Once I am picked up by a much older man, taken to an apartment to participate in witchcraft rituals, chanted at while lavender burns in a large metal cup. We absorb the music passively, undiscerningly, hungrily. In Cactus Records and Tapes we trail aimlessly through the long aisles, the air-conditioning turning our sweat into fine powdered salt. I am waistless, I have braces, I'm still wearing terrycloth tops from the Sears catalog. Suzan burns easily and has pimples on her shoulders. We're so young, we're so homely and lonely, any slight attention from any hideous male and we strain toward it, gawky sunflowers aching for sun. Suzan Seggerman and I, pedaling our three-speeds, our feathered hair flying behind us. I don't know if Houston was as hot then as it is now, but it was astoundingly hot, ninety six degrees, ninety six percent humidity, the sun an angry white bulb in the sky. It's a long, hazardous bike ride from our apartment along streets without sidewalks, stitched with crabgrass swelling from the cracks. I begin to spend hours, long afternoons, whole Saturdays at Cactus Records and Tapes. I sit folded in the slot behind the front seats my mother sits folded beside the dazzling young man, a woman in her mid-forties who looks sixty, parchment paper and bones. We pay him some part of our take from the nurse. Is there any chance they believe me? Another, a dazzlingly handsome young Iranian aspiring chiropractor, takes us grocery shopping alternate weeks in his hazardous Volkswagen Bug. She pays us some minimal rent on which we rely, although I tell the Girl Scouts she's my sister. One of them, an aspiring nurse from Indonesia, lives with us in a cockroach-infested apartment in a complex my fellow Girl Scouts are not allowed to visit. We rely on the kindness of young foreign students in equally straightened circumstances, if hale health. No matter that knowledge wouldn't have made any difference. My father is, ambiguously, elsewhere in time this ambiguity will take on the legal status of divorce but it will never, even to the early years of the twenty-first century, be resolved. Our lives have come apart as thoroughly as they ever have yet. In 1982 my mother and I have been in Houston, Texas for three years. Still, like most kids, music and its precincts define freedom for me like nothing else. I don't know a thing about music and I never will.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply.AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |