by
John Freeman
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What a strange world. You're in a beat-up white van with your son, still a child but barely, driving by the place where your father was laid up so many years ago. And now you live near there, getting up at 4 a.m. to push a broom. Dinner for your family is sometimes eggs, or two frozen pizzas for ninety-nine cents a box. What do you have to show for your life? You're raising your kids in government housing. There are things you see in the neighborhood that you can't do anything about. You might as well be a ghost. [....]
fuckk
inspo for hazel?
[...] he'll ask how I'm doing. I don't ask how he's doing because I know how he's doing. He's doing homeless in Los Angeles for five years. He's doing sleeping in a box. Instead I ask if he needs anything - a blanket, food, money. There's always a pause before he tells me he's fine. I ask if he's sure and he assures me he's sure, and then me and this packaged voice in the dark wish each other goodnight.
And while I haven't always ignored it, I can usually tell what's in my head and what's outside of it, which voice in the dark is imagined and which is real, but why I'm in here and he's out there, I'm not sure I can tell. Why my box is bigger than his.
kinda inspo (the last line) - N
We know the things we know because they've been taught to us, sometimes directly, sometimes obliquely, legend-by-osmosis. The things we don't know are things we've never heard bout - whatever has been left out of the conversation, struck from the record, or simply never even considered. We sometimes have to unlearn these early teachings, or at least learn that some additional facts inhabit the legends we've been passed down like heirlooms, each as solid as a land mass and casting long shadows, just like the Buttes themselves.
[...] We girls - not one indigenous student among us - received a standing ovation as we gathered at the front of the stage in our costumes, linked arms, and took a grand, ecstatic bow. We were being raised to understand that the world was ours for the taking, because that had long been true, even after the gold dried up, even after the cities burned or failed to be built at all, even after our origin stories were revealed for what they were and we outgrew our costumes and our grandparents and then our parents began to die - heroically or no - even after our memories failed and the stories flew away.
There is a terrible structure of goodness in the United States that is designed to be unattainable for most non-white Americans, most poor Americans, most immigrants, most queer, most disabled bodies. We are taught early to be good, to behave, to be quiet, to not take up space, to be invisible. Maybe this is why we gravitate toward sports - a place where we can be good. Not an equal playing field, as we have seen, but as close to one as we get. It's the gimmick Baldwin was talking about - sport/game - our way up and out from under the thumb or boot of our nation's power structures.
The days were long. To break up the monotony of topping garlic, I would rise from my stooped or kneeling position and treat myself to a long, luxurious, cone-shaped cup of water at the Igloo cooler. Others would gossip, joke around, or sing along to the lachrymose rralcheras on their transistor radios. But of all the workaday distractions, none were no fascinating as the oracular musings of Primi. The workers would sporadically lob questions at him, and he would swat them back with elan.
"Primi, you wanna get married? Don't you wanna wife?"
He mulled over the question like an ascended guru.
"No, ese. I don't have money, so I can't attract someone better-looking than me. Imagine a woman with looks like mine. Sad, huh? Nope. Chafe. No marriage. Besides, it's cheaper to rent."
"Primi, what's the best beer?"
"Whichever one is in my hand, loco."
"Priori, why do dogs love humans?"
"If you gave me free cans of meat and cleaned up my caca, I'd love you too, homeboy. Woof."
Head and Shoulders' last day at Gyrich Farms came within a week of the wedding just as the garlic season was winding down. Two olive Immigration and Naturalization Service trucks and one van descended upon the garlic fields just before midmorning. They braked hard, kicking up clouds of dust and dirt clods.
"La Migra, La Migra!" shouted several garlic toppers. Six khakied INS agents exploded from the vehicles. It frightened me when several young workers bolted. The guys seemed to adult to me just seconds before, an full of bravado and that physical competence of young men, hefting heaping bushels of garlic onto their shoulders with thoughtless ease. Ina moment, they had been stripped of that, and had been made into prey, fleeing to hide beneath cars or behind the garlic crates. I panicked and turned wide-eyed towards my mother.
"Should we run, mami, should we run?"
"What are you talking about? You're a citizen, born here. They can't take you away."
man this SUCKS
Now that she is free, she is in New York to raise funds for victims of trafficking still in captivity. Whether for tsunami victims or child brides, fund-raisers always seem to me like a necessary evil. A performance for the powerful.
On this occasion she surveys the catered spread from the top of Trffieca, nearly eye-level with the lofty tip of the Freedom Tower. She finds the buffet choices distasteful, and whispers softly, "Everything looks uncooked. So far in America, I only like the Mexican fried shrimp." She serves herself a few grapes and a piece of cheese. The austere gaping space, adorned with a few select prints notable for their rarity, has an air of isolation meant to Ire envied. One that penetrates her in the most unenviable way.
She stands off to the side as the guests gather. A nouveau riche, cultured, socially conscious crowd—people for whom an invitation to such events is an increasingly necessary symbol of status. The type of crowd that admires both the Fendi Casa coffee table and the copy of "Guerrilla Warfare" conspicuously lying on it.
They come bearing their power, ready for the one transaction (via tax-deductible gift) they are happy to conduct themselves. They will defer to her pain, and demand inspiration from it.
In December of 2016, I spent four days under suicide watch at Metropolitan Hospital in New York City. If I had known that calling the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline meant involuntary admission to the nearest psych ward, I never would have called. Cutting is a walk on a tightrope. One slip and it's all over. Dangerous, I know, but when I slice into my own skin, I am god, and fuck, does having that kind of power feel good. There is a difference between the desire to cut myself and the desire to kill myself. The trouble is they sometimes overlap, crashing into each other like rolling waves. I called the hotline because in that particular moment, both waves were sweeping me under. [...]