catastrophiat
01-06-2013, 06:31 PM
First post. Be vicious. I wanna hear any and all criticism.
--
It was my last autumn.
That’s what it felt like, anyway. The sharp air had the brightened, decisive effectiveness of a knife, cutting through me as if I had no skin. I reached in my pocket and pulled out my paper. It was crumpled and worn to the point where it felt like fabric against my hands, and every time I looked at the address, the black pen seemed to me a little grayer. Not that it mattered. I knew the address by heart: 508 Pleasant Street.
I continued to sit on the porch even though I knew it was dinnertime; the strong, sweet scent of frijoles negros mingled with the smoke of my cigarette. I took another drag. My boxes upstairs were packed with essentials and well hidden. In the back of my closet I had packed a blanket, some clothes, toiletries, and just a couple other mementos I couldn’t bear to part with. John Steinbeck’s The Moon is Down was one of them – and I had a small case of CD’s to hold my Hendrix and the rest of my musical gods …
Just a couple days before I moved out for good with my band. We weren’t telling our friends or families, or anyone for that matter…we were just leaving, flying to the other side of the country to become famous. And we would become famous – I was sure of it.
I looked down at the address again. 508 Pleasant Street…right in the heart of Seattle, Washington. Everything would be so free and easy compared to the stifling tension that enveloped my house. Only two more days. Yet two days, to me, sounded like a long, spindly stretch of hour after hour before I could drive away, looking back at my house only to laugh a little and never return.
I gazed across the street. My two younger sisters, Lisa and Maria, were playing some mindless game across the street. They obviously invented it: Lisa would run and tag Maria, and then she would go find a rock and throw it in a pile. As the pile grew bigger I felt a pang of regret for leaving them with my mother…but some sacrifices must be made for stardom, I guessed.
I took the last hit of my cigarette and flicked it under the deck. Two days could not pass fast enough.
I woke up. It was the beginning of the last two days of my life and here my mother was, shifting my blankets, quietly insisting that I wake to say the family rosary. I groaned and lay like a sandbag.
“Isabel Maria Rodriguez,” she hissed, and I could practically hear her coil with poisonous irritation. “Wake up. It’s six o’clock.”
I lay still.
“Despiértate. Ahora. Or I swear to God I will make it so you will never wake again.”
My mother’s grumpy threats breezed through me and I mumbled something Dexter always said about religion being the antithesis of truth. I honestly didn’t know what he meant half the time, but that sounded right enough to me.
“What?” She bristled.
I groaned. “Religion. It’s a lie.”
She whipped the blankets off of my body and I felt the sharp cold of the morning slice my foggy mind. I groggily tried to snatch them. “What the hell.”
Her mouth was moving as righteous words and irritated Spanish tumbled out of her lips. I curled up on my bed and ignored her, repeating in my mind: 508 Pleasant Street. 508 Pleasant Street. 508 Pleasant…until I snapped.
I remember yelling something typically adolescent, something about mindless worship and relative morality and the absence of truth in everything we do, mixed in with a dash of we’re going to die eventually so nothing matters and baked with a little what do you know, you can’t even speak English right. My mother ate it voraciously.
She was terrifying. Her black hair rippled, her face shook, and her usually short stature seemed to have tripled, because by God, she was towering over me. By contrast, the gleeful face of my youngest and most irritating sister, Lisa, peeking through the doorway, had an almost saintly concern. I yelled at her instead of my mother, and I don’t even remember what I said. I do remember her face crinkling up like paper when she started to cry.
“How did this ever happen?” She picked up Lisa and shushed her before continuing to scream at me. “How did I raise a daughter who doesn’t know right from wrong?” She looked down at Lisa, who was still sobbing. “How did you ever come to hate your family?”
The heated rage radiating off of her was like a tin roof in Mexico when the sun was at its sharpest. I felt scorched.
“I don’t hate my family,” I said. I had a lot more to say but I was too angry to say it.
“Whether you will or no you are my skin and my blood, hija mia. And you will respect your mother, right now, and you will say rosary with your family.”
I paused, glared, and then muttered something at her that made Lisa’s eyes widen.
My mother flew into a whole new level of rage. I ran, grabbed my coat, and stalked out of the house, her frantic, burning Spanish echoing off of the bare trees.
I was leaving soon.
508 Pleasant Street, 508 Pleasant Street…less than two days now. Two. Days. I will leave, I told myself; I will create a new life and throw it back in their faces. My mother didn’t love. She wasn’t capable of that – she was cruel and stupid. When my father left us, I was seven years old, and I remember asking her where papí went. She told me that he went away because I was a very bad girl, and that maybe if I was good he would come back. Obviously I was the best child in the world, wracked with guilt, until I realized the truth. That’s when I started hating her.
I think I knew within myself that I was being juvenile and unreasonable, but it was just so damned poetic to feel like I did. The s*** I came up with, like my mother was “wistfully wasting away her dying destiny,” and that she “lay, livid, in her lazy lies,” was too artsy for me to want to look at things clearly.
When I finally returned to the house, the chorizo eggs were eaten, the prayers said, and the fire in my mother’s words had frozen into ice. She didn’t say a word as I took Lisa and Maria to school, which I thought was all the better for me.
508 Pleasant Street. I was leaving home.
During band practice that day I was absolutely bleeding music. We ran through our set, and not only did it sound unusually electrifying, Dexter randomly jumped in on one of my solos and we took it to new places. After playing through some of our favorite covers – Black Dog by Zeppelin was our best – we collapsed on the couches in Zig’s garage to celebrate our triumph.
“Damn,” Zig said as he chugged his coke. “We should have laid down some tracks today to make an EP to pass out when we arrive. You know, land with a punch. What do you think, Izzy?”
“Yeah, sure,” I replied, lost in a reverie. I was gloriously sweaty and tired, my fingers almost ripped open from playing so hard. The calluses were peeling.
Dexter lay on the couch with the gigantic rip on the side, fingering songs on his unplugged guitar. It was amusing to watch – his eyes were closed, imagining some fantastic live show no doubt, and his face twisted whenever the notes were particularly complicated. He abruptly sat up and opened his eyes.
“Holy f***,” he said. “Two days.”
Zig tossed his coke can in the trash. “I know man. It’s so close…It’s like we’re on that plane already, flying out to the glorious city of grunge. That’s where it all started, man.” He started tapped his drumsticks against his legs. “That’s where the greats began.”
I snorted. “If you consider Kurt Cobain one of the greats.”
Zig laughed and tossed me a blunt. “Don’t start on that again. You’ll only lose for the what – hundredth time? He’s a f***ing legend.”
I rolled my eyes and lit the blunt.. “Whatever. Dex, you still have the tickets?”
He pulled them out of his wallet, and I swear the light reflected off of their diamond-like beauty. His voice held a holy reverence as he said, “Two days. We’ll get on that plane…fly to Seattle…eat, sleep, and rock in that house Zig rented over the internet…”
I sighed. “508 Pleasant Street.”
“Yes,” Dexter breathed. “And we’ll be out, every day, pushing our music working our way up to the top.”
We sat basking in each other’s glory. None of us had been this hopeful since the last week of high school, when we finally got out.
508 Pleasant Street.
My phone rang. I let the blunt dangle from my lips as I answered, imagining I was a rock star, which some kind of label calling begging for us to sign with them – or even better, some kind of smoldering drummer. Who wanted me and no one else.
“Isabel?”
“What do you want, mom?”
Her voice shook, and I immediately regretted being rude. “I need you to come home.”
I took a hit, exhaling slowly and blowing smoke rings. “Why?”
“Lisa’s been in an accident.”
I dropped the blunt. It rolled across the cracked cement under the drum set where it smoldered.
“…what?”
“Please,” she said. I could tell she had been crying. “Please just come home.”
I don’t even remember what I said to the guys. I just drove home, picked up my mother, and we went to the hospital. She was sobbing so deeply that I could barely understand what had happened.
I understood soon enough.
You would think that when someone you love dies, it’s like one of those Lifetime specials where the death is tragic, the last words sad and beautiful, and everyone hugs and consoles each other. The reality was this: the jungle gym at my sister’s school collapsed, and a metal pipe broke her skull. There were no beautiful last words, no tender hugs. I remember the stale, parched walls of the E.R. and the blank look and dried blood on the crushed face of my sister. I remember the smell of seasoned chicken on my mother as she hugged me so hard she left marks on my arms – and cried so uncontrollably that my shirt was sticky and wet with her tears. I remember the doctor, apologetic and regretful but very busy…and I remember my sister, Maria, pale and confused. She didn’t move and said nothing as I swept her into my arms like I knew a big sister is supposed to do.
I don’t remember what I felt. I don’t think there was room to feel anything.
When we got home, mother went to make dinner while I hoisted Maria on my shoulders and took her to the playroom. After I set her down, she just sat there, looking at all of her toys as if they were foreign. I remember wondering what she was thinking. How do you deal with that when you’re five years old? I heard a few loud crashes erupt from the kitchen and left Maria, almost running to where mother was.
She was hysterical, throwing the pots and pans and glasses and china against the wall…not screaming, but still crying and breathing like a storm, gulping down air, before stopping and collapsing on the tile floor. I moved the broken glass away with my shoe and sat down beside her. For some reason, I knew exactly what I should do – I gripped her hand, tightly, and began to say the Our Father. Her heavy voice joined me, winded and hiccupy, eventually quieted to a whisper. I gave her a tight hug before sticking some frozen pizzas in the oven. Maria walked in at that moment, quieter than innocence, and I led the women of my family into the living room.
Mother took out the rosaries and we all prayed for my sister’s soul. I think that in these moments, holding my mother’s hand and helping Maria move her prayer beads, that I stopped resisting. We huddled together like we had those years ago when dad left, but now I had to pretend that I was stronger than anything that could hurt them. No, I didn’t need them at all – but they needed me now.
After they went to bed, I went outside and smoked the rest of my cigarettes. Chain style. I took out that tiny piece of paper – soft as silk – and stared at it for a good, long time, feeling the smoke burn the very bottoms of my lungs, destroying my capillaries.
508 Pleasant Street.
I remembered a flash of things – of Lisa, ugly and wrinkly, the day she came home from the hospital. Of the look on my mother’s face one lazy Sunday afternoon, just staring at her daughter and smiling for no reason while she cleaned the kitchen. I remembered Lisa doing everything from getting me in trouble to pouring orange juice on my guitar to screaming in my face to being curled up next to me at night when she had a nightmare; and I thought of my fearless spectacle of a mother, sleeping in her room tonight, and what nightmares she would have.
I threw the damn paper away and began to unpack my boxes.
--
It was my last autumn.
That’s what it felt like, anyway. The sharp air had the brightened, decisive effectiveness of a knife, cutting through me as if I had no skin. I reached in my pocket and pulled out my paper. It was crumpled and worn to the point where it felt like fabric against my hands, and every time I looked at the address, the black pen seemed to me a little grayer. Not that it mattered. I knew the address by heart: 508 Pleasant Street.
I continued to sit on the porch even though I knew it was dinnertime; the strong, sweet scent of frijoles negros mingled with the smoke of my cigarette. I took another drag. My boxes upstairs were packed with essentials and well hidden. In the back of my closet I had packed a blanket, some clothes, toiletries, and just a couple other mementos I couldn’t bear to part with. John Steinbeck’s The Moon is Down was one of them – and I had a small case of CD’s to hold my Hendrix and the rest of my musical gods …
Just a couple days before I moved out for good with my band. We weren’t telling our friends or families, or anyone for that matter…we were just leaving, flying to the other side of the country to become famous. And we would become famous – I was sure of it.
I looked down at the address again. 508 Pleasant Street…right in the heart of Seattle, Washington. Everything would be so free and easy compared to the stifling tension that enveloped my house. Only two more days. Yet two days, to me, sounded like a long, spindly stretch of hour after hour before I could drive away, looking back at my house only to laugh a little and never return.
I gazed across the street. My two younger sisters, Lisa and Maria, were playing some mindless game across the street. They obviously invented it: Lisa would run and tag Maria, and then she would go find a rock and throw it in a pile. As the pile grew bigger I felt a pang of regret for leaving them with my mother…but some sacrifices must be made for stardom, I guessed.
I took the last hit of my cigarette and flicked it under the deck. Two days could not pass fast enough.
I woke up. It was the beginning of the last two days of my life and here my mother was, shifting my blankets, quietly insisting that I wake to say the family rosary. I groaned and lay like a sandbag.
“Isabel Maria Rodriguez,” she hissed, and I could practically hear her coil with poisonous irritation. “Wake up. It’s six o’clock.”
I lay still.
“Despiértate. Ahora. Or I swear to God I will make it so you will never wake again.”
My mother’s grumpy threats breezed through me and I mumbled something Dexter always said about religion being the antithesis of truth. I honestly didn’t know what he meant half the time, but that sounded right enough to me.
“What?” She bristled.
I groaned. “Religion. It’s a lie.”
She whipped the blankets off of my body and I felt the sharp cold of the morning slice my foggy mind. I groggily tried to snatch them. “What the hell.”
Her mouth was moving as righteous words and irritated Spanish tumbled out of her lips. I curled up on my bed and ignored her, repeating in my mind: 508 Pleasant Street. 508 Pleasant Street. 508 Pleasant…until I snapped.
I remember yelling something typically adolescent, something about mindless worship and relative morality and the absence of truth in everything we do, mixed in with a dash of we’re going to die eventually so nothing matters and baked with a little what do you know, you can’t even speak English right. My mother ate it voraciously.
She was terrifying. Her black hair rippled, her face shook, and her usually short stature seemed to have tripled, because by God, she was towering over me. By contrast, the gleeful face of my youngest and most irritating sister, Lisa, peeking through the doorway, had an almost saintly concern. I yelled at her instead of my mother, and I don’t even remember what I said. I do remember her face crinkling up like paper when she started to cry.
“How did this ever happen?” She picked up Lisa and shushed her before continuing to scream at me. “How did I raise a daughter who doesn’t know right from wrong?” She looked down at Lisa, who was still sobbing. “How did you ever come to hate your family?”
The heated rage radiating off of her was like a tin roof in Mexico when the sun was at its sharpest. I felt scorched.
“I don’t hate my family,” I said. I had a lot more to say but I was too angry to say it.
“Whether you will or no you are my skin and my blood, hija mia. And you will respect your mother, right now, and you will say rosary with your family.”
I paused, glared, and then muttered something at her that made Lisa’s eyes widen.
My mother flew into a whole new level of rage. I ran, grabbed my coat, and stalked out of the house, her frantic, burning Spanish echoing off of the bare trees.
I was leaving soon.
508 Pleasant Street, 508 Pleasant Street…less than two days now. Two. Days. I will leave, I told myself; I will create a new life and throw it back in their faces. My mother didn’t love. She wasn’t capable of that – she was cruel and stupid. When my father left us, I was seven years old, and I remember asking her where papí went. She told me that he went away because I was a very bad girl, and that maybe if I was good he would come back. Obviously I was the best child in the world, wracked with guilt, until I realized the truth. That’s when I started hating her.
I think I knew within myself that I was being juvenile and unreasonable, but it was just so damned poetic to feel like I did. The s*** I came up with, like my mother was “wistfully wasting away her dying destiny,” and that she “lay, livid, in her lazy lies,” was too artsy for me to want to look at things clearly.
When I finally returned to the house, the chorizo eggs were eaten, the prayers said, and the fire in my mother’s words had frozen into ice. She didn’t say a word as I took Lisa and Maria to school, which I thought was all the better for me.
508 Pleasant Street. I was leaving home.
During band practice that day I was absolutely bleeding music. We ran through our set, and not only did it sound unusually electrifying, Dexter randomly jumped in on one of my solos and we took it to new places. After playing through some of our favorite covers – Black Dog by Zeppelin was our best – we collapsed on the couches in Zig’s garage to celebrate our triumph.
“Damn,” Zig said as he chugged his coke. “We should have laid down some tracks today to make an EP to pass out when we arrive. You know, land with a punch. What do you think, Izzy?”
“Yeah, sure,” I replied, lost in a reverie. I was gloriously sweaty and tired, my fingers almost ripped open from playing so hard. The calluses were peeling.
Dexter lay on the couch with the gigantic rip on the side, fingering songs on his unplugged guitar. It was amusing to watch – his eyes were closed, imagining some fantastic live show no doubt, and his face twisted whenever the notes were particularly complicated. He abruptly sat up and opened his eyes.
“Holy f***,” he said. “Two days.”
Zig tossed his coke can in the trash. “I know man. It’s so close…It’s like we’re on that plane already, flying out to the glorious city of grunge. That’s where it all started, man.” He started tapped his drumsticks against his legs. “That’s where the greats began.”
I snorted. “If you consider Kurt Cobain one of the greats.”
Zig laughed and tossed me a blunt. “Don’t start on that again. You’ll only lose for the what – hundredth time? He’s a f***ing legend.”
I rolled my eyes and lit the blunt.. “Whatever. Dex, you still have the tickets?”
He pulled them out of his wallet, and I swear the light reflected off of their diamond-like beauty. His voice held a holy reverence as he said, “Two days. We’ll get on that plane…fly to Seattle…eat, sleep, and rock in that house Zig rented over the internet…”
I sighed. “508 Pleasant Street.”
“Yes,” Dexter breathed. “And we’ll be out, every day, pushing our music working our way up to the top.”
We sat basking in each other’s glory. None of us had been this hopeful since the last week of high school, when we finally got out.
508 Pleasant Street.
My phone rang. I let the blunt dangle from my lips as I answered, imagining I was a rock star, which some kind of label calling begging for us to sign with them – or even better, some kind of smoldering drummer. Who wanted me and no one else.
“Isabel?”
“What do you want, mom?”
Her voice shook, and I immediately regretted being rude. “I need you to come home.”
I took a hit, exhaling slowly and blowing smoke rings. “Why?”
“Lisa’s been in an accident.”
I dropped the blunt. It rolled across the cracked cement under the drum set where it smoldered.
“…what?”
“Please,” she said. I could tell she had been crying. “Please just come home.”
I don’t even remember what I said to the guys. I just drove home, picked up my mother, and we went to the hospital. She was sobbing so deeply that I could barely understand what had happened.
I understood soon enough.
You would think that when someone you love dies, it’s like one of those Lifetime specials where the death is tragic, the last words sad and beautiful, and everyone hugs and consoles each other. The reality was this: the jungle gym at my sister’s school collapsed, and a metal pipe broke her skull. There were no beautiful last words, no tender hugs. I remember the stale, parched walls of the E.R. and the blank look and dried blood on the crushed face of my sister. I remember the smell of seasoned chicken on my mother as she hugged me so hard she left marks on my arms – and cried so uncontrollably that my shirt was sticky and wet with her tears. I remember the doctor, apologetic and regretful but very busy…and I remember my sister, Maria, pale and confused. She didn’t move and said nothing as I swept her into my arms like I knew a big sister is supposed to do.
I don’t remember what I felt. I don’t think there was room to feel anything.
When we got home, mother went to make dinner while I hoisted Maria on my shoulders and took her to the playroom. After I set her down, she just sat there, looking at all of her toys as if they were foreign. I remember wondering what she was thinking. How do you deal with that when you’re five years old? I heard a few loud crashes erupt from the kitchen and left Maria, almost running to where mother was.
She was hysterical, throwing the pots and pans and glasses and china against the wall…not screaming, but still crying and breathing like a storm, gulping down air, before stopping and collapsing on the tile floor. I moved the broken glass away with my shoe and sat down beside her. For some reason, I knew exactly what I should do – I gripped her hand, tightly, and began to say the Our Father. Her heavy voice joined me, winded and hiccupy, eventually quieted to a whisper. I gave her a tight hug before sticking some frozen pizzas in the oven. Maria walked in at that moment, quieter than innocence, and I led the women of my family into the living room.
Mother took out the rosaries and we all prayed for my sister’s soul. I think that in these moments, holding my mother’s hand and helping Maria move her prayer beads, that I stopped resisting. We huddled together like we had those years ago when dad left, but now I had to pretend that I was stronger than anything that could hurt them. No, I didn’t need them at all – but they needed me now.
After they went to bed, I went outside and smoked the rest of my cigarettes. Chain style. I took out that tiny piece of paper – soft as silk – and stared at it for a good, long time, feeling the smoke burn the very bottoms of my lungs, destroying my capillaries.
508 Pleasant Street.
I remembered a flash of things – of Lisa, ugly and wrinkly, the day she came home from the hospital. Of the look on my mother’s face one lazy Sunday afternoon, just staring at her daughter and smiling for no reason while she cleaned the kitchen. I remembered Lisa doing everything from getting me in trouble to pouring orange juice on my guitar to screaming in my face to being curled up next to me at night when she had a nightmare; and I thought of my fearless spectacle of a mother, sleeping in her room tonight, and what nightmares she would have.
I threw the damn paper away and began to unpack my boxes.