit of wishful remembrance.

As for the others who were not so carefully chosen, who sometimes remind you of their ugly retainment in your past by showing up backstage after a performance with a bouquet of roses and a knife, well you have to first take away their knife and with it cut their names out of your brain and move very faraway.

There was one boy who didn't matter much, until he got away before I was ready to let him go. He moved to the otherside of the Atlantic.

He must have returned to the States because out of the blue he called and left a message but before I could call him back my roommate accidentally erased the recording in which he had given a phone number that began with an area code in San Francisco. I don't think he is in San Francisco any more. I asked the operator a year later and there was no listing with his name.

I fell for him really because his best friend got shot, and that was way tragic and romantic and much bigger than writing papers and practising during my sophomore year. We had broken it off when I found him sitting on the steps of the dorm sort of staring past me, and I thought he was trying to ignore the fact that I was coming up the steps with a different boyfriend. I said in jest, "Geezus, what's wrong? You look like you're going to a funeral." And in fact, he was.

They shared the same first name, Ethan. Ethan came to town to visit Ethan, and they were coming out of a music store when a kid about their age pointed a gun at one of them and asked for the keys to their car. The other Ethan tried to reason with the kid asking "Why are you doing this? It's only going to hurt you in the end," all peace-love like. A struggle ensued and the gun went off and a bullet went into Ethan's head. My Ethan held his friend and watched his life go.

I'd only met the best friend once, but after he was murdered, his face and his smile stayed with me, when had he still been alive I would have forgotten him. And Ethan, I wanted to be with him after that because seeing his friend die catapulted him to a different plane of existence, and it seemed to be a place that was more real and meaningful than where I was myself.

I had met the other Ethan at a mutual friend's art show opening in Chicago. We were very late getting there because I had relied on instinct instead of a map, and plus we'd gotten pulled over by a cop for my speeding to make up for lost time. I remember being terrified that the cop would sniff out the bag of coke in Ethan's sock. Ethan liked to talk back and make trouble, and though this time he wisely stayed mum, his eyes held the expression of a buck about to charge. The cop gave us both a ticket, one to Ethan for not wearing his seatbelt even though he had just unbuckled it when we pulled over.

There was a real weirdo at that show, and he caught my eye, as weirdos are prone to do. I said something to him I shouldn't have, and he followed us around for the rest of the night. Ethan and I fell down drunk and stoned on god knows what else under somebody's dining table, and we had sex and all the while this weirdo was standing at our feet watching. In the morning the weirdo handed me my underwear. Instead of getting angry, Ethan asked him for gas money, and he handed over a twenty.

MORE MAESTRO

It's no use trying to avoid the unavoidable. On this anniversary of our last meeting, I finally reply to the Maestro's previously unanswered emails and send him a photo of my daughter. I can't help feeling sorry for him--and why?, why feel sorry for such an asshole? I see a bit of my father in him, and reluctantly, a lot of myself: the preoccupations, the selfishness, the inability to relate to other people.

In his case, I suspect that the reasons for his isolation are linked to mild autism. His young son is more severely autistic and will never be able to support himself. The Maestro, through an obsessive work ethic and desperately driven to be recognized became a world-renowned musician at a very young age. And now, at an age when most people relax and take cruises or play golf or give up and die, he fills every minute of his day with ambitious projects and telephone calls and rehearsals and fast vehement latin fights with his wife.

What good is any of this? He might make beautiful music, but what about his three ex-wives, his present wife, and his five children? To hell with art. Loving people is more important. And then, maybe as a side, you'd be more apt to create a meaningful work.

GENETIC ENGINEERING

Once again, I find myself mired in heated arguments with an all-organic-alternative-lifestyle-smoke-pot-but-don't-eat-meat friend. While I am all for saving the earth and eating produce that is free of pesticides and waxy coatings, I detest the backwards "science is dangerous" thinking that has contributed to our reluctance to loosen a grip on superstitious beliefs, leaving millions around the world to suffer in conditions no better than those of the Middle Ages. A hippie who won't touch genetically engineered corn is just as backwards in his thinking as a mother who cannot fathom that her child is part of long lineage tracing back to monkeys. Neither have an understanding of the science of genetics.

With the exception of wild berries and deer, the genetic make-up of every food we consume has already been manipulated by selective breeding over the centuries. There is no such thing as food that has been grown by "nature" alone. Our varieties of apples and melons, our many grains, our milk cows and meat cows, our fat chickens with miniscule wings--humans have already played God in the route of evolution.

Sometimes with dire consequences, it's true. Some varieties of terribly poisonous squash were accidentally bred a few decades ago, not with the exacting science of genetic engineering but with the more sloppy "natural" way of forcing cross-pollination. You can't predict what you are going to get this way. Look at the photo above.

That is why it's much safer to depend on knowledge. If you can identify the genes beforehand, you have the palette to invent plants that will save the world from hunger and pollution. Isn't that what the hippies want?

LOVE LETTERS pg.4

JULY 16, 2004

The anvils are growing in the evening sky. The waning sun is a great vermillion orb. This sun, you would say, "Freddy come look we have to take pictures, it's so beautiful." It is lighting the distant storms from within, pinks and violets and that creamy color that only sunlight at the end of the day can create. You're right, it is beautiful.

Sorry I didn't manage to get you called, in your evening. I tried
to escape the clutches of my clients. I failed and didn't get home
until after seven. I assume you're in bed after your airport pickup.

I will be on the road to --- in the morning. Solve all of
your Mother's household problems. Pull that toilet, plop a lesser
cousin in its place. Fix the stove, finally. She's finished using it. Countless other what-about-thises. I'm sure the heat and humidity will be a joy. I'll do a little H&H dance for you.

I'll have to hijack a Japanese computer to write to you for the next few days. My hungry stomach is already nervous about the coming cuisine. I guess she has never actually poisoned us with her strange combinations. Venison and sushi.

I so wish that I was with you, with fish soup, with fried sardines and all the lazy people.

Have a great, inspiring day. Smell a flower, eat good food, say hi
to Iliojuet, tell (Maestro) to fuck off for me.
Freddy

LOVE LETTERS pg.3

JULY 15, 2004


Hi,

I hope your day finds you well. Rested and rescourceful. I hope
I can call you earlier in the coming days. Sleep. You seem to be
wearing out easily. Maybe you could get a sleeping aid. Something
other than those kiss of death muscle relaxers.

I've had some odd dreams the last couple of nights. Last night it was about an aquatic woman, mostly human, not like a mermaid, more of an alien from some distant watery world. We swam across an ocean
together. She being from and of the water swam at an insane pace. I didn't think that I would be able to keep up, but keep up I did, and with such ease. We crossed the Atlantic in twenty, maybe thirty minutes.

We arrive on a foreign shore without sand or pebble beaches.Everything is paved, ancient limestone blocks and concrete covered with a black mildew. The same brackish dead goop has grown, at some time, over all the stone surfaces in this city. Things are very
secretive and clandestine.

Always moving quickly, never being seen, we creep through a large, urban park. It hasn't always been a park. It has what appear to be old battlments and bunkers, pill boxes, all made of cut stone.

Enough about the dream, it goes on and on, in a James Bond-like
fashion.

I woke up because I had to piss, thought I could squeeze in a little banter with my love. Talk with your onfire mind. I tried, eight-fifty-five, your phone was busy. At eight-fifty-nine no one was home.

Say good morning.

"Good morning."

It's partly cloudy and eighty-five degrees at three in the
morning. It's just fucking miserable. Not this sticky warmth. Misery is missing you laying next to me.

Have a wonderful day. I will call you this
evening.

Freddy

LOVE LETTERS pg.2

JULY 14 (p.m.) 2004

silly thoughts, for the woman I love.

Zulieka,

The ship slope of the roof line, it reminded me of rocketmen from
the fifties.

I love to pick flowers, I say pick rather than cut because I love it with childish enthusiasm. I was nearly arrested once for picking
flowers. Cops are..... Cops ... ehhh...nothing to say about cops.

I need to make up a German name. Stutzwieler.. ? no, Alsuntzwort..? no, Flonshienstien...? getting better. How about Glossenschlagel...see they are improving. Eventually I will have the right German name and I will use it in my story. But I can't or won't write it until I have the right one. A story with a German name in it must have the right name. No pussyfooting with the Germans. It's either right or it's not. Gossenschlagel...? it could be an improvement, I don't know, it's just too early to tell. These things, they take time. hhummmmph..

It's not unlike pussy foliage. There are natural gardeners and there are master gardeners, gardeners and so on. Flower cutters and flower pluckers (the latter is the same as a flower picker with the addition of some European pomp). I am of course an American flower picker, the lowest of the flower people. I have resigned myself to using the rather upscale scissors device, in an effort to more efficiently pick the pretty little buggers. Mind you it is not a pruning shear or a floral scissor, it is the nearest, nearly sharp, scissor-like implement I can find. Call me scum, I really don't mind. There is something pleasant about being a trailer park florist.

I hope your day is like you... Beautiful, mysterious, bright and
full of life.

Love, Freddy

LOVE LETTERS pg.1

JULY 14 2004

Hi Zulieka, my thoughts are with you, perhaps beside of, in front of, or behind. Nonetheless they are with you.

Within the holds of ourselves is the joy of being reborn, with all the babtistry and hand holding that befits the newly born.

I hope you're in good spirits this morning? You seemed to be jovial, even if a little dark last night. I realise how much I miss your laugh. I am thinking of a breakfast with you. I haven't eaten for thirteen hours, and I'm feeling a little thin.

Freddy