Knock-Knock, Who's there?

“You need to stay out of the sun tomorrow”

I pulled on the frayed edges of my cut-offs, twirled my cigarette in the ashtray….

“Why?”

“Your face”
“You’re getting wrinkles”

“Hmmmm”
“Is it supposed to rain tomorrow?”

“No, its supposed to be beautiful”

“Then so am I”

Vanity and arrogance dribbled from the corner of his lips like tobacco spittle on an old lady. Didn’t your Mama ever teach you if you can’t say anything nice, not to say anything at all? Hey big boy…..whatcha gotta say?

Silence.

He can’t say anything nice, so he just sits there. Stewing. Trying to dream up something else that will crawl under my very last nerve and get to me. He hates when he can’t.

I laugh.

These wrinkles aren’t from the sun, you silly fool. They’re from living. From failing. From falling. From flailing on the living room floor and living through “that” night. From laying down in the middle of the road in front of a car driven by a 16 year old maniac and bellowing “over my dead body”. From the Christmas Eve “Ma, I think she’s pregnant” revelations and the "oh, thank God she's nots". From kissing dirt and kicking it into gravesites 25-35 years too soon. From wars and ghettos and moments we weren’t poor, but broke as hell. From laughing hard and late in life. From loving and taking chances. From running, climbing, crawling to get here.

The sunshine just watercolors the lines on my face. Makes them glow in the dark. I’m proud of them. I've lived through them.

I believe in peace and love…

Take that, and put it,
Where the sun doesn’t shine!

Slammed....

It’s just a crooked screen door. Kind of Florida-like, kind of Victorian, kind of 50ish. One of those. It’s the rusty hinges that do me. The cheap haunted house sound they make. The way they pro-create their own tainted WD40, oozing like dirty glue, dripping down the door frame.

The hinges. My doorbell. My pit bull. The way I know if my next door neighbor, Maggie, is ready for coffee…sneaking over in her pajamas on Saturday morning ,hangover plastered on her face….if my Father has lumbered up the drive-way , "The beer-garden-fairy", on Friday afternoon, to have his “dearest darling daughter” chat, if my son has successfully stumbled past the benches and made it as far as the screened porch to make bodily noises and expel his Friday night at my feet. But, made it home Alive.

It’s the way I know if the mailman, who has had a crush on me since 1999, has left a package from SLB, loitering if he thinks I’m at home. The way I know if Daniel got my cut-off notices in his mailbox again, and is slipping them discretely onto the outdoor coffee table.

It’s the announcement.

Anyone that rings the real doorbell, stands on the front porch, and leans past the wasp nests, through the bouganvilla,to put their dirty little fingers on the front door button, is a stranger. God, I hate that sound. The ringy ding screams trouble. On the other side of that noise stand cops, Religious witnesses, pizza deliveries to the wrong address, men in uniforms selling fertilizer, frozen steaks, and serving subpoenas. I have furniture piled up in front of that door. Even in a fire, we’d have to run out the kitchen door, couldn’t be saved by the sound of the saving grace. We don’t do the front door. It’s the screen door that spells welcome. The screen door that is dressed in an old piece of oak, carved by Skinny , that says “This house believes…”, the screen door that I slam when I’m having a hissy fit, that I flit in and out of, creaking, squeaking, slamming…..

God, I love the noise we make

When we’re not strangers……

One Million Seven

I drew maps today. Intricate little cross hatches on scraps of paper dotted with circles(lakes) rectangles (houses) dashes and arrows (This is the way we went) and X’s (it happened here). I can’t remember what flippant remark got me started on the neighborhood thing, but I grew up there (well actually I was already a teenager, but isn’t that when you really grow up?) and I was compelled to set everyone straight on the geography of my childhood . BECAUSE they absolutely cannot understand how all these little bungalows on these bumpy broken brick streets could be worth millions now.

Well, I can.

I, of course, can’t afford to go back and live in my memories, but anyone with a buck in their pocket that wasn’t brain fried from the 70’s and therefore CAN’T remember the magic of those roads, would be 40 something now and nostalgic for “that place”. So gotcha! Prices have skyrocketed and it’s a phenomena and the “address” to have….

But anyway, this is how I remember it…..

Flying down Grove Terrace, bumpity bumpity bump on the bicycle my Mom bought from The Sheriffs sale (stolen bikes spray painted, confiscated, and never claimed), blonde hair flying behind me leaving trails, flip flopped feet embedded into the spiked pedals…..Can’t wait to make it half way around the lake, past Paiger’s little friends house, to light this cigarette! Now I can! It takes two hands, one to flick the bic, and one to shield the wind, I’m going down hill, looking down, on a bumpity bumpity bump brick road!

The road burn was instant. The elbow and hip thing came later. The smell of my hair, scorched for a fleeting second hovered throughout the introduction. “Wow, you crashed, dude”. I stared at them. My eyes were running. Away. I’m 17, tanned, thin. Two beautiful guys are crouched next to met, splat, on the road. They’re older. 20 at least. I’m dying. “Hey, you need a light?” I laugh.

Best Friends.

30 years later they bulldoze Christians house to build three more. One million seven.

God, didn’t anyone remember we danced here? We painted the bathtub in psychedelic colors with Saturday night hands and turned it into an aquatic rescue unit. People would wait in line to sit on the toilet and watch the fish swim. We painted the glass panels of the French doors psychedelic too, embedding little peep holes into the glow in the dark menagerie…..The better to see who had rambled up the rod iron stair case onto the balcony. It was never the cops. Not in our world. Where Terry would sit on the third story roof and play the harp with the sky. Where we would all sit, blue jeaned legs dangling through the railing, toasting the angels that came out to listen.

And then, like little soldiers, we would straighten up our eyes. “Must be the stiff wind” that made them that way. And pile down the steps to the real house. The big house. One million seven.

And we would dance in their kitchen. And toast to their stories. And give them gray hair. And they loved us. And we loved them.

And they’re gone now.

And the house with the first swimming pool in town is gone. And the 47 cats that lived under it are gone. And my name, carved in a door frame, next to 32 others is gone.

And Christian is gone.

One million seven.
And worth every dime.

The Color of The Sky

In the Aftermath

I stood on my deck, splintered boards mildewed under my bare feet, and thought for a moment what an odd bowling alley our backyards made. It had been days, maybe weeks, since the last storm, and now, with every fence down, it looked as if Mother Nature had carved an alley smack down the middle of our block. No longer protected by the waving arms of oak trees or divided by property lines, our secret lives were now exposed.
Backyards, so unlike the portrait we present to the street, are storybooks. Real-life story books. A rusty swing set , four doors down, still stands. I envisioned a young man there, sweltering in the sun, making sure the shiny new frame was meticulously level, and then affectionately drowning the legs in a pool of concrete. His little ones could touch the sky, and never-ever would that tee-pee frame teeter from their fun. I counted the houses again. Mrs. Lazaro is a widow now, her children long grown. On holidays, laughter blows over the fences like barbeque smoke. Her grandchildren.
A little to my left I see a flattened fort and the remains of a toppled tree house. The yard is over grown, lush with weeds and kudzu. The newly fallen trees look like Lincoln Logs tossed absentmindedly from heaven, landing just so on a boy’s world. Three little rascals are climbing over and under the debris .The oldest, lanky and with a mop of hair the color of damp mulch, claims his territory. He quickly mounts his flag; a brightly colored swim suit secured by duct tape. Two little fellows scramble to follow him. No one hollers out the back door to be careful. I know instinctively that when the fences go back up, the little jungle created by the hurricanes will remain there. Paradise for three little boys.
I feel like a peeping Tom here. I can suddenly tell who has matching garbage cans and which of my neighbors haven’t a clue what actually is garbage. An above the ground pool is now a crumpled pile of blue in the distance. It looks like a miniature mountain of vinyl. I have to squint to make sure it’s not just a reflection of all the blue-tarped roofs surrounding it. Whose lazy round river has been destroyed? I realize suddenly that backdoors are very different from kitchen doors or front doors. Some appear to have not been opened in years. I imagine them lined with deadbolts from the inside. Are these dog -less homes? I wonder why the inhabitants, once neighbors, now strangers, have never felt the urge to tiptoe barefooted in their pajamas through the wet grass. To gaze at the stars on sleepless nights.
I scrunch my toes on the cold, soft planks of my beloved deck. I close my eyes and pretend the towering trees are still dancing overhead; their swooping branches sprinkling morning dew into my coffee cup. The rising sun kisses me and for a moment, I’m standing at the ocean’s edge, digging my toes into the wet sand. I can almost smell the salt drifting in the breeze. This is my backyard. As I turn to open the back door, I remind myself that when this is all over, I want to hang a welcome sign here.