Biggest Little City

I used to cry a lot when we lived in Seattle, my face often matching the sky, so my mother moved me to the desert to dry me out.  I did grow tougher, but there was still an occasional flash flood, which as everyone knows, can be deadly in the desert because there really isn’t anywhere for the water to go.

My body has always existed across several biomes, splitting itself apart into fractal shapes to maximize surface area, but many of these selves are currently wandering in the Great Basin.  We know about the duality/ duplicity of man, but let’s examine now of the multiplicity of women/ this woman, to the extent that a writer is ever anything but ink on a page.

I used to travel between cliques, never fully belonging to any, desiring membership, subscription, purchase in all things, all manners, showing up in the costume of that one for that day, which never completely fit properly due to my awkward chubby and left me more lonely than if I had just stayed home.  I remember the exact moment when I realized I was becoming a pantheon of lesser super heroes with very specific and limited powers.  Mega-victim collected traumas like passport stamps, skipping her way through them with a deranged laugh.  Super-tough got in a lot of fights, some physical, and while fighting was never really her thing, she never backed down and she got pretty good at throwing insults.  Poison-slut was good at blow jobs and forgetting things.  Toadflax was outstanding at blending in, but only if she was standing in front of one specific wallpaper design that looked like a stone castle which is too specific to be at all useful in the majority of circumstances.  

Now I travel everyplace, everyplace but home. I cast them all over my shoulder onto the trail behind me, nestled in little sacks to disguise who and what they were, like donations to the Damnation Army and the Badwill.  But when I drove  back into town this time, past the Cal-Neva and closed down Little Nugget and boarded up Harrahs, to the loading dock just beyond the parking lot, I could still see the paper bag with a version of me in it, waiting through all manner of weather, all sorts of indignities and minor catastrophes, for me to wander by and pick her up again.  There was another one in front of the basement apartment door, where I lived when I was pregnant with my son.  That one bought a lot of things on eBay that she did not need, because she her limited superpower was winning auctions at the last minute, and some of those purchases remained stacked there, in front of the wisps of grass that still refuse to coalesce themselves into anything resembling a lawn.  There was a third one at that horrible weekly hotel, with a broken watch on her wrist, marking the time she had fallen down the stairs in her haste to get away.  

Now that I am back in Reno, for the first time in a decade, it seems cruel not to collect any of these former selves.  So far, they are all hitchhikers and they all want rides.  Every one of them wants to get the hell out of here.  Perhaps later, I will come across one that is more rebellious, who I have to chase down.  Likely that one will arouse the suspicions of local law enforcement, who though dim, take a dim view of anything that appears like kidnapping.

What will I do as it gets increasingly crowded in this story?  Which one will speak with you?  Shall we allow the editor to be the one to mesh the voices together such that we sound like one reasonably coherent individual?   

Oh little bird/ birds/ burdens.  

Fighting over which one gets to ride shotgun.  I allow the one who was friends with the classy girl at school to get in the front seat.  She is the most hurt.  She reached out even before I got into town, asking if Tiff wanted to see her/ us.  Tiff said she did not, despite the fact that there were years of accumulated history since then, several meetings and conversations in which we took great care to be supportive, caring and understanding, so as not to upset Tiff or drive her away.  Having Tiff as a friend was a source of validation for us, that said perhaps we were not as big a failure as it seemed.  But Tiff is going through another divorce, her second one, so she is very upset about her failures.  She says we ruined our friendship with her when we told her we used to have a crush on her 30 years ago.  We remember many things, but we do not remember having a crush on her, or telling her we had a crush on her, but we do remember the idiotic and awkward response she had to our coming out as queer.  We also remember her sharing her wild relationship with another woman that she had after we came out, and her saying that while it was the best sexual relationship of her entire life, she was not queer and would not be having sex with women anymore.  All of this we held with our usual tender attention, despite our innermost thoughts on the matter, until such time as she dumped us as a friend via text message while we shopped for pens and journals the Barnes & Noble. Pens that we then used to write these sentences out, which caused these past selves to rise up and demand to be reintegrated.  Like the one that was so concerned about losing her friendship altogether that when Tiff asked her to recopy her physics packet, all 30 pages, in Tiff’s handwriting, which we were easily able to imitate, we agreed.   We understood.  Tiff lived in an only partially successful ecohome, and so she was often without water or power, which made it difficult for her to complete her own physics homework.  Adding to her difficulty was the fact that she had decided our friendship was holding her back from her true popularity potential and she was luxuriating in many more social invites now that she had abandoned our time together in favor of people that she never spoke to again after high school.  Geez, this version of me sounds so bitter.  Perhaps it’s time for this bitter betty to have a heart-to-heart with the self that had sex with her high school sweetheart, even though I/ we were married to someone else at the time.  There is no version of us that is not a cheating heart; we refuse to allow anyone perfect dominion or fidelity over any part of us, and if we have to have sex with other people from time to time to keep that from happening, then that is what we do.  We used to feel badly about it, but now we have many friends that think it’s just fine that we are like this, seeing it as perhaps liberated or otherwise evolved.  We love both too much and not enough at the same time.  There is a part of us that hopes somehow she will see this. There are other parts of us that hope she never ever does.

There are so many other selves to pick up, and here I am, wallowing in having let the same person discard me twice.  Why should she not, when I have so readily discarded myself?  Some of these selves I am not ready to confront, because they are truly just horrible and even boring, like the one that made a VHS tape of herself smoking meth and discussing cat food and porn movies as if the two things were related.  That bitch is so trashy and has really bad skin.  We discarded her when we got pregnant, moved into the basement and stopped doing those things.  We are not even sure where she is, because we were in the process of being evicted from our above-ground apartment at the time.

I pull over the car. I am emotionally incapable of another run-in with myself and besides, the car is full.

I morosely walk along the Truckee River, which is barely a trickle, because I guess there’s a drought.  And just when I lose sight of the car and the bickering inside, along comes another barefoot floozy self, ready to go back to my hotel room and take a nap while soaking my insides with flop sweat.  And I think about how to accommodate this one’s particular needs which obviously include a shower and probably a peanut butter sandwich. Maybe some calamine.  Most of us are badly mosquito bitten, as it's a part of our essential nature to all have red welts and blacktop bitten feet.  I abandon the car and walk her back to my room.  There are clearly so many problems here, but at least this is a place where I can hold my own hand and no one thinks it's strange. 

A Rock For Your Pocket

There starts to be a real pleasure in walking around the world with crutches from the satisfying clacker smacker of hard plastic and metal landing on the pavement to the joy of swinging my whole body from one standing point to the next, like taking big gulps of sidewalk instead of steps.  My palms burn with the effort, resting on the grips of my lofstrand model walking aids, but I am resolutely happy and it shows.  A man swerves my herky jerky to run into the subway station, bounding down the stairs two at a time, when he suddenly slows, turns back up the stairs and smiling, approaches me and touches my sleeve lightly.  “Hey, you’re beautiful,” he says in an easy way.  “I’m going to miss my train, but it doesn’t matter because I met you today.”  He pauses.  “I don’t need anything,” he adds, understanding how incongruent with urban social mores his current actions are.  I laugh as my response, which I can see he thinks is just exactly perfect.  He smiles and with one final pat on my sleeve, moving more slowly now, he heads back into the gaping maw of the subway with a jauntier and less frantic air.

That is how I know things are about to happen.  Good things.  I had to move away and come back, in a limited possibility constrained movement iteration, to make this happen.  Last time I was here, a crazed and enraged man attempted to puncture my foot with a used drug needle.  Luckily he chose an unattached syringe instead of one of the many needles fanned out beside him on the sidewalk but still broke a bone in my foot when he smashed it onto my exposed skin in my delicately formed ballerina flats.  This is not the reason I am on crutches but I think of all the times this city tried to destroy me in one way or another and how much I have dreaded these homecomings until now, a slightly grey afternoon, with nothing particularly special to call it out.

I make my way down the street with anticipation.  I don’t have to wait long for the next thing.  A local pub, one of those San Francisco institution type places, is playing live music outside.  It’s barely warm, which could be a tagline for the city itself, but people are dancing in short sleeves as if it were middle summer instead of late fall.  Someone with particularly energetic and ungainly dance moves catches my eye, runs over and starts dancing with me on the street corner and I pull moves that I imagine look particularly cool while on crutches, watching as the whole party migrates to the corner and eventually reforms around me dancing and whooping until that song is over.  “Wooo, you dance like the world is on fire,” one of the onlookers shouts.  “I dunno about that,” I shout back, “but my heart is.” Nina Sanko – Fire Heart –, is the nickname given to me by a quechua guide on the trail from Cusco to Machu Picchu in Peru and I am obsessed with the thought of living up to it.

And just as quickly as it began, the song is over and I continue onward to my hotel, waving one of my crutches in fond farewell.  After sharing charming anecdotes with lobby dwellers, I continue to my room, where I change into my costume.  My friend is having a stellar themed wedding reception and I am dressing like a kind of outer space fairy, in a silver hologram dress with pointy shoulder pads, and an interstellar space/ moon/ stars headband.  Silver lipstick and other random sparkles everywhere are of course required and with all this applied, away I go to the event space.

I don’t know most of the people there but it doesn’t matter.  I sit in one spot with my crutches beside me and I occasionally pick one up and use it for emphasis in conversation.  Another real advantage.  My friend’s mother and all her friends are there and eventually they make their way over to see who I am and why I am there.  I know my friend’s mother is very wealthy and I assume her friends are also, based on the way they are dressed and they carry themselves.  They also seem to be out of their minds, which makes them infinitely more interesting than they’d otherwise be.  “Are you a fairy?” one of them asks.  “I’m not not a fairy,” I respond smiling.  “That’s just what a fairy would say,” she says confidently.  “So,” and she lowers her voice looking around “do you grant wishes?”  “Um… depends what they are,” I say.  “I cannot do anything manifestly negative, and I won’t move resources from one person to another, but in the sense that entropy works to our benefit and that eventually everything disperses and we become more alike and more free… I can get behind those kinds of wishes.”  “Well okay,” she says with less certainty.  “So how do I do this?” “Uh…” I am actually not certain about this, having never been asked to do it before.  “Well you whisper your wish to me, it should be something deep in your heart, your innermost desire,” I continue “...and then I’ll ask you to repeat it twice more the same way and I’ll grant it for you.”  “Okay,” she says brightly.  “Let me think of it first.”  I begin to feel mild alarm at how intensely she is thinking but my curiosity overrides my concern.  “I’ve got it,” she says.  “What is your wish?” I demand imperiously, sitting up straighter.  No one ever granted anything with bad posture.  “I wish I wasn’t so worrisome,” she says quietly.  “Mmm,” I say surprised.  “Is there a way to phrase that in the positive?”  “I wish I was more light-hearted and carefree,” she says.  “Perfect,” I say.  “Now repeat.”  “I wish I was more light-hearted and carefree,” she says again.  “One more time,” I say.  “I wish I was more light-hearted and carefree,” she repeats, still quietly but more confident.  I flick my wrist in a way I think is graceful and say “May it be so.”  “Well, did it work?” she says to me eyes open wide.  I smile benevolently.  “Well you tell me,” I reply.  “Oh my god,” she screams.  “GIRLS, GIRLS, she is granting wishes!  WISHES!  Come over here and have your wish come true.  Mine just did!  It WORKS!”  

Very quickly, a queue formed of middle-aged and older women, chattering excitedly and I repeated the same formula and the same words.

“I wish I was a free spirit.”

“May it be so.”

“I wish I could stop comparing myself to everyone else I meet.”

“May it be so.”

“I wish I was helping find solutions instead of just creating problems.”

“May it be so.”

“I wish I could find the same joy I had when I was a young girl.”

“May it be so.”

As the evening wound on and the wishes continued, not a single one was selfish, or malignant.  Not a single person walked away feeling dissatisfied.  Everyone was willing to be touched by whatever it was that was radiating from the silver fairy with the crutches.  

I once gave a sobriety rock to a heroin addict I met outside of an arcade.  After an hour of conversation, clutching the rock that I carry in my pocket for luck and for tactile sensation, he headed home for what he knew would be a difficult detox.  In the way that I just know things, his entire life changed in that moment.  Was it me, the random stranger who understands more than she let on, who showed him some kindness in a moment where he needed some?  Or was it the rock?  Steadfast for possibly millenia, polished to a pleasing sheen, satisfying in size for fingers and pockets, radiating the energy of all the places it had been and was still to go?  Now labeled for the task at hand, did it accomplish miracles?  Rocks are always doing that, actually, and I am only smart enough to know to keep them around.

What is it about this body, this amalgam of spirit and blood sauce and bones and skin that has patterned itself in such a way that maybe it could help you?  Especially I think/ know about all the times when it was stupid and it couldn’t help itself.  It/ I am unqualified to do something different for you. This ability to tap into the collective unconscious and to pull something into the currently now is even more fleeting than I am.  And yet, sometimes, the pattern emerges under the stars, even if you can only see them on my headband.

The New Land Is Full of Emptiness

My horoscope says I won’t need external validation until September. Right now it is April. The challenge for the next several months is not to go entirely mad under the thin pressboard wainscoting of my own counsel.  My brain flashes various unhelpful slogans like neon signs behind my eyes.  This is a city designed for entertainment but all I can see is how unhappy everyone is.  People walk by each other, practically colliding but not really noticing, not stopping or pausing whatsoever to marvel at the absolute miracle the existence of another person actually is. Perhaps I watch too many apocalyptic movies, but I can imagine each one of them gone: the trembling older man with the cane taking cautious palsied steps toward the car while his family waits impatiently, the bouncing aggressively cheeked girl with the hot pink barrettes excited about her first trip to Disneyworld repeating “its my first time” over and over again, the irritated and the mother of the hot pink barrettes  complaining about how a complaint she made to someone else earlier in the day didn’t actually change her situation and she doesn’t know how to change it except to keep repeating herself. I take them all in with eyes and mouth and skin as plump and round with love as I can make them, especially for the old man, for whom ceasing to exist is something he confronts every morning when he wakes hours earlier than his family to carefully dress himself – every button in a button hole is a maddening labyrinth – spending hours he can ill afford preparing himself so the rest of them can whirl and stuff themselves into a state of being that only approximates happiness.

I’ve always been a favorite of old men.  I cannot help but feel tender toward them.  Once they’ve been stripped of their essential maleness by age, made impotent in their musings, I find all of their prejudices and hatreds as soft and edible as the mushy food they spoon into their wrinkled mouths.  My mother used to be a caretaker for a couple of older men – the real sweethearts, she called them.  She refused to care for older women – those demanding bitches are never satisfied.  So these were bachelors and widowers, forced to listen to her own  imbalanced, odious and incoherent opinions, while she performed her various ministrations on their behalf.

“Do you remember old Mr. Schumacher?” she used to inquire from time to time.  Of course I remembered him.  Any job my mother did, I also did.  My recollection is that I was an extremely capable helper, but given that I was only 4 or 5, this might have been a lack of self awareness on my part.  Nonetheless, despite the fact that with my mother’s capable and strong arms, Mr. Schumacher was able to get in and out of the bathtub, he did require help and supervision.  While my mother did the dishes or prepared lunch, I’d run a giant sponge or washcloth over his body, while he told me stories or hummed songs he’d long since forgotten the words to.  I was fascinated by his translucent nudity and all the odd shapes men’s bodies made, but my mother told me it was rude to stare or to say anything, because it might hurt Mr. Schumacher’s feelings, so I’d often close my eyes partway in a gentle and fuzzy gaze that felt not quite asleep and not quite awake.  One time after his bath, while he ate soup, I ran and played in his overgrown backyard and was stung by a bee I had startled while picking flowers.  I screamed several times and he slowly and tenderly ministered to my sting with a baking soda poultice after my mother plucked out the stinger with tweezers.  “The bee didn’t mean to sting you,” he explained.  “They have to give up their own life to do it, but this one was probably protecting his family.”  “I wouldn’t have hurt the bee,” I cried.  “Of course not,” he said.  “But a girl like you looks big and scary to a bee.  Sometimes, they just don’t know any better, that’s all.”  

I liked his humming too, it was very soothing, and it was a habit I imitated when I was at home in my own bath, while my skin wrinkled in the water just like his.  I often told him I wished he was my grandfather, because both of my own were drunks, one mean all the time and the other incoherent by noon, both were men to mostly avoid, not yet old enough to acquire my compassion. He said he wished for the same thing and he would gently pat my hand when he said so.  One afternoon, the same pattern as any other afternoon, he grasped my hand and said “I think this is it now, girl.”  I stopped washing and just let him hold my hand, though the water was going cold and his skin was turning blue.  I kept my gaze soft and fuzzy.  I was a very patient girl.  When my mother walked in, her eyes got wide and she extricated my hand.  “He’s gone,” she said to me.  “How fortunate he was with someone he loved.”  She made sure to repeat this to his daughter later, when they came to take his body away, and the daughter’s face changed immediately to a kind of angry horror.  She made a hole in the check she wrote to my mother with the pen she wrote so hard and we had to leave right away.  “She was jealous of you,” my mother said.  “Her dad loved you more than he loved her.  But at least she was generous with the final payment.”

Sometimes people are just gone and it doesn’t require an apocalypse.  Sometimes the only things they leave behind are complications and unresolved knots and questions that don’t have any answers in this plane of existence.  Sometimes we long for death because it is ultimately the only exit from our own painful ambiguity.  But mostly we don’t hasten that along, because we haven’t scratched everything off our to do lists, and because the world is crammed full of distractions.

I have a short list of things I wanted to do today myself, and the overheard complaints of the complaining woman seemed never-endingly and mind-numbingly repetitive, so I left my hotel and made my way to them knowing they would more than fill my time.  I returned after dark, having spent too much money at the designer outlet mall, and too much time feeding adolescent alligators who were crowded into a tiny pool.  I made friends with their young keeper who let me come inside their enclosure and get far too close to them, due to my general charm and calmness of spirit.  I knew I was taking a risk but it felt like a manageable and worthwhile thing to do.  I tell myself that predators with large teeth know how much I love them and so they are unlikely to attack me.  This is only sometimes true.

I exited the hotel later that night trembling because I always find it frightening to know what the fortune teller might say to me, and because the pressure of impressing them but not saying too much is always such a balancing act. OPEN flashed the sign, also promising me a variety of mechanisms for telling my future.  All hotels with such a panoply of humanity in its rooms should have a fortune teller in the parking lot.   

PSYCHIC

TAROT

HANDWRITING ANALYSIS

CRYSTAL READING

But the little fortune teller shack was completely empty. Come in the flashing sign said. Come in.  Come in. 

PAST PRESENT AND FUTURE.

I did come in, slowly pushing the door open, expecting an alarm to go off.  Nothing happened.  I sat in one of the empty chairs in silence. The room was entirely purple in a lurid glowing kind of way, leaving a faint lavender cast on the white furniture and presumably on my anxious face.  

I write like I think — fast, associative, slightly impatient with the physical act of getting it down before it escapes. The letters lean forward urgently. I bear down hard on certain words — the ones that matter announce themselves with pressure – and with dreadful earnestness, I destroy pen nibs and pencil points, sometimes tearing holes in the paper or the space time continuum. Without lines on a page, I drift upward, which graphologists associate with optimism and idealism, the writing is literally trying to rise off the page.  The words I use sometimes make me sneeze.  I had brought my notebook but the only thing I succeeded in writing while inside was a large ink blot from holding the pen against the paper for too long.

Everyone or everything has a story. Just a tiny little pause to see the intermittent tuft patterns on the floor carpet, the squares of the small counter tile, installed for the purpose of displaying stereotypical spiritual objects to magnify the reading and presumably to maximize your own financial investment. Now that everything isn’t made by human hands, things mean less than they used to. But how sad for the things. Designed by a robot, not invested with any human meaning, then trod upon until it’s threadbare then thrown away. Only really experiencing the pattern of my soles and the weight of my body.  It’s not enough.  All the things lacking in purpose have an inherent sadness that can’t be overcome no matter how much I think about them or how much intent I direct fiercely at them in my sudden fervor over their existence.

A small sign on the table listed a phone number to call “anytime day or night” if the psychic shack happened to be unoccupied.  I could not bring my still shaking hands to dial.  And the shack was not unoccupied.  I was there.  The noises outside were also there, muted by glass and thin lower walls.

Eventually, I bowed in namaste, thanked the empty chairs and the room and the stereotypical spiritual objects and rose, leaving my money on the table. I hadn’t asked any questions but now there were none left. I met my future in a place where my past didn’t think to look.  I can see into my own heart, but the print is too fine to be read with the naked eye in the pale purple glow of 11 pm in Orlando.

A Safe Bet

How do I make the sound beep so that you actually hear it?

That enggh enghh woke me but did not get me up. I laid in bed, listening, wondering what the trucks were up to so I could write it down. Why were they backing up outside my window? Why not just go forward early in the morning? What had already been done so that it needed to be turned around and redone at this hour?

It is a shitty hotel on a shitty street. Nice hotels don't have enggh enggh outside of their windows.

The less money you spend, the noisier your life is, the harder it is to find the words for precisely what is happening to you. No one would understand it anyhow. There are plenty of things in life where the words just sit on the surface of that thing, they blanket it, they hint at shapes and dimensions, sexy in what they reveal and even sexier in what they don't.

They make it tender to play at the grotesque.

The lack of coffee in the lobby is another special feature of the shitty hotel, practically advertised on the sign outside, because it proclaims they serve COFFE with part of the letters missing, just like the coffee container exists but the contents do not. The percolator is completely dry, no dregs or lees creaking out of the spigot, like I once imagined the top of a camel's hump to be, close to the idea of liquid sloshing beneath it, but never expelling it.

Why did everyone tell me camels could go weeks without water because they held the water in their humps? That was just another lie, filed in a whole lineage of lies, that fed my rapacious gullibility. Instead, now I know that the whole hump of a camel is filled with fat. It provides energy, not hydration. Sally the camel has two humps but she has dry bones.

I leave the shitty hotel completely unsatisfied, scurrying toward the first scheduled obligation of the day, on the glitzier part of the Strip. Rounding a corner, I see it and immediately begin to weep.

The water my body has to offer the earth pours in large gasping plops from my orbital sockets. I am crying because I did not expect to see the four faced shrine here and I write into my notebook the inscription, as if it were a sacred part of the precious offering.

THE CASTING CEREMONIES FOR THE FOUR-FACED, EIGHT-HANDED STATUE OF THE BRAHMA WERE HELD IN BANGKOK, THAILAND ON NOVEMBER 25, 1983 AND MANY IMPORTANT RELIGIOUS AUTHORITIES AND INTERNATIONAL DIGNITARIES PARTICIPATED.

Teardrops are not even teardrop-shaped. Instead they are hamburger buns that turn themselves into an umbrella as they fall.

Yes, an umbrella is the exact shape of rain.

One shape repels the other shape, knowing it is separating itself from itself.

I kneel to pray on the padded prayer bench, whose vinyl coating doesn't receive my tears but rolls them onto the ground where they wait patiently to evaporate, while I wish for my own release.

The scent of burning incense sears into my nasal passages as I murmur my desperate supplications and fragments of scent grasp my nasal hairs with their tiny smoky hands until I have ceased to be anything but musky floral fumes.

I solidify back into body and obligation and head in a direction that is on my way.

I will not run after the phony monk in the umbrella hat, but I do quicken my steps, knowing his own will slow when he hears me behind him. The con artist must be aware of his surroundings, with all his senses providing him information about where his next mark might be. The phony monk con artist doesn’t know it just yet, but it will be me. He will want to convince me to donate funds to his imaginary church and I will absolutely do it, after he shoves the luck or love bracelet onto my wrist. This is what I know will happen and this is what is now happening.

"Love or luck? Love or luck?" He insists I choose with rapid, impatient speech. He looks closely into my face, peering and seeing perhaps something desperate, or perhaps pathetic.

I don't know, I cannot see myself, only him.

I look at the ground, avoiding his questions, struck mute. His socks are very white inside of his plastic sandals. He hands me a notebook when I don't answer, and a pen. “Write your wish,” he instructs. “Love or luck?”

I write down peace instead. He grunts now while reading my note, a kind of unhh from deep in his chest and gives me also a plastic jade Buddha necklace, shoving this over my head.

"Peace? You wrote peace? You want peace? Now you Venmo." he says and shows me his QR code. I nod, because this is a part of it, this is something I cannot miss. I will lose money in Las Vegas and I will do it this way, to the man I now know is Yize Li, the phony monk with umbrella shade on his face. I look it up later, this name, Yize. It means on the one hand. But right now I am on the other hand, I want him to know I know him, his real face under the shadow. I look up and hold my face of knowing to the light so he can figure it out.

There aren't any tears forming now, but they were there ten minutes ago. I’m sure the tracks are evident. "Peace," I whisper to him and to keep from drowning with me, to keep from dying, approximating a very real benediction, he swiftly grabs both of my hands fiercely and kisses my palms one after the other, with lips as dry as the Sahara.

This is Thursday.

Nebraska Named Me

Small airports always seem eerie, missing the bustle that is supposed to exist in all airports everyplace.  Anytime I go through Palm Springs, I am delayed.  The heat likes to suck all the moisture from my body and the airline usurps my time.  Bereft of bodily liquid and trapped in a waiting game, I’m always in a fossette of depression when I leave there, not because I don’t want to go, but because of something that happened during the trip.  I keep dropping these little pits in her depths but the dry Palm Springs air keeps them from growing into anything larger.  

My flight was delayed this time because the maps were corrupted.  The pilot ran out to excitedly announce that this was the problem with the plane and in a rush grabbed the microphone from the startled gate agent. “This is crazy everyone, I have never had this happen before. Believe it or not, the maps have reverted to 4 days ago. It’s absolutely extraordinary, Unheard of!  And it’s Sunday so the one guy who fixes these things is on a day off but he will come in soon and once he does, we will get you back on your way.” None of us were as excited as the pilot about this news. He seemed disappointed.

The diner in the terminal wafted a promising smell of pancakes, a cure for many things.  I wandered inside.  No one paid any attention to me, and after a time of waiting by the Wait to be Seated sign, I seated myself.  Eventually, an unbothered effortlessly cool girl with an order pad and a wrinkled menu ambled over.  She handed me the menu, waited for my thanks and coolly said “No problem, figure out what you want.  I’ll come back in a bit.”  Of course I had made absolutely no impression on her whatsoever; her insouciance was almost impermeable.  

She had a large nametag swinging from a beaded lanyard around her neck that said NEBRASKA.  Hm, perhaps they are doing that whole where-people-are-from thing instead of having their servers use their names.  I glanced at the other sections of the small diner, being served by motherly SHANNON, and weepy bedazzled jeans MARIA, doing her best not to cry directly onto customers’ plates while SHANNON mopped up behind her and murmured small comforting things to keep her going.

NEBRASKA ambled back over and arched an eyebrow by way of asking the only question that existed between us.  It turns out the pancake smell was emanating from an imposter offering of french toast, which I ordered, then put another question into our shared space.  

“Is your name actually NEBRASKA?”

“Yep,” she replied already bored.

“Are you from there?”

“Nope,” she replied, her lackadaisy reaching peak amplitude.

I was anxious not to let her go just yet.  “It’s just… well, I’m curious about names right now.  I’m a… writer… and I’ve got to choose a pen name for myself.”  

Ah now I had her.  “Why?” she asked, her eyes clicking like a lighter trying to make a spark.  

“My actual name is the same as another writer,” I explained.  “She writes romance novels.  I don’t want to be mistaken for her and I’m sure vice versa.”

“What kind of things do you write?” she asked.

“Magical realism… uh disguised memoir, poetry type stuff…” I trailed off, feeling I had lost her with this description.  She wrinkled her nose and walked away.  

A few minutes later, she returned with a cup containing my receipt.  I dropped my credit card into it.  She gazed at it reading my name.  “I’ll think about it and come back to you,” she said in a determined way, taking on naming me as a mission I hadn’t meant to charge her with.

She went to the register and charged my card, laconically serving a few other customers before she came back over and dropped the cup with my signature receipt and card back on the table, along with my order of french toast.  “Okay,” NEBRASKA said warming up her barely used vocal cords, while I started eating my food.  “So your actual name is pretty good.  I think it's actually bullshit you have to give it up for this other Kathleen Long.”  She made air quotes with her fingers to emphasize this point.  “Like, my advice is, just forget about her.  You could do… I dunno, something like maybe your first and middle name together?  Kathleen Elizabeth?  You know, like Madonna.”  She nodded sagely.  I nodded too, though I had no idea what using my first and middle name has to do with Madonna.   I was following along.  “But also,” she continued.  “Do you like lions?  I noticed there is a lion on your credit card,” she said.  

“I do like lions,” I replied.  “I am a Leo, so…”

“Ooh big cat energy, okay…” she said smiling.  “So you could either just change your last name to Lion, like there is a certain ring to that.  But your last name is also something pretty good so you could also just add your initials to lion and use your actual last name?  Like yeah, one of these things is the answer,” she concluded.  She stopped abruptly.  Likely, this was the longest speech she has ever made while working at a diner in the airport, where everyone is always in a hurry.  

“Thank you NEBRASKA,” I trilled.  “I think you have solved it!”  She waved her hand foppishly, pulling the window shades over the interest in her eyes.  She had finished my order, solved my problem and had probably immediately forgotten about the whole thing.  I still had 20 more minutes to wait before boarding my flight, with the pilot excitedly chattering the whole time about his problem also being solved.

kellion (def)

1 A little cell (late Greek/ Latin origin)

2 A small religious house or monastic cell containing no more than 3 monks

long (name)

HISTORY: The Longs lost all their lands and possessions in the upheaval of the 17th century and many have been on the move ever since.

ARMS: Sable, a lion rampant armed and langued argent, surrounded by a sense of crosses crosslet

MOTTO: vitute et probitate - by virtue and honesty

NAME MEANING: Seafarer