Sheet Music

You tucked me between the pages a while back.
And all this time
i've been wanting you to
figure me out.

Unfold me.
Each crease in the paper stiff from being pressed together.
Make me fit you.
Run your tounge along the seam.
Moisten the edge.
Then tear me apart.

The feeling is
divine.

Pray for me.
Write my name on the steam covered mirror.
Close your eyes in the shower and turn the heat all the way up.
Scald me up against the cold tile wall.
Feel me in the water.
Incantation in reverberation.

Run your fingers across my eighty-eight keys.
Wrap your hands around my neck and
stop my breath with your chord progressions.
Hold on tight.
Press me into the space
between the staccato.
Turn me into the sound that hangs in the air.

Etheric snake wrapping loose like chiffon around my thighs
and up my spine.
Loa and shakers calling my spirit out
Rattling the bones in my cage.

A second line is forming.


Write out my essence on your grand staff.
Hit me with your hammers.
Transform me into notes.
Syncopate me.
Practice me
forwards and backwards.

Then freestyle, as you play me right down into your wooden coffin.
Finally putting me to rest in your sheets.

Bachelor Pad.

i.

Vintage bikes stacked against each other in the living room, dragged in past the concrete stairs and through the beat-up black metal security gate. He wheels his Hercules against her Raleigh, trapping them both between the hand-me-down couch and unused wet bar. His well groomed beard and thoughtful eyes follow her around the room as he thinks quick on his feet in preparation for a summertime scrugging in his early 80's apartment. He kicks the air conditioning on, pops open his Mac Book and dials up some reggae tracks after mounting the white circulating fan on the coffee table strewn with books on world travel, rock anthologies and Flight of the Concords schwag.

She can hear his dirty flip-flops clopping around the kitchen as she escapes to take a piss-still having to turn on the water out of shyness that he might hear her go. It's a different story when she's sipped down two or three Cazadores. The fiery spirit in her pushes apart her daytime shell, demanding out. On these nights she pushes her way right into the bathroom with him, demanding he piss in front of her. Staring him down on purpose, in the throws of some sort of perverted challenge, unwilling to leave until she sees him go, she climbs over the toilet demonstrating how it's done, arms and legs in between, all the while never breaking that delicately humiliating eye contact. She's a very dirty girl, that one.

But she is not quite that girl right now. Mesmerized by the blast of 104 degree daytime heat, salty droplets dripping down her thighs, from their lunchtime ride to Tower Cafe. She stares at herself in the mirror, slightly spaced out. Closing her eyes and grounding herself in the rhythm of the pulsing faucet, feeling the fuzzy tap water running through the webs of her fingers, she pats her neck trying to make herself be right there in the moment. A wave of nervous energy suddenly courses up her esophagus from her stomach and she bites her lower lip, setting her jaw in an attempt to filter the uncomfortable spell away from her. This one's always stored stress in her throat and mouth, ever since she was a little girl.


ii.

Condensation dripping down the mirror like sweat, I wipe away the pool of dew above my upper lip as I stare at myself in the mirror, it's under edges are breeched with rust, corrupted by the damp of this poorly ventilated slightly latrine -like bathroom. A broken towel rack folded in half, some Edge shaving gel, a couple disposable razors and an extra value pump bottle of Vaseline Intensive Care lotion border the receding sink ledge. Just the other night I got screwed right here. In fact, I'm the one that broke that towel rack in half getting banged against the sink.

I snap a tittie shot of myself perfectly framed against my bachelors miss-matched navy, taupe and teal towels hanging disheveled over the shower curtain. A bit of personal documentation, if you will. First, there's nothing like a little bit of private exhibitionism to reset my ego and harvest the momentum to walk out and manifest the desired course of events with my rouge summer bachelor after reliving the perverted and titillating events which took place in the toilet of his unkempt bachelor pad. Secondly, and maybe equally valuable, it's important to document those perfectly 80's towel colors so I can pull them into my Autumn wardrobe in the coming months.

I hear the upstairs neighbors stir above me in their bathroom. Wondering if they heard us the other night sends a rush of hot embarrassment and sexual verve through my belly and up into my chest. I force intense eye contact with myself in the mirror and set my jaw like a brace. What can I say, I have always been attracted to danger-I purse my lips and scrunch my curly bobbed hair- and now exhibitionism appears to be another manifestation of this. Hearing him approach on the other side of the door I think how rad it would be to be shoved up against that cold hallway wall or forced to crawl along that pilly brown carpeted floor like some creature out of a Duran Duran video, all the while at an unknown risk of being seen or heard in my dirty town ways by his strange absentee room mate.


iii.

Joanie had always been attracted to danger, that's why she rolled with boys growing up. She had genetics in her favor too. Her Pop rode motorcycles, shot guns at the family ranch in the rocky foothills of Ione and got into wrong side of town greaser rumbles before being given the option of jail or the army at 18. An article from the Sacramento Union dated August 1964 exclaimed, "MEN ATTACK YOUTHS". In reality he and his fellas had just turned 18 earlier that Summer while the other boys were 17 soon to be 18. Street fights were common in the throws of the early Vietnam era throughout the rough parts of East Sacramento and her Pop's loosing his dad at 16 provided a perfect stage for his reckless behavior. Complete coronary failure was the fate of many butchers in her grandfathers day. All that brain and sweet organ meat he handled and devoured at Arita Brothers Butchery had no way out of his stout muscular Irish body. Family photos taken of him with his wife, Momma, just months before his sudden death showed off his balding head, kind smiling eyes and built upper body pressing through his white workman's tank top. She was dark haired (a French gypsy streak in her Irish blood the talk always was) and inches taller then him, he sat to the left of her, his hand on her knee, in a patch of their cherished garden, laundry strung on the line behind them, both appearing tired and in love.

With no father figure and no direction, forced enlistment in the Army saved Joanie's Pop from an unknown fate. He came back a well respected drill sergeant and a blossoming leader with a drive for academics, community organizing and a delicate addiction to the bar. He was the apple of his Momma's eye. Highly ranked upon return, he would be the only child in the whole family line who would go on to get a college degree, a huge accomplishment compared to his parent's 6th and 8th grade diplomas. In the years ensuing he would become a binge drinker. While getting his Masters degree in Social Work and running county adoptions, he would disappear from his wife for days at a time, holing himself up in hotel rooms before reappearing to his chosen inheritance, 3 teenage kids plus one of his own.

Alcoholics Anonymous caught him during the worst of his 1980's free fall and he would eventually save himself with the support of his wife and the image of his own daughter. He would sit in smoky meeting halls full of stressed out men on metal folding chairs, them like a fleet of ships socked in at a foggy harbor, unable to find there way out. His lighthouse was to be his little girl. She would sit outside the meeting hall, tousle of blond hair and corduroys on, playing with a doll, this the only clue to most that she was in fact a little tom-boy rather than just a little boy. Her Pop would smoke one unfiltered Lucky Strike after another telling his truth's and lies and listening to other's. Periodically checking on her throughout those hours of waiting, reassuring her they would be leaving soon and protecting her from the strange glances of unknown men that occasionally peered at her or were self centeredly oblivious to her existence on the wooden bench outside the hall.

Each time after the meetings were over, as the men came streaming out, he would reach out his hand to her from above and beam with such pride fear and joy for her that his powerful blue eyed gaze would paralyze her breath. Joanie learned very early that she was to be his life preserver.


Joanie's Mother couldn't have found a more terribly perfect match in her third husband. More of a beatnik at heart Mother lost her Daddy at age 8, sort of. A rich girl, from the right side of town she lived in a huge brick house with the most beautiful diamond shaped lead paned windows. She'd lay across the back of the long white leather sofa in her high ceilinged Land Park living room peering through those wavy panes of glass for the sound of her Daddy's 1947 Ford. His she new by heart and could hear him driving up the winding tree lined street as she lay on the soft white flocked carpet, engine shifting into low gear as he coasted down the long driveway to the back door of their 1930's California Italian Villa.

Daddy built and ran Rainbow Liquor and as men did in those days he and his partners would take the levee road out to the delta town of Isleton for drinks at the Ryde Hotel; making real estate deals, smoking cigars and carousing with unnamed women. On one of these long drives home, windshield wipers waxing and waning in a flurry and futile attempt to subdue the sheets of rain coming down from the valley sky, Daddy's car left the levee road behind, crashing and tumbling down the muddy walls headfirst into the fast moving Sacramento River.

His passenger lived, banged and bruised his gray suit ripped and torn apart, he dragged Daddy out of that car, saving him from drowning. That was a late night for 8 year old Mother's Mom. She paced and waited in the soft lemon yellow breakfast nook, tick of the electric clock hands echoing, wire loop furniture and chrysanthemum wallpaper giving off a false sense of hope on this fated late rainy night in the classy Wright and Kimbrough Tract suburbs. Mom smoked a cigarette and pulled her left clip on earing off to make calls to various friends, looking for Daddy. Unsuccessful, she would briskly mash out her cigarette in the crystal ash tray set next to the cream colored rotary phone and put her earring back on.

She clicked her mauve painted nail on the glass topped table as the phone finally rang, startling her with it's shriek. Moments later she shook Mother awake, "Take care of your sister and brothers...Daddy's been in an accident. Nana Fenner will be here as soon as she can." Groggy and caught off guard Mother wandered into the kitchen in her night dress, hearing Mom's front fender scrap the curb in a rush to get to the hospital, looking for evidence of the nights events and found nothing but Mom's cigarettes and a lonely clip on pearl earring. The following afternoon, holding her youngest siblings hands she stared up at her Daddy in the stark white and metal bed, while her Mom sobbed quietly. Daddy would never walk again and would maybe with therapy be able to use his arms. Until then he would be considered a quadrapaligic.


Pop and Mother both subconsciously encouraged Joanie's risky nature by putting her on skis at 6 and horses at 7, reinforcing her innate craving to get high off the rush of acceleration and daredevil antics. She'd already broken her first bone by 5 while bmx'ing down a neighborhood hill and by the age of 13 had broken six more. Her nose, collarbone, both middle fingers and two toes. That was to be the least of her pain though. The dental chair was to be her biggest fear, her personal Amityville Horror.

iv.

Dr. Lollysworth was not nearly as jolly as his name sounded and the open room with 8 multicolored kidney bean shaped examination tables was far from the Sesame Street experience the colors alluded to. A tall man with a fuzzy red beard, Lollysworth dominated the wide low-ceilinged room with his presence. His basketball player build apparently instilled trust among the neighborhood mothers, enough so that they waited outside the examination area browsing McCall's, while dental hygienists in tight wide collared Kacki dresses and baby blue masks pulled down around their necks led their little patients into the sea of burnt orange and mail box blue exam tables.