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MANAGE YOUR SUBSCRIPTIONNews From El Corizon: In The Composing Room
We all know how sleazy street is
it’s up in the mornings with too many kids
it’s too many men coming in the back door
and not enough time to sweep the floor
it’s coffee in the pot and a dirty sugar spoon
it’s towels on the floor of a dirty bathroom
and a smell like me and a smell like you
all mixed together in sleazy street stew
sleazy street stew oh sleazy street stew
it smells like me and it smells like you
gimme gimme gimme that sleazy street stew
— especially composed for paula footloose & her 5-piece baby-band
NOW LEO SAYS that of course we will get together again. He calls me on the telephone from seven-eleven parking lots long-distance and says that he loves me and he sends me a hundred dollars a month to keep his name on the mailbox, he in fact spends great parts of his poet-in-the-schools money to drive from galveston to dallas for weekends of love-making and whispered reassurances and barbequed chicken crowded around the little kitchen table with me and the three kids like he is simply a commuting husband and this family is really his. And at first he comes almost every weekend and his hundred-dollar share of the rent comes on the first of the month. But as the fall wears into winter he doesn’t come so much, and the money still comes but it’s coming later and later, too late to cover the rent, so that by spring I realize that I have got to stop counting on it, the rent is going to have to come from me. Me the sometimes writer. Me the new-born bookstore clerk. And me the mother with the asset of morgani the working son, he does pay his part of the rent, too. And so the household lurches along paying its bills on minimum wage and money that sometimes appears in the mail — homage to love from leo and occasional checks from newspaper accounting offices rewarding me for using my time to write commercially viable articles on choosing melons in the supermarket and growing indoor palms instead of wasting my skills on stories and poems which do not sell.
But life is not grim. I like this upstairs apartment I find myself in. Even with rats in the walls and weeds in the driveway, it has its advantages, There is a room for each of us, and my kids are electronic age kids, so each room has its own kind of electrical noise: second-son playing stereo, daughter playing radio, son-morgani playing electric guitar, him playing the loudest and longest, wanting to be a rock musician so much so he won’t have to work at the car wash anymore that he practices his guitar all the time. But the rooms are big and somewhat apart from each other because of a central hall, so it is only at certain peak times of voltage overload that I finally have to let out some kind of yell or scream or politely pointed question /would you please turn it down/ which never stops the mix of noise for good of course, only long enough to give a little quiet time in the evening, a little peace, so my head can come to rest and my thoughts settle down before the sound-level starts building up again.
And then best of all features in this apartment is a white door in my bedroom a magical device. So the kids can be rocking and rolling, shouting jokes at each other through the walls, they can be rolling the bicycle up the stairs and down the stairs and bringing home friends to play pool on the pool table we found in the alley and placed in second-son’s room, and all I have to do is to open this door in my bedroom and step outside. And just like that the lights are out. The electronic noise is far behind me. I am standing on a second-story balcony supported on crumbling colonnades and embraced in the clutch of massive oak branches surrounding the upper part of the house. In the daytime I am in the company of blue jays who soar down through the leaves and squirrels running the branches, and at night I am in the company of stars. And I can sit in my used-to-belong-to-grandmaw rocker out there in the evening and put my feet up on a nail barrel I use for both table and stool and turn my own little radio to the country and western station that none of my kids can stand listening to and smoke a joint. Oh sing it, dolly! Listen to the man play that fiddle! I look down through the tree branches at the cars and bicycles and people passing on the street below who rarely look up long enough to spot me in the leaves — the vietnamese grandmother who comes down the sidewalk every morning with her cluster of children collecting cans, the black man with the twenty braids and red ribbons who rides his bicycle every day, the regular joggers and the dog-walkers, the couples shouting angry words at each other while they walk and the couples with arms around each other, the friday night drunks and the saturday morning whistling mailman — I study them like I study the pigeons who prance and flutter through their various bird rituals along the rooftop of the house next door, composing stories for each one of them and like a benevolent director assigning them roles.
Now in the apartment downstairs lives simon-polli. And when I first take up my observation post on the balcony, I see him coming and going on the walk below me with an array of thin, young and lacquered women on his arm. He is enrolled in the downtown community college with plans for becoming an accountant/male-model & masseur, and he says that the electric guitar playing above his desk keeps him from studying very well. But morgani learns to turn the decibels down when simon-polli knocks a broom handle against the ceiling. I don’t like simon-polli too much, I don’t like his black pompadour and little twitchy mustache, and I don’t like the endless photographs in the simon-polli portfolio he wants to show me with every invitation to his apartment for a beer — simon-polli lounging in a bikini on a broken brick wall, simon-polli dressed in a black gypsy outfit smoldering at the camera-eye, close-ups of simon-polli with his nostrils flared and his pores open. But I do occasionally like to hear his stories. So when he stands in the front yard waving a poorly rolled joint and looking up at me on my balcony perch, I invite him up sometimes to sit with me in the branches. Because simon-polli, see, came from eastern europe somewhere, his earliest photographs he says showed him a skinny kid with a shaved head, symbol of lice control, standing in front of a tent in a refugee camp with his father because when they were released from the concentration camp where his mother died there was no place for what remained of his family to go. He spent five years after the war going from one camp to another, traveling on trains that stopped in towns and villages where constables blocked the doors so that no refugees could get off. Then finally to america with a handful of family jewels which his father parlayed into a decent living selling used cars in chicago. I don’t know why simon-polli came to dallas — that is one of the mystery stories he doesn’t tell. To go to a community college to study massage? That’s what he says.
And simon-polli has a european-sentimental streak at least as strong as that streak in me that keeps my radio tuned to the country-and-western station. His eyes get teary when he talks about his father. He fulminates about the coldness other students exhibit toward him in the college halls. At times he grabs up his guitar and brings it up to the balcony with him and croons out oily love songs from dean martin albums to the passing joggers. One evening he comes with his guitar, full of emotion.
I’m going to be a father again, he says, my four-year-old son is coming from new york to stay with me because his mom doesn’t want him anymore.
Well, I didn’t even know he had a son or an ex-wife, but I say wow simon, that sounds pretty exciting.
I wrote a song, he says, I’m going to sing it for my son when he gets off the airplane. And then simon starts singing — oh matthew, I love you, you are the sky’s blue, you are a bird of a beautiful hue, my son, my matthew — simon-polli singing with his eyes closed his lips pursed up to the moon above the balcony like a jewish coyote.
And then the son does come and he is the most scowling worried and mean little kid I have ever seen. He has thick black eyebrows that meet at a permanent seam between his eyes. But for the sake of good neighbor-relations and in exchange for simon not complaining too much about my own noisy kids, I agree to babysit the son from time to time for free which in fact does make simon very happy, he invites me to come down anytime I want to and smoke grass with him, his stash box kept full by generous checks from his chicago-father.
So one evening I’m sitting out on my balcony when I see simon-polli coming up the front walk carrying a large over-stuffed chair followed by matthew who is picking up little rocks and throwing them at his father’s ankles.
Cut it out! simon is shouting.
No! matthew is shouting back.
When simon sees me on the balcony he calls up. See this great chair? I bought it from this lady down the street who’s being evicted. It’s okay, it’s got some broken springs, she was asking seventy-five but I talked her into taking fifteen.
Sounds like a bargain, I say.
Oh I just felt sorry for her, not that I wanted the chair, he says, although it looks okay, just the springs a little bad.
Matthew lobs another stone.
I said cut it out! simon shouts.
I said no! matthew shouts.
They go on in and there is the sound of whopping and screaming and crying, and I look up the street in the direction the two of them came from to see what is going on. Sure enough, I see daughter standing with some more kids around a pile of stuff along the curb about six houses down. And the sun, I also notice, is almost gone. So I lean across the balcony rail and call down the street for daughter to come home. She comes running, in a minute she’s coming out on the balcony. There’s a girl with her about the same height, long brown hair like hers, same budding build with almost-boobs making little bumps under her blouse and hips gathered ready to begin making curves.
This is fran, daughter says, she’s fourteen, her family’s the one that’s being evicted.
Hello, fran says, very polite, the same as if daughter had said fran’s family owned every house on the block.
Hello, I say, do y’all have a place to sleep tonight?
Fran frowns a little bit. Oh I don’t know yet, she says. My mom is trying to call some people. She starts squinting down the sidewalk back at the pile of stuff on the curb. Oh I better go back and see what my little sister is doing.
Well you tell your mom you can sleep on the floor here tonight, I tell her, if nothing else turns up. And I’m thinking that blankets thrown down for them on a bare floor in the apartment of strangers isn’t much to offer, they will have to be pretty desperate to accept an offer like that. But then if they don’t know where they’re staying yet, when it’s already dark, then they must all feel pretty scared, pretty bad, and any invitation is better than no prospects of a bed for the night. So daughter and fran run back down the stairs and back down the sidewalk. The streetlamps are on, and I can see a pick-up truck parked along the side of the pile with its door open. There’s a black man leaning on the side of it, there’s some little kids playing around the pile, and then fran and daughter are there, standing, talking, but too far away for me to get what’s going on. I go into the kitchen and start washing the dishes when daughter and fran come back. You need to talk to her mom, daughter says, but they don’t know yet where they’ll be staying.
So I stop the water and walk down with the two girls. The black man is still leaning on the truck. He is watching two men speaking loud spanish to each other. One is holding up a pair of pants to himself he picked from the pile and he is laughing, and the other is nodding his head up and down like those pants fit him just right, and there is this little blonde woman tottering around the two men on tiny-three-inch spike heels made out of clear plastic and wearing a white nylon skirt like she just got finished drinking daiquiris at some country club pointing her finger emphatically saying put that down! you put that down!
Hey man, put that down, I say while I’m walking up, and when he doesn’t, I tap my chest a couple of times and say, a little heart man, a little corizon — CORIZON, I say up close to him clenching my fist and shaking it over my heart (this is a chicano charm I learned in el paso, since corizon is something no good mexican man ever wants to be caught short of). Sure enough he puts it down and the two of them snicker, swagger away, saying things I don’t try to translate, and the little woman is picking up the pants from the sidewalk and trying to fold them up. I was just telling your daughter, I say to her, that if you didn’t have a place to stay you could come stay at our place for the night.
Oh! she’s all full of emotion suddenly, shaking my hand. Didn’t I tell you? she asks the black man, who has been leaning on the truck in the same position through the whole encounter, the lord provides. And I don’t correct her there, we will resort to abstracts like that the rest of the night to cover up our shyness at this strange situation: stranger asks other strangers to move into her house, a city act as strong as street sex, more easily talked about when veiled in euphemism and depersonalized, so that paula isn’t really paula but the voice that cried out, the one in need, the little-lost-lamb, so that pat the person came down from her balcony and entered the story as the lord and pushed the wheel of paula’s crossed stars and wrote the address down for the next installment of paula’s karma.
What are you going to do with all of this stuff? I ask her. She just looks puzzled, looking at all the pile of mattresses and black plastic bags, piles of clothes and shoes and papers already beginning to blow away. So I say maybe you can put it all in my back yard for right now.
The black man suddenly unbends, smiles and says all right, like he’s been waiting all this time for just those words. And he starts throwing things into the back of the truck.
I’ll go down and get my sons to help, I say, so I trot back to the apartment. Morgani’s out, but second-son is there and the two of us walk back to the truck. Paula is running back and forth, up and down the sidewalk, first lifting a bag, putting it down, herding fran and the little sister out of the way, talking in explosive sentence fragments. He stole the television, she says, I’m going to sue him, she says, not suitable, she says, now that’s the way he puts it, and look at this! She tucks her chin in at me and points over her shoulder, it took me three days to pack it all up.
Sure enough, I can see that there are lots of things which have been put in black plastic bags and that now are half-dumped, the tops of the bags coming untied. So we all start putting things on the back of the truck, and the black man drives the truck down the block and into our driveway where we unload it, and we do this two or three times until nothing is left on the sidewalk anymore.
So by this time it’s about ten o’clock. The black man (whose name is bennie and whose position in paula’s story is never quite clear except that his truck has been made an instrument-of-god) wants a joint after we make the last load, and I tell him that I’m out but I’ll go ask simon-my-neighbor for one. So I knock on simon’s door. Simon’s mustache is twitching over the chain latch on the second knock. I stick out my tongue and make a face like I’m all dogged out, which in fact I am.
We’ve just got finished moving a family upstairs, I tell him.
Oh no, he says, you moved that woman and her kids in with you that got evicted?
She didn’t have a place to stay, I tell him, it’ll just be for a night or so, until she can figure it all out.
Oh no, he says, I don’t mean to sound like a bastard, but I can’t take it. She can’t move in. There’s agencies to take care of people like her. I’m about to go crazy, pat, he says. I’m studying and having to get up early to take matthew to daycare. Shit.
Look, simon, I say, it’s just going to be for a little while. Listen, do you have a joint?
Bennie-the-black-man’s come up on the porch and is standing right behind me now.
Simon looks over my shoulder significantly, then looks at me again. For you? he asks.
I smile, shrug, guilty as hell suddenly because I’m asking simon for a joint for everyone.
You come down later, he says, I’ll give you a joint anytime, but nothing for them.
Does he have any grass? Bennie asks me while simon closes the door.
Not really, I say. Paula comes shuffling up in her little high heel shoes, and we go on upstairs. When we get to the top, there is paula, there is bennie, there is fran the teenage daughter and her little sister, but then there is another baby, too, one I’ve never seen before, and there is also a german shepherd and a little black puppy. Paula is looking apologetic.
This is cody, she says, pointing to the strange baby boy, dirty faced, in dirty shorts, no more than two years old, slightly smaller than the baby sister.
So okay, I am thinking, there are three children, a woman and two dogs, but this wheel is set in motion now. And they will only be here a few days, they really will not be here very long.
Someone carries up some mattresses from the pile of stuff in the back yard, someone gets sheets, pillows. Then morgani comes in with two joints he’s gotten somewhere. So we sit down on paula’s mattress and everybody smokes, and we start talking about dallas, whether we want to stay here or not. Bennie the black man says he wants to live in dallas all his life and become a well-respected gangster, morgani says he wants to be a rock musician but maybe somewhere else, and I don’t say because I am too busy taking this new landscape in to think of another one, and daughter and fran are already in dreamland falling asleep together on the floor, and cody the little boy-kid is walking around without his pants on, little baby penis peeking out from under round little baby belly, standing in the middle of marijuana talk with a big self-confident baby grin, taking for granted that wherever he is doesn’t matter, he owns it all.
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