Scars

You asked me to tell you about a scar. Instantly I thought about my chest, the bilateral scars that snake along the underside of my pecs. Then I moved lower running my thumb along the scars in my abdomen from my hysterectomy, following the path downward I settled on what I tend to imagine as the old man in my knee. The cadaver ligament I acquired last spring. But these scars get plenty of attention.

Two scars come to mind. One is not mine and the other not yet real.

The scar that is not mine belongs to my sister. The upper corner of her lip met a flaming marshmallow, just after sunset, the winter we were practically kidnapped. It was cold, we did most of the cooking on a grill outside the double wide trailer that rested among oak trees in central California. Some how she got bumped just as she went to blow the flame out on the marshmallow. I remember screaming before she even realized what had happened. My father grabbed a wet towel and put it over her mouth, trying to cover up her wailing more than ease the pain. Today she's 30, and the old triangular scar the size of a lucky charm is no longer visible, but bodies them selves hold memories, and they even sometimes hold memories that don't belong specifically to that body. I don't like roasting marshmallows, when I see them, I see her 8 year old face full of excitement catch fire. The image is burned in my memory like the California's landscape after a wildfire. Still smoldering, black and strikingly empty. I asked my sister about the scar, and she said, "What scar?"

The second scar is a currently a figment of my imagination. Sometimes in some cases this is how scars are born. I am still debating whether I want/need surgery on my ears again. This new scar will not be hidden like the others. It will rest on my temples as if my ears will forever be held at gun point. It could cause a whole host of problems, it could be the tombstone for my sense of taste or my ability to feel my face. It could also be a memorial to my time that was silent and now only sound will always exist. I will not be able to remove it and move through sound or silence at will. This theoretical scar will pin me down forever as one or the other. I have never been very good at one or the other.

Bacon

I have always been afraid of bacon. Really afraid of bacon.

It took me years to put it together.

Sometimes during the weekend, while I was little, my father would make breakfast. This is the only time I ever saw him cook before my mother died. He would get up early wearing only a white t-shirt and BVDs. A while back, my sister had her only Puerto Rican boyfriend who upon looking at a photo during this time period said, "He looks straight out of Watts". He did. Dark brown skin, thick muscles, the slow gait of heavy lifting and light pay. Some times he was gruff and as monosyllabic as a Spanish speaker can get. Sometimes he was kind, taking his time after breakfast to brush out my waist length hair from the bottom or letting me cling to him after yet another ear surgery facing uncontrollable vomiting.

During these weekend breakfasts I never knew which side of him we would get. I liked watching him cook. I liked watching the bacon shrivel as if by magic, the ritual of putting down a paper towel and laying each piece out dry. Without my hearing aids in and even then before I "needed" them, I cannot hear bacon sizzle. I get the concept, I can see the concept and after two very recent kitchen fires I am very aware how heat works in the kitchen. I wasn't aware then. Maybe I was five years old. I didn't hear him tell me to stand back. I remember distinctly what it felt like as the oil and fat hit my arm. It leapt out and grabbed me, burning a hole into my memory. My father told me it was my fault and to never go near cooking bacon again. And I didn't. For years and years, I was afraid and despite my love of bacon, I shunned it. It began to represent my fear of my father, the oil just grabbed me like one of his bad moods and I didn't even see it coming.

I suppose that people are resilient and my love of bacon has led me to being able to fry it up, keeping the parts of my fathers ritual that served me. The early morning wake up, cooking the entire package at once, black coffee and paper towel for the final lay out. I still stand back though, still have the fear of oil, fat, anger-- reaching out and grabbing, pulling me back to a snot nosed kid, with a several burn marks and new void in my world where the magic of frying bacon use to be.

Red Ribbon Hospice

We play Skip Bo
Like we are in a Casino,
It's fueled
black coffee quick
and the minutes tick
by
hours,
ticking by days
washing up years
and Lucy died yesterday
with her favorite red nail polish still wet
and it's Pride month
and I am sitting with forgotten ghosts
People talk about AIDS like it happened
and George tells me about falling in love
with a soldier
in the Vietnam war
They tell me about their lives
like they happened
like the story is at it's epilogue

Here, among the florescent lights
hangs
every Tuesday,
scattered coffee mugs,
left overs from lunch
and lives
that aren't
quite
history.

The Sound of Silence

It took losing my hearing to fall in love with Yo Yo Ma. It happened on a Wednesday in rush hour, riding in a the picturesque modern day cowboys truck actually named Truck Noriss, skirting downtown traffic, with a Texan who had beat thyroid cancer twice, who had years ago fallen in love with american sign language, and was taking me to a bar where we would huddle in the back with just enough light to almost make out our abc's. He wanted to introduce me to this album he had fallen in love with, I wasn't sure until he turned up the bass so loud the dash board shook and his coffee cup was practically leaping out of the holder. This is the only way to listen to Yo Yo Ma. I put my feet on his dashboard and fell, completely in love. I let the bass notes tumble up and down my spine, let silence rest on my sternum until bam -- my heart woke up. I now know that it wasn't exactly Yo Yo Ma that I fell for but the the curves of the cello. Some days I can hear the whisper of the notes but mostly I just feel them, it was the cello that taught me that there IS sound in silence, and that there will be another world, another way of being, new unexpected love randomly and mismatched just around the corner, the cello makes me less afraid of letting my hearing go, the cello has shown me that life is not what I have expected it to be, and deafness isn't either, two years ago with 60% of my hearing intact, I couldn't hear a thing.

*****
There is something about a sunny day, a Chevy pick up, and rock and roll. I was half way through listening to "Free Falling" when it hit me. I pulled over, along side lake Washington and a late spring breeze. I pushed up the volume as far as it would go. I tapped gently on the steering wheel, I let the bass vibrate all the way up my spine, I could feel the clash of the symbols on the left side of my ribs, just beneath my heart. And the words jumped off the windshield gently nibbling the back of my neck. My hearing aids were tucked safely into my front pocket, I wasn't hearing a thing. Not a goddamn thing. I have wondered what sound feels like in silence, it feels like the rush of Christmas morning as a child, the excitement of a first date, an earthquake, an orgasm, it feels that my body is a boat on an wild but tender river, it tastes sweet and metallic, it feels like success.

I have been mourning my loss more and more, trying to get my self to a place where I can treat my hearing as essentially a library book. It was good for the time I had it, I loved the story it told, a perspective of the word that I experienced but now it's time to give it back, of course it's a loss but there is a whole new world to experience, and this world is all new and totally mine. So here I am free falling into the sound of silence that is so loud and full of a million vibrations, it's deafening.

New Paint

Most people think I am white
shit,
sometimes
I think I am white
but I have been painting
and the paint is peeling
from my knuckles
my brown skin with white gashes
I am a stain from
some long ago, never spoken about, incident
in the tobacco fields of Puerto Rico
I pull the bright white latex paint
from my skin,
piece by piece
and only my worn brown skin
remains.

Learning my ABC's

A year ago, all I knew were my ABC's. My hands were awkward and shy. I was afraid.
Afraid to say the wrong thing, afraid of being inept, afraid of not fitting in. Afraid for my hearing loss. Afraid for my life.

And yes, while signing at a play party, instead of saying nice to meet you, I have signed nice to fuck you.

And while sitting on a city bench at a busy intersection, instead of saying to my friend, "a woman behind you just tripped and fell." I instead signed, "a woman behind you just tripped and died."

It all started with a new set of hearing aids and the news that my hearing is on it's way out. The news came to me the same way someone might say "garbage day is on Tuesday."

It started with learning, learning how to use a phone with assistive technology, how to set captions in color on Netflix, how to ask for what I need. It started with the ABC's and colors, with numbers and with "what's your name?"

And now, the fear is gone. Hunger replaced it. I want to know about classifiers, word order, verbs and facial expressions. I want to know more about ASL, Deaf culture and art, I want to know more about other people who have lost their hearing. I need vocabulary, I want to leave my aids in a drawer, I want to be me- stand on the line between hearing and deafness- drinking with the jims (beam and Morrison)--grieving what's been lost, celebrating what's been gained and loving music in silence.

It's shocking how much a year has changed my hands, my outlook and my ability to trust that I am not perfect but growing perfectly.

Sunflowers

I find myself on the edge of a storm, sowing seeds ever so carefully. I don't know why I find myself in the garden when it's about to pour. I stand on the very edge sweating in the last corner of sunlight, with the heavy gray sky whispering her secrets to the last few days of spring. I find my tattoo'd knuckles warm in the dirt, literally burying a metaphor with my sunflowers. It's prayer to summer, to tomorrow, to that rainbow I feel on the back of my neck.

It's taken me years to admit my love affair with flowers. Somehow I was afraid of not being enough--man enough, butch enough, to pass for normal.... enough.

I never was butch, I had the swagger but not the heart, this has always put me on the edge of tears, and I have never known why.

I think of the years I spent in the fields of Watsonville, I think of the men who would get up early in the morning and lay down the 14 foot pipes to water. I think of the lettuce and kale. I think of my favorite flowers--agrostemma-- the roses of heaven. I harvested, I boxed, I washed, I loaded the truck, I ran the market.... it was working on the farm that led me to being able to harvest sides of myself. It was at the farm that I could finally love flowers and still have my masculinity. It was working for a farm that gave me the support I needed to transition, no questions asked. Live and let live. As I tended to produce, I too, blossomed.

And today with the whisper of rain, and my sweat mingling with a rainbow, I sow my prayers to summer, to tomorrow, to sunflowers.

Monuments of weeds and gentrification

Not long before I moved to this block, the city started a pilot program. They redesigned the block to be a multi-use space, a place to walk, drive, bike and even play in the street. They put in random gardening plots, forcing cars to theoretically slow down. They put in trees, and plants and then they forgot about us.

Five years later, the plots now sit as thrown out overgrown poems with stanzas of weeds. Some times they serve as forts for the neighborhood dogs to win and lose in the still of a hot day. Sometimes they become mini landfills overnight. And then there are moments like these that they loom as monuments to gentrification, alive with whatever will exist throughout a war. I have heard that dandelions can live just about anywhere.

Last night as the rain was just becoming a storm, it seemed like a good idea as any to work on the plot in front of my house. It seems like my plot is a beacon for volunteer trees, and one began much too close to another one. All it took was a warm winter for this a little seed to become a 6 foot tall giant stealing space it was not meant for and had no fruit to offer as means of rent.

It's a sad thing to fell a tree and this is my second this spring. It took 6 of us-- two being onlookers-- to tie the tree to a truck bumper and yank it out. It gave way with a pop and it's roots stayed completely intact, as if it always knew that one day it would be forced out with no home to ever return to.

Rock Me Like a South Bound Train

I forgot that trains, like memories have pulses and heartbeats that do not always run in sync with mine.
I forgot that memories like trains have hidden conductors and engineers. I don't know how memory works, I don't know how trainswork. I just know that they work but there can be accidents and they can be devastating.

Yesterday, I found a handful of birds swooping around my back yard picking off the yellow jackets for a late afternoon snack. It took me back to Oakland and bee keeping right off telegraph avenue, shoved up between whole foods and gentrification. A group of us rented a house from an old Berkeley hippie who was heading south, the agreement was to at least care for the bees, if we could not come to love them. I remember standing on the back porch one warm afternoon watching Oakland pigeons do their ghetto version of murmuration and I noticed swallows swooping into the yard and snagging bees as they came and went from the hives. I remember calling the home owner panicked. She told me that it was okay, the birds needed a little protein and this is the way of the birds and the bees, she told me that the birds would not take more then they need.

I need to remember not to take more than I need.

I need so much lately. I think I have been a smoker to chase a need that can never be fulfilled. It's really not about the habit, or the nicotine, it's trying to fill a hole, or maybe it's several. I feel like a shooting victim, riddled with holes and the bullets are memories laying on the floor, still and dead and difficult to find among the carnage. I am trying to make my self whole again. It's not just cigarettes or trying to fill all of the holes by swallowing fire, it's a need to consume. Some times it's cigarettes, sometimes it's coffee or french fries and sometimes it's booze. I feel so empty, with my memories littering the floor.

This feeling of being in pieces, clings to me, it's become a residue that can never be washed off. It makes me think of my father and how he came home from Vietnam with the residue of war. A residue that we call Schizophrenia. He will never be free of his residue, and what I want to know, what I need to know--- will I ever be free from mine? Can I be whole again?

I read somewhere once that "nothing important is learned; it is simply remembered." I constantly change my mind about whether I am chasing my memories or running from them. I want so badly to remember more about my mother, I want to understand why I cling to her. A few weeks ago I was moving her old sewing table into my studio space. I was gearing up to make the transformation from a useless piece of furniture to a wedging table and I opened one of the drawers. I found a needle and thread, a tin of laxatives and a receipt from Lucky's grocery store dated 1987. The items on the receipt are as follows; 2 packs of Marlboro reds, a box of Oreo's and a diet coke. These three items are the only things I have ever known my mother to love.

Some times I can remember a lot. The color of fluid in my mother's IV bag, my fathers eyes, addresses, the flowers of the magnolia tree that hung so lazily next to my Grandmothers old house. Some times I can't remember my phone number, birthday or social security number. I never can quite seem to remember who I am. But I always remember the calm that my sisters voice had on me when she would sing. Whenever we were scared she would sing. Sometimes it would be songs my parents loved. Something by Tracy Chapman, or Frank Sinatra. Sometimes it would be from Disney movies or what ever was on the radio. My sister and I both learned early that art--art is something one clings to, because everyone needs to cling to something-- and god had stopped listening.

There is this feeling in my memories, this sense of a search. A shared fabric though them all. I am looking for home, looking in every moment, breath,trip to the corner market. It's not exactly myself that I am looking for, it's a place in my heart to call home. And it's been right here all along-- not the random hotel outside of Portland, or in the rains, or in a tiny house in Rainier Beach. It's in words, it's in writing. This is home, this is where the train fueled by my memories has brought me.

Home. To writing. To me.

I am the conductor, the engineer and mechanic of my own memories and every story is a beat in the heart of my life.