Forgotten for the afternoon and likely the day, the girls sit in swings dangling legs as dark as the shadows they cast. One holds herself in the A-shaped frame, grasping the metal bars and craning her neck and head like a zoo animal to make the others laugh. Their skin is black in the overcastted clouds and their hair is somehow blacker and wild, the girls like silhouettes, their outlines yelling to each other though they are only a few feet away, screaming for today, maybe using up all the little girl before a few years now when they are forced to become women before other girls in other neighborhoods. No parents to protect them or guide their hands, they play unnoticed most days behind the apartment complexes without even a face or slightest glance from someone checking on them. And yet, they’re safe and happy, and they’ll be that way all day unless it rains.
I see the girls while coming in from dropping a check at the rental office, across a winding sidewalk and about 100 feet from my backdoor. They pay no notice to me, and I go inside and slip open the window to listen to them. The kitchen window in a sparely furnished apartment is an entertainment and a simple appliance that acts as a radio, a clock, a television, a fan, and a jury box. The noises that filter in through the screen are the radio waves, and it easily becomes a television when you put your eyes to it to bring a picture to the sound. I use it as a fan or a vent when I’ve singed my dinner in the skillet or need to freshen the air. The former tenant was a heavy smoker, and the cigarette smell has permeated the carpet, but it’s only noticeable if the place has been closed up for a time. And the window can become a jury box quite easily if I think about these children and the parents who live in these complexes, who I see leaving for jobs on weekday mornings, and coming home and parking in the same spots in the evenings, but who I’ve never once noticed in the middle-yards, tossing pitches, pushing kids on the swings, or calling them home for dinner. But all the children sleep somewhere and they are back again the next day after school, in the same groups, segregated from one another by age and gender.
After work, I listen to them while I make dinner, and let in the sounds from the playground down the row of khaki-painted buildings to the north. While I’m moving around the range and trying to remember where I’ve stored the plates, pans, can opener, and silverware in this new place, all the movement I can imagine outside sets the shadows on the walls and under the cabinetry into a motion that only I can perceive.
Yesterday morning, which was a Saturday, I listened to six boys playing football in the open grass in a space about the appropriate size for a football game not counting the cement back porch slaps that jut into spaces along the imaginary sidelines and the sidewalk to the rental office that cuts through one end zone. Usually, the boys are not organized enough to play their own game and stand around the play equipment or climb up on the swings and push each other standing in the seats and grasping the chains, like trapeze artists, swaying and too scared to somersault off into the rocks, proudly swinging without any supervision or discipline, without any care that the little girls on the slides would like a turn to swing but are too afraid.
They are gentle boys, and they would relent if the girls asked them for a turn, but they never do. The girls only get the swings if they happen to come first. If they’re not first, they just take rocks and toss them into the puddles that last for days after rains, thinning out the playground surface and annoying the grounds crew that has to stoop and replace the rocks when they’re about to mow.
During what felt like morning to me, but was actually almost noon, and while I was lining up my plate for a steak I fried, I heard an “ooh” that follows a big hit, and I looked out to see one boy lying on his back by the sidewalk, and another boy, who I’d talked to and thrown a few pitches to during an unexpected pick-up game, rolling off the ground from his hip and standing up. I stood an extra second to make sure he was ok, and he was. I liked that boy, but I couldn’t remember his name.
The soft clouds for sleepy afternoons always remind me of February, and they’d moved in and now were making the angles on the building tops sharp so they stood out. Both boys were fine, so I went back to my meal, ate at the shaky kitchen table, and took my trash out to the dumpster. The boys were gone and the sky was barely spitting rain. They’d quit their game on the flimsiest sprinkles I can remember a game ever being called for, and I went back inside not thinking I’d hear them again for the day. But they came back, and I heard them arguing about what down it was, and I heard them again talking about how close one play was to greatness. And, then the rain came, and they were gone less than 10 minutes later.
As often as I see them, I couldn’t say in what buildings they live or whose parents are theirs. The kids are well behaved, if sometimes a little lost and desperate for attention. I only know one boy’s father. They share the same name, and I’ve seen him selling a little pot, I’d suspect. Nothing serious, but he makes his way around the complexes, seems to know everyone, and sits out back with a woman who cleans apartments here, and is sometimes so drunk, she can barely pronounce her name. She tries to get me to talk, and I imagine she’s slept with some people in the complex, and what’s most surprising to me is that she has a pretty teenage daughter who comes out to walk their little dog, and seems well adjusted. The parents here don’t seem to take any interest in their kids. They are let loose after school, come home when the sun is coming down, and hopefully in one piece. I’m not sure how much they would be missed if they didn’t come back.
I would notice them missing. Continuous sound, even if it’s not from my own children, is important in an apartment that feels especially empty after my two daughters and son go back to be with their mother. The noise is not what is missed, it’s the type of noise, the sweet calls from upstairs from my little girls who always yell daddy first, then follow with a request for what they want. When I hear daddy in a public place, I still look for my kids, even when they aren’t with me, and I am aware of children being around when they are not mine, like these girls at the playground and the boys tackling one another.
I don’t know them or own no responsibility to watch them or keep tabs on them, but I do it. I know a few of the boys now. When they see a father throwing a few pitches to his son, like I do with mine, they all leave the playground and walk the length of the apartment complexes to join in, to take a swing, but most are too lazy or uninvolved to play in the field. Their energy is spent making it through the day, like mine is some days just to make lunch.
I try to move fluidly while I cook, not inhibited by the judges’ robe I wear while I turn the meat over, seeing myself an ideal parent who unjustly ended up in a divorced apartment, alone, completely innocent, like a zoo animal, like all those not-guilty jailbirds in the world wearing orange.
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Tags: Apartment Life
Helped by a momentarily dead wind, the train crossing sounded across the quiet parking lot and still highway. On a Sunday night, the town goes silent on its own, but this late in the spring, the high winds and the purple storm clouds settled in just as the day started to turn to night.
The sky was spitting buckshot sprinkles as though the rain was passing through a filter somewhere overhead and hitting my face in a million undetectable wet spots. I was walking back to my apartment along the shop fronts that connect to the grocery store, and all were closed or vacant. China Taste closed three hours before I was passing under its electric letters, but you could still smell the spicy beef and the chicken that had been singed to the tasted in their enormous woks. The last few times I’ve passed, a cook has sat forlornly at the block table closest to the kitchen with his food before him, but not eating, just staring out into the parking lot or maybe his reflection in the restaurant glass, wondering, “What am I doing all these miles away from my home, from my family, helping my aunts fry and mix all this in all the steam over the stoves all day, only to eat this same meal, Moo Goo Gai Pan, over and over, and not even at an elegant sushi place at all, but this little strip mall in a small Kansas town.” I think maybe he might think something like this as I look in at the empty tables, the dark lights overhead, the empty lettering on the door that explains why no one is here this hour on this day, but would be any other day.
The video rental store is closed and I laugh to myself as I imagine the movie posters and the boxes along the walls. I owed them late fees for a few movies and decided not to rent again because I didn’t want to pay that much for late charges. I never paid and because of customers like myself, partially maybe, they closed.
The liquor store is semi-lit, the front windows blocked by a few shelves and bottle shapes, the neon Retail Liquor sign, and a cardboard cut out maybe a NASCAR driver representation facing the cash register. The door is dark, though, and it’s hours are posted, too. Sundays in Kansas you can now buy beer. I remember when my uncle would drive across the state line late on Saturday nights which must have been Sunday mornings, to a store called the Red X, where he’d buy liquor and bring it back to my grandmas back bedroom that he had stashed with Penthouse and Hustler magazines, the worst porn you can imagine with ladies with bruised ankles and smoker’s hair, all dried out and naked, with make-up done for a few pics (these sincerely being some of the fondest memories of my childhood), soon after they’d hit the streets for another hit or line, and then they’d forget all about what they’d done. They wouldn’t mind what their parents would think. They’d be high in Hollywood, and a long, long way from a place where I walk, where someone would be more likely to confront them about god and make them feel the guilt of their ways.
The one place open other than the 24-hour grocery is a bar, Wally’s, and its front is protected by a broad awning and the door has been left open. The windows are appropriated with beer signs, and the light from inside is orange and faint. Here is when I hear the wind stop and am beginning to enjoy the quiet, cool night, when the train arms sound and start to lower, long, long before I can hear the train wheels rolling metallic and heavy and deadly past all the last life in this town on the weekend. I stop and watch the train move in, then its motion encourages me to move, and I do, down the high windows. Inside Wally’s, I can see three men, alone, at tall tables, a bartender far down the bar to give his customers some company, a couple at another high table, and a server waiting on one table. The bar is open, people are inside, and it is somehow the loneliest place among all the stores, the closed ones, and the last in the strip that I pass with this loneliness apparent in my mind, the Laundromat, and a woman slouched in a way that you wouldn’t believe her body could bend, at a table alone, studying. She’s intent, by herself, but not nearly as removed as the people inside the bar dousing their lives in one last weekend beer.
My grocery bag is my company, and the plastic rattles as I turn up the road to my apartment. I lose the building that was there blocking the wind. My arms get tighter, the muscles define just to carry this simple, lightweight bag. Rustling across an empty field between the stores and home, I hear the first bullfrogs from a collection in a small ravine lined with trees. The summer animals have all come to life on what will likely be the harshest night in the last month. The rain may not pick up, but the winds will, and the temperatures will drop, and all those animals that chose today not to be lonely, will go back into hiding for another week after making a poor decision to be born. I think there are some people behind me and maybe in my skin who can relate to that sentiment. Nobody is waiting for me at home, and when the door opens, it opens cleanly without a risk to anyone behind it. I made my venture into civilization for the night so I can prolong my absence in it a little longer in the morning, eating alone, dressing alone, and off into the work week, envious that a few men in this town were brave enough to kill their weekends at the last minute, late, at a forgotten bar more memorable than the townspeople.
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Tags: On the Town
Here’s a link to an article I knocked out real fast for Present Magazine this week. In all, this piece about the Kansas City Public Library and KCPT’s Meet the Past living history performance series took me about two hours to compile. There were some great interviews involved (at least, I thought so), though it is really a summary piece intended to give audiences a taste of what they might expect should they go to the live show or sit in the audience. These are the facts, as I saw them, and for the first time in about three years, I actually end an article with a quotation. I thought it worked in this case. Thanks to editors Pete Dulin and Pam Taylor for the opportunity and the wonderful layout.
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Tags: Present Mag.
She is fascinated by soap shaped like seashells. Anything she finds in the house to her liking she takes down from the shelves and display tables, countertops and bureaus – even the bath tub ledge – and stuffs them into her baby stroller to push around the neighborhood like a miniature bag lady.
The stroller isn’t meant for real babies. The model she’s taken to is a miniature one intended for baby dolls with small wheels to carry light loads around a living room or to be pushed up and down a sidewalk, gently – not to carry the enormous weight that results from her collecting sprees. She loads the seat and its undercarriage with stuffed animals, puzzle pieces, pinecones, marbles, synthetic flower stems with the blossoms cut or fallen off, potato chip bags, a backpack and a hippo figurine. Read the rest of this entry »
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Tags: Kids
The writing won’t let me go on good nights. Not every night is that way. I was up after 1 last night. I started in about midnight, hoping my thumbs could put together something beautiful on my BlackBerry. I felt I owed my handheld a little literary brilliance since I occasionally use it type out my thoughts in a way that would send my former writing instructors into therapy (What r u waiting 4?) Granted, I usually got through the trouble of spelling everything out, but on the rare instance that I butcher my thoughts with symbols that rival Prince album liner notes, those few instances are egregious enough to be made up. Before closing my eyes for the night, I came up with an idea to map my childhood, to literally chart the people and places where I grew up but without using a legend or latitude and longitude lines. Instead, I’d use words – describe the settings and told about the people the way they were then. Below is what I came up with in about 45 minutes. Largely unedited, you can see here what a decent first draft looks like (I hope.) Mozart’s first drafts were near perfection. This is certainly not close to that. (More notes follow this piece.)
On the west side, the houses hadn’t given in to their sighs of mid-summer. Mostly everyone’s house was well kept and the ones that weren’t, even their families mowed the lawns under the sagging eaves and drug out ladders with cob-webbed rungs to add fresh paint. The kids played in the streets making makeshift ramps from phone books and leftover boards, setting fireworks off at the edges of driveways in July, and in August, sitting on basketballs under shady overhangs just staring at the baskets and never breaking the heat more than two or three times to take a shot. One lawn was perfectly manicured – poisoned evergreen bluegrass, thick and Catholic lawn mowed and raked and the lawn mower and driveway washed extensively afterward by the holy man of sorts, the caretaker, Mr. Crandski, who’d waste gallons rinsing the dirty blade and clearing pavement. He’d smoke when he was finished with the yard and had the hose in hand, post coital almost, or maybe like he would after a big meal, the high-pitch and thudding all the same spray sound wash, wash, washing down the drive. We kids used to love him smoke and wash his driveway. His sons were good boys, older than us by just enough grade levels to separate our groups. They’d end up in the loudest, filthiest fucking arguments you’d ever heard in the middle of the day, the boys walking out in the summer sun on the clean driveway, yelling in adolescent voices right into their dad’s big sound, almost a roar. Crandski was a big man, with big lungs and good sized pants. His sons would walk off on him after they’d drawn the neighbors to the windows.
These fights were among the more interesting events of the summer. The others generally happened in the same place, down the street and up a hill, past the trees and chain-link fence to an old graveyard. The headstones were perfectly looped by a gravel road, and some more headstones were outside the circle, on the edges. The loop made a perfect race track for kids on bicycles, about 1 and 8 of a mile around. The races always started at the far end, the northeast corner. Someone would yell go, usually someone in the race and looking for a head start. Smooshed socks and worn shoes would kick the pedals down and after the first long, slow pushes, the feet would move faster, the pedals lighter, around the first corner and full speed down the straightaway. The first corner was the toughest. Some riders would lose it there, take it too hard. Their expressions would change. Smiles would turn to “oh shit” circles, like guppies, then the bike frames would waver, then a scream an actual oh shit, and that rider would go careening off into spaces between headstones. Read the rest of this entry »
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Tags: Childhood
