NEWS AND SLEEPING
Phil never wanted to be seen with his food. He leered at the people he’d seen on the metro, who would hang to their food as they lifted an elbow up over a seat top, or a leg on top of a step, or an eye up over a mirror. He pictured these more undesirable types as guardians of food, and would think defensively of his own lunch as a more personal thing. He was always surveying some laboring type, gripping a moon pie like a Dame would her clutch. A hoagie, a grinder, a peanut butter and jelly, all thrown to the wolves in Phil’s eyes.
When He stepped onto the Metro he looked like the thinking man’s advocate, and when made to feel like wearing much of anything at all, he would wear black leather shoes, a brown suit, and a tie of no mentionable faire. He had wavy hair, nice sideburns kept to a formidable length, and huge reading glasses that looked liked suns were setting in them. He would also at times have liver spots, a mustache, or no mustache whatsoever. He would finish or start a cigarette in only enough time to match the bus schedule, and bid a good morning to the food guardians.
Trying to get his head right, and provide more excitement for Yuni, Phil had recently bought a horribly old house in South Bend, and planned on fixing it up on the weekends. Among other things, he thought of new locks, windows, carpet, plumbing fixtures, and some modern paint. Working four long days during the week, he would have ample time to clean up the old house during his time off. Slowly over time, Phil would change his mind, would no longer care to notice the black mold on the outside of the windows. He would no longer take an eye to the weeds. He thought to himself, if weeds are here, then here they are. He became obtuse to the idea of washing the needles from the gutter, or scraping the shingles of their growth. When the sink would leak he would fill a bucket with the runoff and fill up the bird statuary with it before heading home for the week. Upon returning to Tacoma, he would write lists of things he might bring next time he were to go down to the old place. He would pencil out words like, Lysol, scrubbers, and VCR, on the back of Dennis Company receipts. Phil had once told a friend who was in between jobs, that life didn’t get much better, just different. He now felt his own life becoming different, or better. He persisted this way in light of a phone call that he received months after his bout with bronchitis had passed. News of his lung cancer, felt like nothing, as if he intended to take the brute humility of aging in stride, amiss, resigned to a warmer sense of self.
Sitting in an old country house in Uruguay wearing bright green sandals and smoking pipe tobacco with the cowboys, Phil dug his toes into the cool earth. He listened to the auctioneer delicately offer his property up to the quietest, most honest bids in the room. The auction house became full of all the women he had ever loved and all the food guardians. Bar men, as they prefer to be called here, were with Phil, and wanted him to be lucid, and never give up living, but he told them something nakedly with with his eyes, “I am and always have been."
Waking in the mornings would never be easier than they were now for Phil. The chain on the toilet pulled the flood down, and the tea in his cup tasted like hell. It was perfect. The lightning in the morning cracked open trees somewhere he would never be, and somewhere death and birth went on without him. This was the only moment left, at least anywhere that he’d ever looked for one, so he thought. At any time from that point on Phil would have only a few things left: a file cabinet full of blood tests, a home in South Bend, a plane ticket to Acapulco, an old desktop computer that managed his files, and a wife named Yuni. Phil lived to be forty-eight years old, and it was in the waning year of 1993 that he would bury the keys of a white jeep, and give up the ghost on a banana plantation thirty miles west of Ixtapa-zihuatenejho Mexico, more or less.
Wherein Phil and Yuni meet
Phil was sitting at the Dim Sum Restaurant in Burien looking over his mismanaged accounts, drawing margins, and figuring. He was planning at one point to find a home in a nicer place somewhere, but couldn’t figure how to get out from under some of the projects at work to allow him the time. He had always wanted something simple in respect to a home. He really felt something telling him to simplify his life and guard his savings. He felt like he was waiting at a boat launch.
A woman was arguing with the owner about refusing her mother’s check. Phil could barely concentrate on what he was doing, and turned around to see two small Korean women, and an older looking man. They seemed upset so Phil watched. One women was shaking a yellow check at a sign that said something about a NSF fee, and Phil figured this place had recently stopped taking checks, but forgot to remove the sign, implying that they would. The younger of the two women ran for the parking lot, but returned immediately shouting that her car had been towed, and her wallet was inside. Phil thought he might pay for the meal, buy her a drink while she waited for a cab, find out the beautiful young woman’s name, and fall in love with her. Her name was Yuni, and he did.
Phil and Yuni lived together from that time on. Yuni worked in the pharmacy, and came home every night with movie rentals, and something nice for dinner. Phil would smell her carnival hair, and take her apron off. She was jasmine tea, in a cup half full, no matter which way Phil tried to look at it. In the nighttime she would put things on his skin that he had never heard of before, recalling things that he had never thought, and in any case he loved her as far as the world allowed. When she was gone during the day and he was on the bus downtown, he would write things on his folders like any old time. When her work took her early or kept her late, he knelt in front of the kennel with her cats, talking about Yuni, and everything. Sometimes when they would fight about it all, he would say things like, I Don’t even care, or who are you, but he did, and he knew. It was the fight that tended the fire. She loved to do it to him that way, and he eventually became used to her way of getting what she wanted, and it was good. So he fought with a smile inside his face, and gave her hell until she gave it back and love was made. Thank the lord Phil would think, as he drifted in and out of Uruguay with the Bar Men, and all the women he’d ever loved.
The Boys, and dreaming now
When Phil told Yuni that he was buying them a home to use on the weekend she immediately started planning what food, blankets, and towels to buy. She wanted to know from Phil, as honestly as possible, what she could spend on what. Ever since the day he signed for the house, he would tell her, whatever you want. He meant it. The two would have their friend’s children over and let them watch movies in their old haunted house, and tell them where the creek in the door and the chip in the glass came from. Yuni would get drunk off wine and tell them that the room next to theirs was haunted, and how frightening it all really was. Phil knew that these poor white boys had no affinity for ghosts, and thus told them he would rid the house of ghosts with or with out Yuni’s help, and so he was loved as a ghost hunter, by the fearful boys who smelled of a million things over.
When Phil thought about the boys he simultaneously shed a fair amount of light on his dream of winning homes at auctions in Uruguay. He had heard from his friend Bruce that cowboys sat on, chewed, and drew straw, buying homes for their mothers. Twelve grand, a piece. He needed it. Bruce would tell him how easy the auctioneer was in his delivery, and phil would lean his head back like Yuni washing her hair, or making love. Phil would take his wallet and slap it to his palm, like a child in the dust bowl, and Yuni would be in the kitchen beating the hell out of a steak. Phil would ask things like, what do you think of Uruguay, and Yuni would say things like, what I think is that your sick and you should do what’s good for health, and see what your doctor says, and come kiss me. He would every time. He could picture himself holding her hair back while she ate fruit, and whispering everything to her in one sentence and she would agree. There had to be a place for them somewhere. Phil would easily afford it, and own it, limon tree and all, and then, like slipping into a dead mans shoes, him and Yuni would love each other in a cowboy’s old bed.
Figuring
Phil would sit at his desk at work, and file, and figure. A place for everything, and everything in it’s place, he might think. He would look helplessly at the date on his coins, and try to turn them into pesos, which he thought to be undated, and this was good. He’s not running in circles or waving his hands for help, he is trying to buy a house for him and Yuni in Uruguay or Mexico, or God knows where, he thought to himself. His sickness never hurt much, and if it did he’d drink hot water, and love Yuni until it'd go away. She understands what he has. People at work would ask him, Phil are you alright, and he would say yes, and mean it. People would say how is Yuni, and the new place, and he would say she’s wonderful, thinking of all three of them. He hardly listened to music, but if he did, he heard everything and would tell Yuni what an alto saxophone was. It made so much sense to get where he was going, that he would thank God that he knew how long he might have to live and he would say, because of that, he could always love her as if he would be gone tomorrow, more or less. People always, drank, smoked and fucked themselves to death never knowing when or why to give it all up. While the other Bruce's and cowboys of the world came home empty handed with their children screaming for candy, and milk, Phil was thanking God for Uruguay and the gift of eternal life.
The Banana Farmer
There is one way to get down between the field... You want to see cattle auction, farming auction, you go down through here. speak to Fernando, y Graciella.
no lo volvi a ver. Saldra bien Felipe.
A wedding
Phil and Yuni’s wedding was held in the banquet room of the Genghis Khan restaurant in Burien, three blocks from where they met years before. The banquet room has wall to wall mirrors, and the restaurant has 184 items on the menu. The floor was wood, lightly varnished, and Bruce's band, played music all night long. Oddly enough Yuni looked as though she was dressed for her quincenera, and Phil was in love. At one point a can of baby corn rolled onto the dance floor, and the event remains a bigger mystery than most anything. Children weeded money from their fathers pockets and gave them to oh so beautiful Yuni in exchange for a dance. Something like Wings could be heard, and the crowd lit up like gas on fire. When Bruce grabbed the microphone and the band stopped, he told Phil how proud he was of him, what a devil he was to pursue Yuni the way he did, how successful he would be in his career, and what a delight it would be to have a good woman behind him. The band played “stand by your man”, and the tinsel shook like a lions mane.
When the wedding cleared up, and all the parking lot had cleared Phil and Yuni were on the way to their apartment, where Yuni would ready herself for him. He bathed her with the hands of an unquestionable love, and she made every gift he had for him exposed. He was a naked back to the wind. She made an attempt to say anything just to cool the fit of their love, but Phil would have none of it, and continued with the ceremony, revived from the dust of days gone by. When love was made between them Phil would often tell her things in breath and song. Any old time Yuni, any old time.
Taxco de Alarcon
The city of Taxco in Estado de Guerrero Mexico, was one of Phil and Yuni’s favorites. They would always return with silver spoons from the mining town, and always found it more endearing then other cities to the north. Ever since their honey moon in the area, Phil smells Taxco in the frozen isles of the market by Yuni’s. From time to time they would pull on their sandals and sit out near the bird statuary and the sink water, look at the pictures of Taxco, and plant the pits of their fruit. Phil would say things like, I’d like to live someplace like Taxco, and before Phil’s doctor called, Yuni would say someday, and Washington is nice this time of year. Phil once read that Cortes said he would take as much silver and precious metal from Taxco as he saw fit, and Phil thought that was good. Phil sat looking onto the tiled red roofs. They were lobster’s backs, careening away from the heat. He saw the white washed walls of the homes, made blatant as the hands of a clock. He held Yuni’s hand and dug his toes deep into the sand. He wondered about the baroque church, weather his candle was still burning somewhere, and if the coins he had put in the box near the burned up punks were spent on diapers or whether people in Taxco just let their babies run into the ocean when they shit. Taxco had no ocean, but somewhere this must be a practice. The Pesos in the altar would go towards candy and milk he thought.
The White Man, and a vision of Yuni
He was moving like the crack in a whip, down the old highway in a white jeep, heading west for Acapulco. He was thinking about the cliff divers, auction houses, Mexican beer, and his lung, which was burning like all hell. He came to a stop where the federales had been assisting some politician through a wedding procession, down the highway. He would be held in place for an hour it seemed. From far down the line Phil stuck his leg out and flashed his white socks hanging loosely from his white legs, jetting from his all white Jeep, and was waved ahead of the line. Weather due to the State of Guerrero’s dependency on tourism, or the officers need for entitlement, Phil was almost as happy as he’d ever been, flying around the line and on his way to buy a cowboy’s old house for Yuni. He had heard about an auction where there would be property for sale, good land, the like. He would go.
The two kept sitting out in the yard, and drinking sun tea, and as long as it seemed, it was. Yuni made golden and green rosemary lemonade and mixed it with sun tea. Every day that the weather made them feel something they would lay under the bird statuary combing their fingers about each other, like Cortes looking for silver in Taxco.
A Baby
Phil and Yuni had been trying to get pregnant ever since they first met, each in their own way. Phil would have been happy to walk out to the mail one day, yawning and scratching the back of his neck and find a baby there. All he would have to do is look into its eyes, check for the right genes and say, Hey baby where were you. As long as what was meant to happen was always happening in the child, Phils chemicals would explode with love. Yuni thought that Phil and her would try, and a child would come about in due time, but was not willing to wait on the child that Phil had been growing in the yard. She used to tell Phil, I think it's time you know, I'm ready to have baby, and he would agree with her blankly, without knowing what she wished for him to do. He was sure that in the end a child would come, as he went. Not to say he ever thought he would die, but that one day the tide would take him out, and bring this tiny little God back in. he used to wrap his hand around Yuni's fore finger while she slept, and say Yuni, Yuni, the baby's coming, wake up. When she woke up to Phils violently white eyes she would climb out of bed, and smoke on the roof.
It was the eternal fit that we throw, wondering how long to wait for what we want, while the mortal masquerade of ending an unending becomes the sole depletion of our pleasure. Pleasure is the one thing we all might recommend, when given the time for it.
Prayer, Synapse
Phil had abandoned the road and decided to walk his hay through the plantation. It was hot. He felt nauseous among many things. An itch in the back of his throat stuck like a tack. He could feel the quilt of sores in his throat and was wondering when the blood might come. He was mindful of his lung which now felt like it was burdening the body whole. Dead weight he thought. What did he want, if not to know when and where, among the click and hiss of a relative jungle Phil was waiting for the swamp, like a croc, it's eyes above water, while his chest was becoming full of the stuff. He humped up to a tree, and wondered what it all meant, the giving in, the dreaming, he had at least enough time to figure out whether this was positively happening or whether his synapses were just exploding at concerning rates. Though he could touch a hand to his chest, could he really? the curse of the dreamer was holding Phil by the neck and raping him of his wits. He was choking on it. It was coming up terrible, and the events were surmounting him. he stuffed his mouth full of grasses and mud, said something we might never know, and buried his keys in the dirt, in the ground, in the morning,
and Yuni knows him now.
Our Daughter says your words. Rehearses them in her genes, throwing away all the interest and talking to me like you would. Like it's you. You've cursed her, and I just don't know what to think about that. I suppose that if you ever came back-If you werent so dead, so mortal you would have some new schemes, something to raise her hopes toward, and something to destroy me with. I never lived where you lived with all the carrying on, and thinking until the dull became a drug, and most anything intangible you might whore to you're mind. dealing out, the ending and going on, Thank you for my baby, I see you everywhere now, and I hope you know that. The old golden memory has faded, and I live in a full color view. I'll see you in the yard sometime, and goodbye for now.
The End
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