from Visions Of A Mexican Wrestler

But this particular late March 1975 afternoon heralding the night and the time to come that is for you in March 1975 still morning you heard the swoshling churn of the washing machine on the back porch before your eyes have opened and seen again the walls that baffle and redefine the sound you hear. Just as there is this wow and flutter, an oscillation of tempi, a likeness to the locomotions of Drew as he is sorting the 0.1 uF capacitors from the 0.001 uF capacitors of his MITS no. 8800 kit and onto butcher paper weirdly and woozily balanced on the feared “into” of the purplish shag of the carpet in his room. March 1975 wakes up and you were roused however by the shriller burr of the kitchen counter phone and in shifting to a sitting position in bed you let your untrimmed toenails scrape the wall—is it Drew? Francisco would have had to cadge your number away from some mutual acquaintance, he’s never known it, and besides, if you were to try and write your phone number on a remnant of lunch-bag brown paper for Francisco, the duress of your hesitancy and Drew’s lentiform polishings shaking like a disappointed head, Drew running a finger across an eyebrow to feel for anymore mayonnaise as a lunch whistle re-inducts school, and this all might refute the prime numbers into backwards emergence, four digits proceeding the three of the extension—the potential humiliation that Francisco would not let fly, you set your arms at your side crooked each at the elbow like you’ve just drawn double six-shooters and release the cramps of your drowsiness in a full-body tremble, the yellow kitchen counter phone rings again—you are not so old the late March 1975 day and night that you are this time—and you tighten the band of muscles that makes your growling stomach a torso and you climb out over the rim of the skirtless single bed and rise into hearing your older brother gasp out your name as if to say, with showy exasperation, “Of course the phone is for you”. There is a mocking lilt at the last syllable of the name your older brother calls you, it is your name except when he says it this way. You can picture the tiny spray of toast-crumbs exploding out past the drier outside of his lips with that university enunciation and you decide both out of spite and with mule’s logic to dress yourself prior to your first response. And you rub your eyes with this opulence—to delay—and your knees are locked in the center of your room. The room you share on a day / night schedule with your older brother. You open the door to your room, letting in the soft golden splinters of hallway’s hardwood, but you flip on no lights, you snap your fingers in the hall and make vocal no answer to your brother who you detect slumping away from the phone with no second effort to tell you who is calling. Because you don in a flat-footed jump the black denim you need to refract the night you and Drew and other forces have planned to have come on very, very soon, you don’t worry about having the “other party”, as your mother will often say, wait on the line, or to get all specific, the other, transmitting side. Is it Drew? Where is the plan? If you hang a right and then a second right from your house and take Abrams out to its furthest east you will come to Richland College’s “D” Parking Lot. Or West Abrams? You button the fly of your crasting jeans and in your ears that ring with a little too much rest is the bore and stroke of the Amtrak locomotion that carried your “scrawny” and acne-scarred friend Drew to Palo Alto in another, year-older summer. Why? Trains here demarcate late and early, far and near. Maybe some commuter somewhere is being held up. It is more likely, though, that Drew’s parents had trusted him to board and ride the path of his future—this is how you in 1975 and even to this day, or night, still think of it—either that or they do not care what Drew does. No matter what, you envy this freedom (or did; you do this time) but not necessarily the family moral behind it all. It was Drew’s mother who clued you to the UFW boycott of Gallo wines, blasé in her teeth-bared faction allegiances (she was not angry, just enthusiastic, in her delivery) to the fact that you are too young legally to drink. Two dead eyelashes and not tears drop along the upper ridge of your left cheek, and it twinges. And the window is open in the kitchen that, past the hot water heater closet, is opposite your bedroom as you stride in exhausted, pubic cool to the telephone and you feel across the bare of your chest that it is late March 1975 because your nipples stiffen in this chillier wind that rattles curtains and your mother’s hanging planters and more, the orange and brown of fallen Texas oak leaves in the stack, suspended between uprightness and collapse, of the old brick chimney over the hot water heater closet, a muted clatter of dead tissues much to your ears like the time your great country aunt shook ripe yellow peppers against your head, un-seashell, the belling of seeds loosened from a central stalk knelling in a bounce of whispery pidgins across the food’s hollows, pealing not like the telephone you awake with an intent to answer when it is ringing six, seven? asleep minutes before ringing and not picked up into the rapid, dissipating glockenspiel la-la-la-la-la-la of the receiver being separated from its cradle and ringing still some more making you into a belief, dreamy, that you are home by yourself but you are not. Your older brother is still “hanging around”, he is still there to “lay” matters that he deems “heavy” “on you”. The terse March 1975 phone call you are currently about to take is now to become the answer, the warm black vinyl takes your ear and you think about closing the kitchen window where Alice half-perches, half-hunches, staring at the shirtless stranger that has strolled out of your room and, as a way of taking the temperature in the room, allows her tiger-striped fluff to be ruffled by the breeze. Her tail is immobile. You scratch a soft spot underneath your earlobe and send your hair flopping out of its disorder across the often-washed-by-her-kissings nape of your neck. “Hello.” But what is on your mind is: last September, 1974, early in the month, before classes have required your presence, Drew reports back from Arizona, the two of you skipping rocks across the surface of a neighbor’s (Drew’s) swimming pool brocaded with scum you too have been paid to “take care of”: to be an Indian means never having to get a haircut. Your eyes widened to perceive this cachet. But on the other end of this phone call—you skip your eyes back to the dining room and your older brother in his navy bathrobe is folding back pictures of basketballs rolling off of fingers offset-smeared on the Sports pages—you’ve picked up before you are even awake, or you’ve picked up as if you were awake at all in the craster’s good black denim of flared bottoms and tight across the ass and you shake your hair which everyone in your family smilingly agrees has no color that can be named, before you are awake but after you have gotten up out of the tentatively unsprung coils of your bed like a lump animated by your older brother’s don’t-interrupt-my-train-of-thought-or-digestion huff and puff is not Drew. Drew is not there. You put two and two together, like dad says, though he usually says it when he means to use it against you, to say you can’t possibly much less conceivably have ever hoped to put this and that together, can you? and there she is, a breath, a with-holding, a scorn either you have set before her or she is winding up to hurl at you. Coming or going is always a confounded choice. Your father himself, although it was his father who stuttered, never confused dyslexia with alexia, your own breath would come short and ghostly as you secretly would fool yourself that you could feel the “lesion” on your brain, “lesion” being a word you can understand but never accurately spell. Only you have since allocated to yourself the wherewithal and put two and two together and jumped the requisite spaces up the number line to the sum, bowing your back in a stretch and staring down to the dial of the old phone on the kitchen’s yellow counter-top. Nothing is leaking or doing the aneurysm and of course she is on the telephone. Because you have said with the feel of a wary question and not genuine openness, “Hello?” again and have given her dimpled voice a chance to complete this call. Through the initial 900 MHz of a silence that might also just be the checkmated quarters submissiveness allots itself you listen carefully even if as you suspect she has just called to tell you the coordinates of her move, which is to dare you to do it.