the five hundredth post
Monday 4 June 2007 | someone left a cookie
But it’s like I’ve forgotten how to write.
This morning the Brujo brought me home. I stepped out of the Honda and immediately saw a baby bunny rabbit pressed between a clay flowerpot and the bricks of the raised bed. Its entire tiny body saying, You don’t see me I’m not here. Just weaned, I reckoned, about the size of a fat mango. I shooed it gently, hoping it would run off down the driveway and away home, wherever home is, but instead it turned and made for the lilacs, sleepy-eyed and wobble-footed. And now I can’t find it anywhere. The good news is, Pyewacket doesn’t seem able to find it either. I hope it rests in the cool green shade until dusk, and then can make its way back home to its mother and sisters and brothers.
I spent the night at the Brujo’s because we’re both thoroughly ausgefreaked, albeit in a dazedly optimistic kind of way. We found our little house with a big yard in Tartarus, $925 a month plus tax, three small bedrooms and one bathroom with a bathtub and two sinks (to minimize why-are-your-nose-hairs-in-the-basin squabbles? those I-need-to-spit-now toothbrush wars?), carpeted living room and wee tiled kitchen with a place for a washing machine (our notorious slumlord already offering to flog us a used one when we get there). There is so much so wrong with Tartarus, with our renting from this particular gentleman, and with the entire concept of millions of people having lawns in the Sonoran Desert, that it all really requires its own blog (which the Brujo threatens to start: tempetantrum.com). But let it for now suffice to note that we arrived in Phoenix late on Tuesday, househunted all day Wednesday and Thursday, signed the lease Friday morning, and were checked out of the motel and on our grateful way out of town by Friday at 11 am.
In a motel on the New Mexican border that night, the B. and I sprawled exhausted and sunburnt on a king-sized bed with a quilted, pilled cover.
Brujo: We haven’t had sex in days.
Unnarrator: [sighs and nods sadly]
Brujo: That’s because we’ve been too busy being fucked by other people.
Tartarus is, to put it bluntly, horrifying, albeit with a kind of hysterical flair that almost exacts grudging admiration. It is, as the B. notes, “Whitey Weirdland,” a theme-park tribute to paleface tastelessness (though also curiously much more racially diverse than the alleged City Different). Nothing seems older than 1981 and everything that’s not a strip mall or a suburb is either a condo or chain retail. It’s all some strange hybrid of Southern California and Dallas. Half the Arizonans rage around going double the speed limit, while the other half stays home running their air conditioners and flooding their yards with garden hoses. Though we hunted it down assiduously, we could find no shred of funkiness, no thrift stores or smoky dives, no beat-up cool neighborhoods and no quaint inexpensive barrios—just badly-named businesses (Accident Chiropractic, University Shadows, Grilled Expressions), suspiciously well-appointed head shops, and fearsome stretches of apartment complex. We did finally stumble upon a hole-in-the-wall Vietnamese noodle shop, and the local panadería (both one block from our new digs, as is the under-construction light rail). I can walk or bike to school from the house, barely 2 miles from the department (and needless to say the whole city is perfectly flat). The Brujo observed with angry glee that he could write furious stories for the weekly about water misuse and cultural homogeneity; he also spotted an alternative high school where he might be able to teach part-time, and we made a quick tour of the Desert Botanical Gardens, a potential source of cactus gigs. Our new place will almost certainly develop a water roach, if not a centipede or scorpion, infestation, and the slumlord’s tightly composed lease included a clause to the effect that pest control is the tenant’s responsibility—as well as air conditioning filters, broken window panes, carpet replacement, internal telephone wiring and lawn care.
The electric bills will probably be around $100 a month in the summer. It was 107 degrees every day we were there. We agreed to give it a year.
Yesterday I unpacked, then spent an afternoon weaving nostalgically around the flat, putting all my journals in three boxes and then falling asleep for lack of anything better I felt I could do. Santa Fe is of course glorious at this time of year, all dewy grasses and rushing river and hollyhocks and poppies and blue flax. All its encroaching Phoenician traits (condos, chain retail, sprawl) paling next to my romanticized view of East Palace Avenue. Never mind that I couldn’t afford to rent a bathroom on East Palace. Never mind that the full force of the Brujo’s musical abilities are wasted here, that we probably couldn’t afford to live together at our current self-employed salaries. I slept fitfully, dreampt that the Young Monk dumped me all over again via an umpteen-page-long, well-articulated letter detailing all my faults and failures.
After his own restless nap, the Brujo collected me and we had a weary dinner together, Trader Joe’s pizza (nibbles of goat cheese for Pyewacket) and salad with walnuts and red peppers. The B. kept having to remind me to sit up straight and, per DBT, look “innocent and proud” (my posture otherwise resembling an illustration from The Grapes of Wrath). While we ate we laughed together, as we’ve done all week, tiredly and continuously, cracking each other up with our morose assessments of the entire riotously disastrous situation. After chocolate ice-cream bonbons, we went back to his place, where he read to me, beautifully, from As I Lay Dying until we fell asleep. Then it got weird.
I dreamed, heavily and intensely. I dreampt that strange black fingers of nuclear radiation were going to enwrap the earth, killing everyone but those lucky enough to fall in the interstices. I dreampt that I was Winston in 1984, just waiting for O’Brien to catch up to and torture and brainwash me back into socialized sanity. And worst of all I dreampt that my mother lay down and died (à la Addie Bundren) and that my father was as indifferent as Anse, and that like Jewel or Darl I hadn’t been there, and that now I was stuck with him and without her, and that I would never ever see her again, and that it was somehow my fault and I woke, startled first by the dream and then by the harsh volume of my own sobbing (like Vardeman, wishing the crying weren’t so loud). The Brujo woke too, bewildered, and rubbed my back as I wept. What the hell, I said through my tears, as he soothed me; what the hell. I got up and washed my face in the dark and we somehow fell back asleep again.
This morning the B. reminded me of that scale of stressors that starts with death of a spouse and carries on down through illness, divorce, mortgage, marriage and…moving. I know all this is possible, even easy; people move all the time. Hell, I move all the time. I just suddenly seem to have way more stuff than I realized and much less money. And very little emotional resilience.
Now is the time to use mindfulness skills. Find a way to calm down about all this. Deep breathing. Approach, don’t avoid. Present moment. I don’t have to move today and I don’t have to do it alone. The house will be fine. We’ll just have hilarious infestation stories to tell all our I-told-you-so friends.
I asked the Brujo to stop by the nursery on the way home and bought a packet each of red nasturtium and red zinnia seeds. These I’ll plant alongside the ratty-looking azaleas you see in the picture, and douse daily with bathwater. They’re both heat-loving, drought-hardy flowers. I also bought a packet of pennyroyal, supposed to repel pests, to plant along the foundation of the house where it’s shady and cooler. And I interrupt this post to go outside and sow the pennyroyal in peat jiffy pots, to ride in the back of the U-Haul along with the two hundred cacti. To start them, I’ll kneel in the shade of the lilacs, where somewhere a baby bunny sleeps.
Good things can happen. Good things can happen.
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good things will happen.