the secret lives of UPS drivers

I’ve been told that the local Petco parking lot is the best place to make the exchange, but only at the appointed hour. As the target time approaches, I’m ready, equipped and eager to just get it over. And also stuck in traffic, clogged and congested mere blocks away from my destination, yet still trapped, unable to move.

I honk the horn at the cars in front of me, all parked statue-still in front of the green light.

Breathe, I tell myself. He’s probably delayed, too. After all, it’s the same traffic for each of us. But even as I think the words, I know they’re not true.

He’s going to leave before I even get my chance.

I panic and honk louder. The sea of brake lights ahead turns an angry crimson red.

It’s all because of the holidays: the traffic, the stress, the post-it note from UPS with the “unable to deliver” box boldly checked in black. I didn’t want this package to come here in the first place. When I corrected my online order several days ago, I made sure that the delivery address was changed. Or so I thought. I’m leaving tomorrow, going out of town for a week, and according to UPS pre-recorded message, they’ll only try to deliver two more times – in the next two days -- before returning it to the sender. At which point we’ll all fall into that endless whirlpool of package un-delivery bureaucracy.

Unless I can get to Petco on time.

My UPS driver will be there for exactly 20 minutes, the live human at UPS told me over the phone once I had touch-toned my way through all the pre-recorded options. If I get to Petco during that precise window (with proper ID and post-it non-delivery receipt in hand), he can give me my package rather than loading it onto the truck that takes it back to the delivery center for my area. I’m almost there. But those 20 minutes are also up – 2 minutes ago.

I honk at a mini-van that hesitates way too long before turning left, making me miss the light. Two minutes later, I screech through Petco’s back alley and breathe a huge sigh of relief: there are three brown UPS vans clustered at the edge of the parking lot. I get out of my car and run toward them.

“He already left,” one particularly unstressed UPS driver tells me as he lies in a hammock strung across the back of his truck.

I haven’t even had a chance to catch my breath.

“What happened?” another driver asks. He’s slouching on a bench next to the hammock. The two of them couldn't seem more relaxed if they tried.

“He was waiting for you,” a third unbothered driver shouts from inside the truck.

“Traffic," I sigh.

All three nod in unison. Slowly.

Hammock Guy sits up. “Where’d you say you live?”

I tell him my address.

“You still have a chance,” he says.

Slumping Bench Guy nods. He straightens his posture just slightly as he starts giving me directions. “From 6 to 6:15, he’ll be in the alley behind that Chinese restaurant. Just go look for his truck.”

The three drivers resume their original laid-back positions and postures. They start telling each other what I take to be inside jokes about UPS packages.

“So 6 in the alley?” I yell into the truck, ever more aware of my own impending sense of ticking time, of all those missed packages and even more opportunities gradually slipping away, until they're simply gone, and then...

“Should be,” says Hammock Guy.

“I have a better idea,” the guy from the back of the truck steps forward with a cell phone in his hand. He dials, and after an exchange of a few bad UPS delivery jokes, manages to get the exact current location of my driver (just a few blocks away) as well as a promise that the driver won’t take his truck away from that particular sentinel until I actually arrive. My hero: the driver in the back of the brown truck saves the day, not to mention my package.

In hindsight, the trail is clear and easy-enough to follow: a misdelivery leads to a mechanical phone tree which points me to a precisely timed Petco parking lot hammock-strung rendezvous which, when missed, leads to many bad jokes and a few spurious suppositions about packages and then to a shiny double-parked truck that doesn't yet smell of Kung Pao chicken. And I even get my box in the end. The secret lives of my neighborhood UPS drivers. Who knew?

when Andy Gump joins up with those marauding Santas

“Are you stuck?” he asks.

“Uh-huh,” I say as I frantically jiggle the door.

It’s embarrassing enough to get locked inside a bathroom anywhere – when I was a student in Tours, France, long ago, I remember being at a bar when the local firemen arrived to break down the bathroom door and set an embarrassed but still beer-buzzed patron free --- but it’s definitely worse when it’s a port-a-potty. Particularly one of those blue plastic semi-permanent ones that no one has bothered to empty in a while. The good spirit of Andy Gump must just be too busy this season to visit the top of Reseda. Instead he must be trying to wedge his Hummer into one of those compact spots at the mall, or hanging enough garishly decorative lights over every conceivable surface to blow an entire metropolitan power supply, or perhaps even marauding with a group of Santas somewhere…

He’s far from here, though. That’s certain.

The metal rod in the damn lock won’t budge, and it definitely won’t clear the metal door frame. I jiggle the lock again. Harder doesn’t seem to help at all.

Don’t panic, I remind myself, thinking of all that yogic wisdom I’m supposed to hold onto in moments just like these. Just stay in the moment and breathe.

Wait. Not that. Bad idea. Particularly the breathing part if it’s too deep, unless of course I pinch my nose but then I can’t really breathe and…

In a panic, I kick the plastic door. The whole structure reverberates.

“Are you alright?” he asks.

Interesting question, I think. It depends on your perspective, I suppose. On the plus side, if I do ever manage to extricate myself, this will provide me with a conversation-stopping answer to that dreaded “most embarrassing moment” question that some people (particularly some of my more socially challenged relatives) insist on asking when they can’t find anything better to talk about.

“I can’t get the lock to open again,” I say.

“Of course,” he says. “Go figure.”

It’s been a weird, weird weekend. I spent an hour and a half yesterday driving in circles on the 5 (south then north then south then north again) then on the 10 (east then west again) looking for the First Street exit which Google maps, just before it completely crashed my printer, claimed was just off the “10 E/ I5 S”. Turns out that exit is ONLY off the 101, something I might have figured out had I ever been able to find a place to stop and consult my trusty Thomas Guide. But every time I pulled off the freeway, I found myself in a yet stranger neighborhood where yet more people were in the process of being arrested by yet another grumpy-looking police officer as the sun set and my gas gauge read closer and closer to “empty”…

Then there was dinner. It was raining by the time the three of us decided on our plan: go out, get some barbeque chicken, then come back and watch a DVD. A simple enough plan, or so it seemed. The restaurant sign read “open”, and there were even customers eating inside. But when we went to order, the two teenage girls at the register (wearing identical Santa hats and eye makeup and smacking identical green bubble gum with exactly the same giggle, as if on cue) informed us that they had run out of chickens. Completely. Then they explained that the restaurant wasn’t really open, only sort of: they were cooking for the next day, due to the rain and some complicated city regulations about commercial meat smokers and awnings vs. overhangs.

So we settled on a Plan B (which was really C or D at that point), went to the grocery story, forgot to take our purchases to the car and had to double back to retrieve them later, then finally ended up at the house where the lights were oddly yellow and dim when we arrived. And then they were simply gone: the power was completely out, not just us but our whole side of the block. We fished out flashlights, called DWP and ate by the light of spare candles, most of which were unscented. We spent the rest of the evening listening to various versions of the local tv news on battery-powered radios. On the channel I was monitoring, the anchor didn’t have anything to say about our power outage, although she did give in-depth coverage (well, in-depth for tv) to a story about a woman in Tennessee who had been found dead with three fetuses in her freezer. And I caught myself wondering whether before the woman died, she had named any of her not-quite-babies.

This morning, things seemed slightly better. Or at least we had power. And the sun was shining, enough to make us want to try to go out on the bikes. Perhaps we had turned a corner, or so I dared to hope.

No such luck.

I change tactics: I actively pull at the door frame itself, leaning my weight into it hoping to get it to bend, or shift. Somehow, in a way I can't replicate or even properly explain, it works and that annoying little metal bar on the lock clears. I'm free.

“Weird weekend,” I say as I step out into the light where it finally seems safe to breathe.

He nods.

“And by the way,” I say as to him as he moves tentatively toward the blue plastic door, “you definitely don’t want to touch that top lock today. Try the bottom one instead.”

because shtick is the last system to go

This time it’s constipation. My parents are out of town for a week, and this time my grandmother is so stopped up she’s worried sick. Well, she is sick, actually, but I’m not sure that constipation is one of the symptoms. And I highly suspect that she already had a large size value bottle of Metamucil stashed somewhere in her apartment, if somebody only bothered to look, if she only bothered to ask, even, but that's not nearly as dramatic. But anyway…

I call her this afternoon to say “hello.”

“I’ve been thinking about you,” she says. “Just now, even.”

“Oh really?”

“Yes,” she says. “I’m so glad you called. You see, it’s been two whole days and I haven’t gone to the bathroom and I was trying to figure out who could possibly get me some Metamucil and some of those suppositories.”

Of course I’ll get it for you, I tell her. She’s sick after all, dying even: her systems are starting to fail, one by one. But not to worry, she’s still got shtick.

“Of course I don’t tell your parents anything when they call,” she says. “I just tell them everything’s fine. But it’s not fine.”

“Of course not.” It never is when my parents are out of town; something always, inevitably must go wrong.

Outside the Walgreen’s in my grandmother’s neighborhood an obese woman in red reindeer ears stares at the silent bell by her side as she slumps into a metal folding chair and talks on her Bluetooth headset. In front of her is a sign that reads “Salvation Army”. She doesn’t even mutter some innocuous variant of “Season’s Greetings” as I go by.

The pharmacy attendant directs me to aisle 5. There he and I and the shelf stocker and the head pharmacist all discuss the nuances of my grandmother’s conditions, the ins and outs of constipation in a 91 ½ year old woman. Loudly.

Lazy reindeer woman glares at me as I pass her by on the way to my car. This time she rings her bell, a bell that now signals the collective guilt of all creeds.

“I don’t know what I would have done without you,” my grandmother says when I call to tell her the stuff is on the way. As if it’s some kind of drug deal: phylum husks and stool softener disguised in a Walgreen's white plastic bag.

“Be sure to drink lots of water,” I tell her before I hang up the phone. “And remember, my parents will be home Sunday.”

“You know, I don’t tell them how much I suffer,” she says. “I only tell you. You're the only one. I tell you everything. But after I’m dead you can tell the rest of them. Then you can tell your father and your uncle and everyone how awful it was for me.”

And then the wolf actually appeared

So it turns out that my grandmother doesn’t have hemorrhoids, and that her visit to the doctor in my car a few weeks ago was not simply another in a long string of her cries for attention. Some tests and a second doctor visit later, and it seems she has cancer on one, or possibly both, of her kidneys. They’re not entirely sure, since a precise diagnosis would entail a biopsy, something that they think has more risks than benefits for someone of her age (91 ½) and general health. Besides which, no one – including my grandmother – is recommending any sort of treatment for her. The cancer isn’t bothering her aside from the blood in her urine (she was initially confused about the source of the blood…). It might or might not have spread to other organs or systems, or have been caused by them. It might just kill her, if something else doesn’t first. Or she might live for another year, or more. Cancer doesn’t move nearly as quickly in old people as it does in the vibrant, strong and young.

My cousin Alicia, my grandmother’s other granddaughter, died of breast cancer on August 1 this year. She was 28 and so full of life and promise, accomplishments, beliefs and hope. She fought valiantly, admirably against horrible odds for a year and a half, diligently pursuing every treatment possibility, enduring incredible pain so that she could finish a doctoral degree while still working full time in an attempt to give back to the world as much as she possibly could, and so much more than most anyone else I’ve ever known. All the while, my grandmother kept wishing she could trade her life for Alicia’s. Sincerely. If she could have, she certainly would have without a second thought or regret. Sadly, it doesn’t work that way.

But my grandmother is not Alicia, and she acknowledges that. She is on intimate terms with survival: ten days in a coma when she could hear the doctors telling my grandfather that she wasn’t going to live but couldn’t speak back to protest, when she saw the bright white light and floated above her body and came back. Rehabilitation, learning to speak and walk again. A broken back. Three more strokes. For the past 25 years, she’s been Sisyphus constantly pushing the boulder of her body up that hill, gradually losing to the handicap, the limitations of a world constantly closing in on someone who was so athletic and active, a world traveler by nature, even back in the day. Someone so social, needed and trusted, a caretaker for her family and friends, she gradually lost companionship when her husband then her closest friends and all died, one by one. Now she’s a mind, still agile and clear, trapped in an increasingly rigid and fragile body, in a small apartment without even the companionship of a dog. She’s lonely now, extremely lonely. As much as we say it and tease her about her manipulative machinations to get attention, none of us really do understand what her life is like at this point.

The doctor said he was amazed at how accepting she was of her diagnosis. “I’ve had a good life,” she repeated to me, again today on the phone. “I had good time. I was loved.” Not only does she not want to treat the cancer, she seems to see it as a relief: finally, something to end her suffering. She’s not afraid to die; to the contrary, she’s almost cheerful, even. “Whenever it’s my time, it’s my time,” she told me. “Whenever that happens to me.”

It’s true for all of us: we never know exactly when or where or why or what. But most of the time we go along too busy with living to really appreciate life.

“Everyone has to die of something,” my uncle the doctor says. For my grandmother it could be this cancer tomorrow or three years from now, it could be another stroke, or a heart attack, or she could be eaten by the wolf down the hall. And any way she looks at it, she’s fine with it.

“I don’t want you to mourn me,” my grandmother has been telling me this for years. “Do for me while I’m alive. Be with me now. Then, after the funeral, I want you all to go out and have a nice dinner and enjoy it, laugh and tell stories. Remember, I’ve had a good long life.”

Big Sur or bust

Some encounters at (and near) Esalen during last week's yoga retreat:

1) The fasting quasi-resident German who, while he was still wasting away, joined the workshop for a few days, just in time to protest both the use of yoga mats (“I don’t like plastic”), and the much needed fly strips, an attempt to thin the steadily rising swarm inside our yoga practice room (“I simply cannot abide by that. What did those flies ever do to you?” Aside from landing on me in the most annoying places during all the difficult poses, not really all that much... )

2) The elephant seals whose barks echoed along the beach and up the cliffs as the males slammed their thousands of pounds of blubber into each other in their annual mating ritual.

3) The all-women’s erotic dance yoga class where we learned to “shake your tailbone up and down and feel more like a girl.”

4) The cliffs basking in morning light. Every day was simply stunning.

5) My friend, “call me JC. Those really are my initials, you know." A burly guy with tattoos and tales of hard living and massively dysfunctional families (“Addictoholics” he said, “all of us. Addicted to anything and everything."). This wasn't his virign yoga voyage. In fact he had met his girlfriend at a prior Esalen yoga retreat (although when he retold the circumstances of their cute meet in front of her at dinner he managed to throw every single detail of the story into dispute). This JC didn’t take anyone or anything too seriously, including himself (or anyone else). I tried to position my mat near his, this “token Australian” who once was an actual American cowboy, to ensure, if nothing else, that I got a good laugh during class. And as a bonus, he paid enough attention to manage partner work (unlike the fasting German who on the first day of the retreat tried to argue with me about where the top of my hip bones actually were; he, having never studied anatomy and having ignored that morning's lecture on anatomy, was convinced that they were somewhere near the bottom of my ribcage).

6) An observer as I sat down to write in the cafeteria one afternoon.

7) The yogic instructions: “Squeeze the block between your legs, hard,” the teacher yelled at us one afternoon. “Squeeze harder. Imagine it is President Bush’s head.”

8) A glimpse at some migrating monarchs.

9) The naked guy who lay on a massage table as he played his didgeridoo into an empty bathtub for all the spectators to hear and then contemplate, meditate, or simply fall asleep. The concert lasted for over an hour. Hrmmrmmmrmmmrmmm...

10) The windy day that Rummy resigned when I tried to go to the beach with my Esalen roommate. A cold front skipping along the coast blasted us with waves and sand.

the shared green zone

Sometimes in the pre-dawn twilight, the neighbor tells me, you can spot the coyotes so close you can follow them. They prance right down the middle of the residential streets, weaving between the BMWs, Audis, Mercedes and Volvos on their way back to the green zone by the 101.

Coyotes in the city, making their home among the asphalt and cement, hunting careless housecats. It seems like every week the dog and I find a new sign posted somewhere among the picket white fences and manicured lawns: “Coyote” with a date, or an arrow.

And yet…

After prancing through the remnants of a birthday party in the park: the discarded French fries, the crumbles of birthday cake, the grouchy and overfed kids, the stack of presents, the dog and I find the bunnies again. They’re still living by the banks of the LA River, weeks later, growing in equal measure both plumper and more brave.


Their homeless keepers are still attentive, albeit displaced: they and their sleeping bags are gone from the park, moved elsewhere. As we cross the Moorpark street bridge we find them again, or perhaps anew: an encampment of shopping carts, discarded furniture, a mattress covered with a couple of dirty blankets in the dirt next to Moorpark. And there’s even a television: it’s been there for days, unplugged yet you can tell it's still waiting to watched, even in the dirt.







Perhaps they have their own code of streetwise respect, the coyotes who slumber by the freeway and the people who make their home right here in the dirt. They share the same hours of waking and hiding; they’ve adapted and learned what is expendable, disposable. And both of them, these people and the coyotes, may even hide among the same green zone shadows when they’re not prowling the neighborhood for scraps.

hemorrhoids and other near-fatal conditions

“So where’s your car today?” My lunch companion asks.

I sigh. “My mom needed it to take my 91-year-old grandmother to the doctor.”

Slightly quizzical look. “And your mom’s car?”

“My dad needed it to take the visiting Austrians on a road trip.”

“Oh.”

“My grandmother has hemorrhoids,” I explain. “She’s sure they’re killing her.”

Laughter.

“I think deep down my she's really just pissed off about the Austrians,” I say, deadpan. "My grandmother's certain that my dad is neglecting her because he’s busy driving them around the country rather than staying home to attend to her hemorrhoids.”

Doubled-over uncontrollable laughter

“It’s better than last year and the foot fungus. She was feeling particularly abandoned and attention-starved then because my parents were in Europe, so I was the one who had to take the hospital when she was convinced that athlete’s foot was about to do her in. She’s relentless.”

He falls out of his chair. Literally.

There’s one of them in every family, I guess. Unfortunately, in my family there seem to be more than I can count…

attributes of invisibility

Because he thinks no one is looking…

Evening rush hour on the first rain of the season, a weather condition which freaks out all the skittish L.A. drivers and amplifies any traffic tendencies toward stagnation. Today, the stop-and-stand traffic snakes all the way up and over Laurel Canyon.

I’m tired, hungry, and dinner lies a whole hillside and a half away.

I change the radio station for the fifteenth time in ten minutes; nothing suits my mood, and I've heard that same ad now at least five times. I fidget in my seat, inch forward up the hill, then come to a total stop behind the line of brilliant red brake lights that punctuate the twilight gray.

I squirm again. In the Lexus next to me, I notice the driver flicking a cigarette lighter several times. He leans over the steering wheel slightly and takes an enormous hit from a bong.

Or did I see that right?

Yes, I did.

Does he think that the windshield and traffic and rain grant him actual invisibility? Or is he just callous, or stupid, or both?

The Lexus driver sets the bong on the passenger seat, then turns to look at me. He’s dressed professionally, at least from what I can see; his hair is neat and he's well shaven. His smile is sly, direct, desperate.

At the next break in the traffic, he speeds ahead and cuts me off.

Because they think we are…

The middle-aged couple sits on the picnic bench in the park. The man wears a dramatic black felt hat with a turquoise sash, and a black suit, long greasy blond hair spilling out along the collar. The weathered woman in a long skirt with the brightly colored cloth over her head nods at him from across the table. The white boom box on the table between them is silent; on other days they blast classical music at the highest of decibles.

The man and the woman lean in close to each other as I pass; they exchange a few words. The woman leans back and breaks into a bright smile.

From a distance, they could be just another couple overdressed for a midafternoon picnic beside the LA River. If only the shopping carts full of their belongings and the brightly colored tatters of a child’s sleeping bag over her shoulders didn’t give them away.

follicle nostalgia

My high school yearbooks recently found their way back into my life.

They're damn heavy. That was my first thought when they showed up in a paper bag from REI.

The books had taken a hiatus from my closet about this time last year. In the middle of a somewhat innocent conversation, I discovered that a friend was dating someone I actually knew, a guy who had been in my high school graduating class. It turns out that this guy now shaves his head, and has been doing this for years. In fact he seems to have buried any and all photos which show him with hair.

“You still have your yearbooks!” she squealed with excitement, and she’s not normally a squealer, so this was big. “And you even know where they are. That’s impressive.”

Not really. A few years ago, my mom was cleaning out all the closets in her house and decided that every piece of evidence from my childhood had to be evacuated from her house. Immediately. Not only do I have yearbooks, but art projects from second grade, out of focus photos with thumbs in the corners from long-forgotten family vacations, and an “all about me” journal/book I wrote for a 6^th grade English class.

My friend arranged to come over to my apartment for a yearbook viewing. And she found what she was seeking: photos of her guy with hair, big hair and lots of it; it was the 1980s after all.

After laughing quite hard, my friend asked to borrow my yearbooks so that she could show the guy the photos and one-up-on him in the whole “I’ve seen your true follicle display” department. Since the yearbooks hadn't been opened in years and were only occupying valuable real estate in the back of my closet, I said, "Why not?" and lent them to her.

Flash forward to my 20^th high school reunion early last month: I decided to go, despite my general non-reunion disposition. Of course, one of the first people I saw there was the the guy.

“How dare you!” he greeted me. Most everyone else started with something more polite like, “Oh. Wow. You. How’ve you been for the last 20 years?” Or, "You look great" (unconvincing, but still nice), or at the very least, "Well, isn't this weird?"

“How dare you!” the guy repeated.

I stared at him, not quite remembering the yearbook link.

“I mean you had every single yearbook. Every one. Who keeps every yearbook?”

They were expensive, I thought.

“And then who dares to show them to other people?” the guy asked.

I shrugged. We all looked bad. As I’ve said: it was the 1980s.

“I had those damn socks pulled all the way up to my knees,” the guy continued; he was referring to the track team photo.

“Sorry,” I said; it was the best I could come up with on the spot. “I didn’t realize…”

“I’m going to get you.” The guy wagged his finger at me. “I don’t know how, I don’t know where, but I will. When you least expect it, I’m going to embarrass you.”

And then the guy turned and ignored me in order to schmooze with some other long lost and now follicly challenged classmates who probably also wore athletic knee socks back in the day. And I wondered: what makes him think he's so special?

rabbit keeper revealed

The dog and I spot her refilling the water dish alongside the LA River. Even from a distance it’s obvious that her clothes are worn and in need of washing.

She lingers over the water dish, rinsing it several times before refilling the bottle. Then she pauses to consider the food: the dish overflows with cabbage leaves and the ends of carrots. The woman pauses for a moment to observe the stillness of this bright morning, not even a breeze. She shrugs then turns to walk along the edge of the concrete embankment, toward the park where bags of anonymous belongings poke out from the bushes and a solitary body lies still in his sleeping bag despite the mid-morning sun.

And the bunnies?

“She’s just fattening them up for the coyotes.”

Perhaps. But they’re still better cared for than she.

An irrational constant and a proposal

It turns out that a good friend of mine is an Ellis Paul groupie. Which was something I didn’t really know about her until Ellis Paul’s latest tour came to town (or perhaps I did know this somewhere in the back of my head, I just didn’t process it very well since I didn’t really know who Ellis Paul was).

About a month ago when she asked whether I was interested in seeing him (Ellis Paul) at McCabe’s Guitar Shop – she was organizing a small group of friends, getting the tickets, taking care of all the details, all I have to do is show up -- I said, “Sure.” Which is often my response to these things. Why not? McCabe’s is a great place, although I've never seen a concert there, I have been meaning to, for years. So what that I’ve never heard of the musician? That makes the whole thing even better, potentially. Often I discover music I love this way, by going to concerts with friends even when I don't know who's actually playing. Or I discover great stories (of awful bands). Or, sometimes, I get both in one evening.

I’ll admit it was at bit embarrassing when I couldn’t tell people who was actually giving the performance to which I had indirectly bought a ticket. “Uh…something at McCabes.” Note to self: next time this occurs, do try to at least recall the name of the band/musician you signed up to hear before standing in line outside the door.

Because my friend is a groupie, we have to get to McCabe’s a full hour before the concert starts. “To get a good seat” she explains. “You don’t understand these groupies. They line up really early.”

An hour early? To see a singer-songwriter/folk musician? In Los Angeles, not exactly the hub of the nation’s folk music scene? Okay…

It turns out she’s right about this (she’s the groupie; I don’t know why I ever questioned her wisdom on these things). I am the first of our group to arrive, 50 minutes before the show, and there’s already a substantial line on the sidewalk outside. So, I stake out a spot and join the other groupies, an eclectic but seemingly mild-mannered and unpretentious enough bunch (this is folk music after all).

While I stake out a spot for my friends to arrive, I start chatting with the guy next to me in line who is holding a spot for himself +3. He’s wearing shorts, and I notice he has a “π” tattoo on the inside of his shin.

“Are you a mathematician?” I ask him.

“Sort of,” he says. “How’d you know?”

“You have a π tattooed on your shin.”

He glances down at his shin, as if checking to see that the tattoo is still there. “You’re quite observant.”

“Unless it’s some fraternity thing from college,” I say.

He shakes his head. “No, no. Not a frat thing, although I do get that a lot.”

“Is it about the movie? Are you into kaballah? Is that it?”

“That was a weird movie,” he says. “No, that’s not it.”

“So what’s the deal?” I can be quite perserverent when I want to be. “Why the π?”

Fortunately he’s friendly. All these Ellis Paul groupies really do seem quite friendly.

It’s a bit of a long story, he explains, and then proceeds to give me a somewhat condensed version: π is a constant. No matter how big the circle, π doesn’t change and it’s always a part of the area, the circumference. But the number π also has another interesting quality: it’s an irrational number.

“So, at the same time it’s both constant and irrational,” he says. “Sort of like life.”

Just then my friend arrives and rescues the tattooed groupie from any further inquisition (at least on my part) about his chosen body art.

The concert is very good, fun and inspired, and there is something really wonderful about hearing music in a room where guitars and banjos dangle on every free inch of wall space. At one point in the concert, Ellis Paul is in the middle of his guitar-tuning introduction for a song called “The Speed of Trees” when he stops tuning his guitar and says, “Larry? Is Larry here?”

He looks out into the audience. We’re dark and he’s staring into a spotlight. “Larry?” he asks again.

“This has happened to me like 4 or 5 times,” Ellis sighs and sets down his guitar. “This guy named Larry keeps calling me to tell me that he wants to propose to his girlfriend during one of my shows and…”

“Hey Ellis!” A voice from the back row shouts. “It’s me. Larry. I’m here. Standing up in the back row!”

A pregnant pause.

“I’m so glad,” Ellis says. “But I think I just spoiled your surprise.”

Larry doesn’t seem to mind. The lights come up and we can all see Larry.

“So, okay, Larry,” Ellis says. “Here you go.”

“In my fantasy of this moment,” Larry says, “I’m up on stage with you.”

“Fine,” Ellis says. “Come on up.”

Larry gets on stage, stands at the microphone. “I’m really nervous,” he tells the whole crowd. “I’m three days sober, too.”

He tells us all, this audience of now-intimate strangers, that in their three years together he and his girlfriend have “lived a lifetime.” And a new lifetime is about to start, he says and asks his girlfriend to come up on the stage; talk about pressure.

It turns out the “new lifetime” isn’t metaphorical: she’s hugely pregnant. The finacee-to-be waddles onto the stage, he gets on his knee, they share a sweet, un-microphoned moment to seal the deal and then, smiling so broadly that they don’t need the house lights to illuminate their path back, they find their way back to their seats among cheers from all the Ellis Paul fans.

Constantly irrational: a proposal accepted.

Late afternoon by the LA River

There seem to be more homeless people in this park each week: more sleeping bags stretched out next to plastic bags spilling out belongings, convening in this particular triangular section where the sliver of grassy city park ends and the concrete banks of the LA river pass underneath the street bridge.

The dog seems spooked by this corner of the park today. Usually, she lingers on the grass here: savoring ever last scent in this tiny bastion of green before we start our journey home across the asphalt and concrete. But today she walks slowly, gingerly, just along the edge of the sidewalk. As if she’s seen a ghost lurking on the grass.

The young couple with the Chihuahua beats us to the bridge. The man picks up the teensy dog and the woman stands and stares at the river and points down. And I wonder what they’re looking at: the concrete banks? The algae buildup in the tiny pools of stagnant water?

And then I see it.

“A bunny,” I say to the couple as I, too, spot the a fluffy brown rabbit with a cotton-ball white tail. It’s hopping on a stretch of dirt just next to the metal fence that lines the river’s banks.

“Three,” they smile and point.

I spot a second rabbit. Then the dog ducks under the metal guard rail and starts walking on the dirt: through the dried eucalyptus leaves, nose hovering just an inch off the ground, absorbing everything.

She lurches forward.

She points me to it: dishes of greens, a water bottle attached to a bowl. Someone is taking care of these bunnies. They belong to someone. Or someone belongs to them. Perhaps it's one of those new sleeping-bagged figures on the grass in the park.

If only the coyotes stay away long enough.

Jewish wine for Christmas

Last night as we were getting ready for Rosh Hashanah dinner, we realized that our sole bottle of kosher wine had gone bad. Which was a problem. We needed kosher wine for the blessings before the meal. Fortunately, though, there’s a liquor store about a block away. I went to the store, which is run by some people whose native language is Arabic, desperately hoping that they had some wine that would solve the problem.

“Do you have any kosher wine?” I ask the young guy behind the cash register.

“Kosher? I’m not sure about that.”

I frown.

“We do have some Jewish wine,” he says.

“Okay. Can you show me where that is, please?”

“The thing is, I don’t know if it’s kosher.”

I tell him it probably is. Anyone that bothered to label a wine as Jewish would probably also make it kosher. Otherwise, why bother, really?…

The guy does his best to help, but he can’t find the “Jewish” wine quickly, and the line at the register is growing. He tells me that he has to go back to the front of the store since he’s the only one on duty tonight, but that if I wait a few minutes he’ll come back and help me find the wine I need; he’s sure that there’s something, somewhere on these shelves that’s Jewish.

While he’s ringing up the other customers, I scour the wine selection and find a lone bottle of Baron Herzog Chardonnay behind a large tag which says “Kosher” and $11.99 (I know, I know – it’s cheaper at Trader Joes, but I was willing to pay for convenience). I turn to take it to the register and meet him half way: he’s come back to help me look.

“You found something?”

“This one.” I show him the bottle..

“I sold whole cases of that yesterday,” he says. “It was crazy.”

“It’s Rosh Hashanah,” I tell him. “Jewish New Year's.”

“Oh,” he nods slowly, processing this key piece information, "that explains it."

He steps behind the counter. There’s a man ahead of me in line now, buying some wine and assorted groceries, asking for cash off his debit card. The line behind me lengthens still longer; this liquor store does brisk Saturday evening business it seems. Finally, the man’s multiple transactions are over and I’m next.

“So really, that’s kosher?” the clerk asks. “You’re sure?”

“Yeah.”

“Show me. Where does it say that?”

I point to the text on the label, that’s not only plain old kosher, but it's even kosher for Passover.

“Cool,” he says as he swipes my credit card. “That’s good to know.”

I don’t mention that there’s a big tag advertising the kosher part on the shelves of his own store.

“So, have a happy Christmas,” he says as I sign the credit card receipt.

I look up at him. “Huh?”

“Your holiday, right?” he says. “That Jewish holiday you told me about.”

“You mean New Year's,” I say.

“Oh, yeah. New Year's,” he shakes his head and shrugs. “You know I was thinking New Year's and that’s why I mixed it up with Christmas.”

I stare at him; it takes me a moment to realize he had thought the New Year's holiday I was talking about was actually in January.

“But now I realize that’s stupid,” he hands me the bottle. “And anyway Christmas is the Christian holiday," he smiles. "It even says it in the name.”

“Yeah.”

“So happy New Year,” he tells me.

And as I walk out of the store, I wonder if I should have wished him a good Ramadan in return. Or would happy Kwanza have been more appropriate?

sea monster

In the moment after I got bitten by the “animal marino desconocido” (translation: unknown marine animal), I knew that my life was going to change. I wasn’t sure how, but I knew that this wasn’t just some small scrape or cut, that it would require some time to heal, and in that time it would change me.

Three years later, I’m still figuring out what to make of the whole event. It strengthened my interest in alternative medicine (since ultimately that helped heal the infections/subsequent allergic reaction(s) after the initial doses of penicillin so large that they made me allergic to the drug). It also has renewed my trust in the universe: this could have been truly awful, deadly even, and instead it was simply annoying. I was there by myself, and not only did people all along the way help me, but they told me stories that I'll cherish (and creatively reshape and retell) forever…

Cahuita, Costa Rica - 2003

The Danish couple from yesterday’s bicycle escapade down to the Panama border promised to meet me at the bus stop this morning which I though was fortuitous: I didn’t want to explore the national park by myself, but even more than not wanting to be alone, I didn’t want to miss seeing it. So, it all worked out, I thought and hoped last night. But they’re not here yet. And the bus is. And none of us have international cell phones, that doesn’t come for another year or two in my travels.

So the bus arrives and I get on it, without my friends. Perhaps it isn’t that bad after all. There are lots of tourists in Costa Rica. I’m not really alone. Perhaps I’ll meet someone to hike with. And if I don’t, or even if I do at this stage, I’ll stick to the beaten path.

The park is shaped like a tiny peninsula, with a horse-shoe shaped trail that traces the outline of the rainforest along the beach. It seems simple enough to navigate: one trail, lots of foot traffic. I buy my ticket and start walking.

Along the way, groups of tourists drop off. By the time I cross a tiny stream about 1 km into the park, most of the people have planted themselves somewhere along the sand on a beach towel.

I cross the stream and keep going: I want to see what’s ahead.

A man in a well worn polo shirt and shorts comes up to me. He carries a weathered Barnes and Noble canvas bag over his shoulder and I notice he walks quickly down the path, assuredly, even though he’s barefoot. He seems to know exactly where he’s going.

He greets me as he passes. It turns out he’s American, from Washington DC; his name is Jasper.

We walk along together for a while and Jasper tells me that he’s spent quite a bit of time here in Cahuita. He loves Costa Rica, and tries to get away from Washington as much as he can. We start talking about rainforest animals leading up to my favorites: the sloths or perezosos. They move slowly, only when necessary, and prefer to sleep most of the day (15-18 hours). They come to the ground once a week to urinate and deficate, and when they have sex it lasts nearly 24 hours (or at least that’s I heard from a guide in Manuel Antonio last week).

Jasper smiles. “Perezosos are extraterrestrials,” he says.

“Huh?”

He nods. “I saw one crawl out of that stream back there. It got onto the land, came up to me and shook my hand.”

I laugh.

“I swear it happened,” he said. “It was a real extraterrestrial experience.”

We walk along the path a little further and then the path turns inland and Jasper walks out onto a thin strip of sandy beach.

“This is my stop for the day,” he says as he jumps onto a tree branch dangling above the sand. “I like it here. Hardly anyone makes it this far, so it’s great. I’ve got my fruit, a book, a joint. I’m set for the day.”

Jasper pulls a banana and a paperback out of the bag and sets them on the tree branch next to him. “You know,” he turns back to me, “if you go up a bit further that way, you can see turtles.”

“Really?” Sea turtles area another of my favorite tropical creatures; so old (some species are direct descendents of dinosaurs) and gentle (seeming, at least) and graceful in the water. “Just up there at the point?”

Jasper nods. “You’re better off walking along the beach here, though. From here on, the path cuts inland and gets kind of muddy.”

I look down the beach: an extremely thin strip of sand with very low-hanging branches.

“Just walk through the water when you can’t follow the sand,” Jasper tells me. “That’s what I always do.”

“Great. Thanks,” I say. “Maybe I’ll see you on my way back.”

“Maybe,” he says. He lies back on the branch and starts peeling his banana.

I start wading through the water toward the turtles.

“Oh shit!” Jasper yells when I’m about 15 feet away.

I turn around “What happened?”

“That monkey stole my banana.” He points at another tree and I notice the branches rustling. “Nature,” he grunts as he settles back into his spot.

I strap my Teva sandals to my backpack and walk for a while: on the skinny strips of sand when the trees don’t overhang so low as to permit this, ankle-deep in the water the rest of the time. I notice a few small boats out beyond the reef, and I wonder whether perhaps one of those is the snorkel trip I opted not to take because the recent rains have made the water so cloudy. It’s murky even here, inside the reef. When I’m wading through the water, I can’t really see my feet between the storm’s detritus of broken branches and strayed leaves and the sand stirred up by the waves.

The sun is shining, the point where the sea turtles hang out grows bigger: it seems more and more attainable.

And then something grabs my ankle and clamps it, tight.

It’s a sharp, deep pain. It sends me flying into air.

“Ouch!” I yell. The pain burns as it shoots up my leg from my ankle. Something bit me. “Ouch!” I scream and jump onto a nearby tree stump to examine my foot. It’s a deep puncture wound, a half-crescent, shaped like a giant tooth. “Something bit me!” I yell.

No one answers. I look around: Jasper has blended into the trees of the rainforest and the snorkel boats are dots across the reef. “Help!” I wave my arms at the boat. “Ayudame!” I wave my arms toward Jasper, toward the thick rainforest canopy. I must be 2-3 kms inside the park by now.

No one answers.

My leg starts to throb; I can feel my pulse: a new shot of pain with each beat of my heart. Blood slowly seeps to the surface of my skin, then it starts pouring out.

Oh fuck. This is really bad.

In that moment, I am very clear and certain that I need medical attention. Somehow, I have to find a doctor to look at my leg. And no one is going to rescue me. I somehow will have to walk on that bad leg the 2-3 kms out of the park to get to a doctor.

I look down at my leg, now trailing blood. I take off my t-shirt and tie it around my ankle and hope it will stop the bleeding, or at least protect the wound from some of the muck in the water I have to wade through on my way back.

Things will never be the exactly the same after this.

When I get back to Jasper, I find him lying in his tree completely naked, smoking his joint.

He looks up at me. “Back so soon?”

“Something bit me.” I show him my leg.

He jumps out of his tree. “This is terrible.”

“It really hurts.”

“I wonder what could have bitten you.”: He stares at me. “I’ve never heard of anything like that happening out here.”

“It really really hurts.”

“Is there anything I can do to help?”

Put on some clothes, I think. “I need to get to a doctor,” I say.

“There’s a clinic in town,” he says.

“Okay. I have to get there, though. We're pretty far in.”

I start walking.

“Wait,” he says. I turn around. He’s still not wearing any clothes. “Let me come with you. Just in case anything happens along the way. I feel so bad. I told you to go out there and then this happened and…”

Jasper finally puts his pants on and grabs his book and canvas bag. We start walking. The trip seems much longer this direction, but that doesn’t surprise me, really.

On the way back, Jasper tells me bits of his life story, interspersed with his musings on philosophy, ecology and Costa Rica. On the last topic he says. “Italian restaurants are the ruin of a place.” First the Italian restaurants opened in this small coastal town with its tiny grid of dirt and gravel streets that cut through the sleepy bamboo houses. “Once the Italian restaurants came in,” he says, “that’s when I started seeing the teenage prostitutes hanging around.”

Because of the increasing tourism and economic development (even in my injured and pained state, I gather this is the real reason for the prostitutes’ arrival, not the pizzas), Jasper is looking for another tropical undeveloped place to spend the half of the year that he’s not working in Washington DC. “I try to keep life simple, basic,” he explains. And he wants to find somewhere as simple and basic as he can. Perhaps it’s the Amazon next. He’s very critical of the developed world and our consumer culture that’s increasingly, rabidly, over consuming the world’s natural resources. He’s well read, very philosophical and principled; impressive. I wonder what he does in Washington DC, assuming it’s some kind of consulting: on the environment, for the World Bank, etc.

“Hourly work,” he replies. His last job was packing boxes somewhere.

And where does he live?

“I usually don’t talk about it,” he says. “Most people don’t understand.”

But he tells me: in Washington, he lives in a park. So, yes, technically, he’s “homeless.”

“Last winter was really cold there, wasn’t it?” I ask.

“I have a military sleeping bag,” he says. “Sub-zero. And I belong to a health club. The sauna there saved me.” He has a P.O. box, a health club membership, eats only organic foods from the local health food store and he sleeps…in a military sleeping bag in the park. He hides under the bushes; if the cops catch him they’ll send him to a shelter. “Those people are sick in there. Really sick. And crazy, too.”

He’s careful not to let on that he’s homeless; the revelation got him fired from his last job. But that doesn’t deter him: it’s not about money, for Jasper it’s about leading a minimally consuming lifestyle.

He’s been homeless other places, too. Hawaii for a while. “Beautiful, but hard,” he aid of his sojourn on the big island a few years ago. “There you have to get up before dawn and throw your stuff in the bushes because the cops patrol the beaches at dawn, and they’re really nasty.”

He has family, in New York, around the world. He even went to fancy private schools. He has friends here in Cahuita, where he actually rents a simple bungalow rather than sleeping outside, for a change. He has a patent that he keeps renewing. He wrote a children’s book: about a dog, from the perspective of a dog.

By the time I’ve found all of this out, we’re close to the front of the park.

“I’ll let you go the rest of the way yourself,” he says to me once we hit a particularly crowded section of trail near the entrance. “I don’t think you were bit by anything poisonous. You’d have collapsed by now if there were poison in your system.” I suppose that's a comforting thought, potentially at least.

At the entrance to the park the rangers are particularly unhelpful.

“Did you see the animal that bit you?”

“No. I jumped out of the water. It hurt.”

“We can’t give you an antidote if we don’t know what animal it was.”

“But it hurts!”

“We can’t give you the wrong antidote.”

“I need to see a doctor. Where’s a doctor?”

They shrug.

I walk out into the town and start asking for a doctor. At the general store, they point me down a few blocks. “There’s a clinic there.”

It’s noon now, and very hot. I hobble along the dusty shade-less road to the clinic. Twenty minutes later I find out it’s closed. In fact, it’s always closed on Saturdays. Just my luck…

I hobble back into town, back to the store again. There’s a taxi there and I ask the driver to take me to the nearest emergency clinic which is open.

“It’s in the next town,” he tells me.

“I don’t care,” I say. “I need to see a doctor today.”

It turns out that only the emergency room is open on Saturdays. A line of mothers and sniffly infants are waiting outside when I arrive in the taxi. A clinic official at the front looks at me – clearly out of place – and asks what happened.

“I got bitten by something,” I tell him. “In the national park.”

“Did you see it? The animal that bit you?”

“No.”

The official escorts me to the front of the line and then inside the building. There’s a sole plastic chair in an otherwise bare hallway.

“There’s a problem,” the clinic official says.

“What?”

“It’s Saturday.”

“But the clinic is open, right?”

He nods. “But you have to pay Monday. You have to promise to come back and pay us on Monday.”

I promise this man I’ll come back on Monday, if only someone will look at my leg today. He nods and tells me, “Wait here.”

A doctor steps out from a closed metal door across the hallway. He escorts me into his office and I explain, yet again, what happened, and that I didn’t see the animal. He examines my ankle, the deep puncture wound on one side and the scratches on the heel and the opposite side of the ankle bone. “It looks like a jaw grabbed you,” he says. “And this was the tooth.”

Nothing I hadn’t figured out for myself already.

“It’s probably a turtle,” he says, “based on the shape of the bite.”

“A turtle?” I’ve never heard of sea turtles biting anyone.

He shrugs. “Maybe you stepped on its head.”

He goes on to explain that the big issue with marine animal bites is to avoid infection. He’s going to prescribe some antibiotics for me and I must take them every 6 hours. “Every six hours,” he says pointing to his watch. “It’s very important. Even in the middle of the night.” Oh, and I need to take the antibiotics on an empty stomach each time. Okay, I tell him. But where do I get the prescription filled on a Saturday?

“No problem,” he says and hands me the piece of paper before leading me into an exam room. I get up on the table, figuring he’s going to clean and dress the wound. Wrong again.

“Drop your pants,” he tells me.

“Excuse me?”

“Drop your pants,” he repeats and points a big needle at me. I do as he says and he shoots me in the butt with something he claims will help the pain.

It does help. And quickly. My leg doesn’t throb anymore.

The clinic official comes into the room and puts a band aid on my ankle. “Follow me,” he says and leads me outside and into another building.

The lights are off in this building, everything is shut, closed. The clinic official points at a darkened window with a slot underneath. “Pharmacy,” he says. “Where’s your prescription?”

I give him the slip of paper from the doctor and he shoves it into the slot. “Now just wait here.” He points to some empty wooden benches in the middle of the unlit room. I go and sit on the bench.

A door pops open.

“Excuse me,” a little man appears from behind the darkened pharmacy window. “Excuse me,” he repeats. “Can you please spell your name.”

I give him the spelling then go back to the bench. A few minutes later, he walks out and hands me a bottle of pills which I need to take, “Every six hours.” He points emphatically to his watch. “Every six hours,” he repeats.

Okay, I’ve got it. Every six hours on the antibiotic for the mysterious turtle bite.

I ask the man from the pharmacy where I pay for the prescription and he shrugs. “It’s closed,” he says.

“So Monday?”

He nods and smiles. “Yes, Monday.”

The nearest bus stop is at the bottom of a hill. I walk down, my antibiotics in hand, half an hour after the taxi dropped me off at the clinic. Amazing. I’d never have gotten medical attention this quickly back at home…

I just missed the bus, the stressed out young guy sitting on the bench informs me. He’s late for work, and the phone lines are down in this little town so he can’t even call to warn them.

His girlfriend flags down a car passing by and gets in. The young guy tries the same thing, but no one stops for him. He jokes with me a bit as he waits for another car to drive by. He asks how I ended up there, and I tell him I was bitten by a turtle in the national park.

“I’ve lived here all my life, and I’ve never heard of a turtle biting anyone,” he says. “Wow. You’re really having a bad day. Worse than mine.”

A driver stops and picks us both up. He doesn’t even want taxi fare for the ride .

Bad days are in eyes of the beholder. Personally, I think I’m pretty lucky: I wasn’t bitten by anything poisonous, I found help (Jasper) when I really did need it, I ultimately got myself to the clinic, they took me quickly, gave me a painkiller and some antibiotics and a final diagnosis: “mordura de un animal marino desconocido” (bite of an unknown marine animal), all for the mere promise that I’d return Monday to pay the bill (I did return; the grand total for all my treatment and medicine: roughly $20 US). I walked away from a sea monster – that seems like a pretty lucky day to me.

Mimi gets into the car...

San Diego, California - 1932/3

Mimi is ready to get into the car even before June honks the horn, even before June appears in her driveway, even before she’s made the turn onto her street. Mimi’s ready to get into the car from early in the morning, anticipating. She’s always been ready for this car.

She gets into the car and dreams it will make her into someone else.

She thinks about getting into the car the night before, and the night before that. For weeks: from the time she last got out of that car, she started thinking about getting back in, about going back. Every time the phone rings, she hopes it’s word: that she’ll be needed again, to get into the car, to help her family, as service to them. The only gesture she makes for them so eagerly, so willingly, although they all see it as a sacrifice. As always, she thinks, she’s one step ahead in the game.

She dreams about the car, or any car like it: driving it herself one day, owning it herself one day.

Mimi gets into the car with a different dramatic gesture each time. Today it’s the stocking pull. Last time it was the single gloved hand gliding over the leather seat then ever so lightly caressing the steering wheel, the one she’d been forbidden from touching after the incident with their last car, even though that was completely the other driver’s fault and even the policeman would have said so if he had been able to see it from the same angle as she had.

She gets into the car because it’s the one thing that she ought to do that she’s actually good at.

She gets into the car and tilts the rearview mirror to check her makeup quickly, before June pulls it back into place. The conversation is always the same. “I need that to drive.” “Party-pooper.” “I just want to get home in one piece.” “What’s the point of getting home in one piece if that piece looks like shit?” “You look fine.” “But I need to look devastating.”

She gets into the car and notices that June has wrapped her purse strap around her leg. Mimi sighs loudly, overly accenting her disappointment. Ever since that incident no one trusts her anymore, not even June.

She gets into the car with “dear sweet June” “darling angel” “my favoritest niece” and smiles sincerely. “No reason to be glum,” she tells June. “It doesn’t get you anywhere. Smiles are what take you places. Just watch. You’ll see.”

She gets into the car and starts whistling the tune from the Jack Benny show. June likes Jack Benny, too; Mimi is counting on this. After what happened last time it’s vital to break the ice properly before they even start again.

She gets into the car even though she knows she’s only a proxy. It doesn’t matter, not really. And anyway, she does a better job than any of them could. She’s got more courage than all of them combined, more gumption, more smarts. And she’s sure June would agree.

She gets into the car and immediately starts talking, or continues talking; she never really stops. More than anything, it’s the silences that make her anxious.

Mimi gets into the car because there’s no reason to be bland. She sees Edgar’s point, or at least pretends to understand him, or what he is going through, or why he might so desperately needs it in the first place. “You’d never catch me touching that stuff,” she tells June, “but it helps him. Drift off into dreamland, somewhere else, where no one’s screaming at you and no rent is due and no little kids or husband or wives or mothers-in-law need, need, need from you. Sort of a cloudy-like peace.”

June gets into the car...

1932/3

June gets into the car because she’s terribly brave.

She gets into the car because she’s even more terribly afraid.

She gets into the car because she’s a nice Jewish girl, even though she knows that nice Jewish girls don’t go these places, don’t do these things, not even when asked nicely.

She gets into the car in New York to drive uptown to Harlem. To listen while the engine idles and Sidney slides into the large back seat with Edgar so that they can perform their monthly exchange. And then, a few moments after the money has changed hands, Sidney gets out of the car and Edgar unwraps the stuff and after a while becomes quiet again, relaxed, not angry the way he was on their trip uptown.

She gets into the car in Memphis after collecting Edgar from the alleyway. Her mother and Ruth are passed out in the back seat, from fright and worry and alcohol. She collects all of them, cleans them up and keeps on driving forward, even though she’s the only one awake and conscious enough to know where they’re going in the first place. And she’s only just turned 16, only just learned how to drive.

She gets into the car in Los Angeles and drives longingly past the city college on her way to Tijuana, but she slows, lingering to admire the women and men on their way to class. June liked school, she did well, graduated early. She could be there, too, would be there, if only they didn’t need her to drive.

She gets into the car in Oklahoma after the police car has left the gas station and Edgar is safely in the back seat, again, not anxious or angry or yelling any more.

She gets into the car in Texas, outside the ranch where she wishes she could stay a while longer, linger with the cowboys who don’t speak much, and when they do their accents and words and patterns and meanings are so different from those she’s known anywhere else.

She gets into the car outside Albert’s store in Tijuana, straightens her skirt and pretends what she just saw didn’t happen, that she wasn’t here, didn’t participate, that this whole country is just a dusty dream that she can wake up from one day.

She gets into the car and feels fifty pounds heavier even though her dress size hasn’t changed at all. She feels like she has lead inside her, weighting her, getting heavier each time until one day she won’t even be able to lift herself out of the car.

She gets into the car and thinks about that woman, Miranda, with her dark makeup and pale, pale skin that reflected in the light. Miranda, with the scars up and down the insides of her arms, scars that matched Edgar’s.

She gets into the car and thinks about Ruth, sitting alone at the kitchen table in the middle of the night, head in her hands, softly sobbing when she thinks no one can see.

She gets into the car and wonders how you let yourself start down that path, the one that you can so clearly see leads to nowhere.

June gets into the car because they tell her to, and she hasn’t yet figured out how to say “no.”