Riding on the #3

by mamaspitfire

Pass-Off

by goatgirl

He was sitting at an orange booth, staring vacantly out the window, his knee jittering against the plastic table. His tall frame was squeezed awkwardly into the seat, and Andrea was reminded suddenly of the folded legs of a dead spider. She gripped Joseph’s hand tighter and walked over.

She stood next to the table and waited for him to notice them. He didn’t see them; his gaze was fixed on the traffic crawling on Western Avenue beyond the glass wall. It was rush hour, vehicles crammed into the two-lane highway. A rogue commuter had driven his car onto the median strip and was trying to get around a wilting tree and its concrete planter. The three of them watched the driver inch around the planter and then shoot past three cars to stop at the stoplight.

“Idiot.” Jeff said, startling Andrea. She hadn’t realized he knew they were standing there. His voice was just as she remembered, low and bristly from smoking, and her stomach gave a sudden twist.

“Hello,” she said, and then stopped. She didn’t really want to make small talk with Jeff, but she couldn’t leave without saying something.

“Joe.” Jeff looked at the boy and grinned uncomfortably. Andrea saw how like their hazel eyes were, and the heavy bone beneath their eyebrows. Her stomach twisted again, and she looked around at the other restaurant patrons to hide her emotion.

“Hey dad!” Joe said, and squirmed into the booth across from his father.

“I brought two sets of clothes and his pajamas.” Andrea held up Joseph’s backpack. “And his toothbrush and his gameboy. He usually goes to bed by nine.”

“Ten,” Joseph said, grinning up at her.

“Nine. And don’t let him have anything to drink after dinner or he’ll wet the bed.”

“Mom,” Joseph whined.

“It’s true.” She paused. “I guess that’s it. You have my number if you need to reach me. You can call tonight if you want to, Joseph.” Andrea stood uncomfortably by the table, watching father and son eye each other. Jeff still hadn’t looked at her. “Okay?” she said.

“Okay.” Jeff finally looked away from Joseph, down at the littered table. He picked at a smear of dried ketchup on his thumb and then wiped the stubble on his chin with a nervous hand. “Okay.”

Andrea bent over the table and awkwardly hugged Joseph’s narrow shoulders, feeling Jeff’s nearness like radiating heat. Joseph had to protest before she could let him squirm away. “Be good. See you on Sunday.” She told him, passing him the backpack.

“Mom.” Joseph rolled his eyes, and from the corner of her vision Andrea could see Jeff smirking in sympathy. Her chest filled with rage, sweet and strong, and she sighed to let it out. Aware of each flexing muscle, she turned and walked out of the restaurant, keeping her neck rigid so that she would not look behind.

hometown boys

by treason

LUNCHTIME

by mamaspitfire

Bologna and Cheese Sandwiches on White Bread with Mayo. The kind of bologna in the canary yellow plastic package, the red nylon string you pull to break the uniform thick soggy slices out of their hard clear shell. The cheese, Crayola Orange, the word cheese on this square of dyed vegetable oil is spelled with two E's and a Z. It's individually tucked inside flimsy clear stuff, a hybrid between real plastic and generic saran wrap. You peel carefully, so carefully, so that the cheesy square comes out whole and doesn't crumble, clinging desperately to the shrink-wrap. Then the White Bread. Only in your wet dreams can your Ma afford Wonder Bread, with it's chipper rainbow circles dancing on the bag, perfect white squares of fleshy dough waiting to be eaten. This bread comes in a package with all the fanfare of a Wake. White plastic black letters, bread so flimsy it tears at the thought of peanut butter on a knife. Last, globs of mayo, the genera-cheese's wicked sister, some vague mixture of vegetable oil, mystery paste, and Poor. Finally, The Sandwich. The bread turns to thick paste, the mayo glues each bite to the roof of your mouth, a strange Elmer's school paste reaction native only to the mix of this exact combination of ingredients with saliva. Bologna and Cheese on White Bread with Mayo.

Even Better. Peanut Butter and Jelly. On the same white bread because Bologna and Cheese won't keep in your lunch box until noon and your Ma doesn't have those cute little blue ice packs that the Clean Girls bring to school with their lunches that come straight out of a fifties sitcom. And let's be honest, just skip the lunch box fantasy too. Replace it with a brown paper bag, wrinkled, stained from yesterday's lunch, big hole in the corner threatening to give way in your locker. PB and J. From an overgrown Vat of Peanut Butter from the food pantry, bold black letters on white paper, lasts forever, the same giant tub of sorry excuse for peanut butter taunting you season after season, refusing to empty no matter how many sandwiches it makes, sitting smug on your momma's kitchen shelf. The Jelly. Grape. Family Size. Won't spread smooth and slick like sweet sweet strawberry jam reserved for the lucky. This jelly is the bastard lovechild of jello and vaseline. Globs fall off the knife refusing to float evenly over the bread's surface, which is threatening to dissolve under the weight. This jelly makes a miracle transformation in the two and a half hours from when it is made on the kitchen counter in the morning to when the school lunch bell rings. It undergoes a chemical reaction, transforming into something akin to sour battery acid. It eats through the bread so when you pull it out of your used lunch bag it smells like laundry and has stained the lifeless bread grey, the color of white canvas sneakers that desperately need replacement, gaping holes in the toes, gaping holes in the bread. No snack, no side dish. Maybe on a good month an apple. Not Red Delicious, not plump and juicy, but the hateful cousin of the apple fed to Snow White by a spiteful witch's hand. Small. Shriveled. Brown mush in the bruised spots. Small, the size of a baby's fist, the kind that comes in the Assorted Fruit Bag on sale for 3.99. Watching with envy as the Popular Girls unpack jello puddings, sandwiches with real meat in them, wheat bread, crusts cut off, hot thermoses of soup or pasta, the steam hitting your nose from across the table. The smell of hot lunch on pizza day, the red squares of cheese and sauce, a fifth grade celebration. No money for hot lunch, not even the yellow strips of Free Lunch tickets that color your schoolgirl cheeks red but fill your belly. Peanut Butter and Jelly Sandwiches. Maybe you choke down the food, trying like fuck to convince yourself that it tastes OK, trying to ignore the mounds of food pouring out of trays and lunchboxes around you. Or maybe you just throw the bag into the diesel grey garbage bins in the corner of the cafeteria and hide against cool green tile on the bathroom wall until the bell rings.

Soft as Cement/Blando como cemento

by branded

Soft as cement, yielding as a battering ram, 17 and pregnant in an Italian Catholic community. Mama told us how the priest said God wouldn't allow her to walk down the aisle to marry our father, she had to sneak in from the side, like a perpetrator in the eyes of Jesus, with no veil allowed to cover her sin and shame.

It was true love, she said, the only man I've ever had.

It was necessity, he said, he already lost track of another bastard begot from some puta named Consuela, he had to do the right thing this time.

Besides, she fucked around a lot anyway, he said, that other kid probably wasn't even his.

She thought the weed he fed her was tobacco, she thought the dick he slipped her was an altar, they succumbed to the idea of marriage on the cement stoop outside Grandma Ambrose's house in Nassau county.

She sucked it up, she rode it high, she wove a fantasy out of car parts and grease and the Schlitz he came home stinkin' of at night.

She thought it was a dream.

Her belly swelled on a body lean and sharp as a butcher knife, thin ribs floating above the swollen belly.

When the pains started she thought she'd have time for one last cigarette and a cup of coffee in the 6am light of her mama's mustard kitchen, til the rush of an ocean pouring out between her legs made her stub out her butt quick and go walking up Compass Court Hill towards the twinkling hospital lights.

No surprise, she says, you were always a girl who had to hurry.

Soft as cement, flexible as a metal rod, she bent that dream around condemned houses and two room apartments, stretching like play-doh, stretching Papa's paycheck, skin around her young eyes stretching to meet the ground.

Packs of Salem Menthol Ultra Lights scattered among the bills, the balancing act, who to pay, who to put off, when to steal the money out of his drawer when he was late to come home, before money flew like a goose fleeing winter into a brown bag, into white powder, into the boys room in the basement that roared out a party under the peeling plastic on the kitchen chairs Mom slumped into, as she sunk deep like quicksand, buried like the dead under the demands of those little white envelopes.

Cushy as a razor blade, rusty like old knives, she blew out excuses to me in smoke rings of denial, well you know there ain't been no overtime lately, the boss don't like him, getting paid flat rate when the garage is slow is a killer, his no good family always borrowing money off of him, they'll be the death of us.

He'll be the death of us. It rang silent in the air like thunder.

Kinder than skim milk, fat like a skeleton, she moved us farther and farther away from home, to Florida, North Carolina, New Mexico, as if warm winters could ease the drinking and chase the bill collectors like leaves in the wind, make Papa tame as a pack mule, content to carry the load of a wife and two children on his broken back, on two dollars less than everyone else an hour because of his brown skin and accent. Never good enough, never fast enough, never white enough.

She kept her hair long and dark for him, washed his work clothes in one of them old fashioned wringers, warning me to keep my fingers clear of the roll as we passed uniforms back and forth, her hands red and cracked from cleaning and the clothes lines of winter, cooking breakfast, cooking lunch, haciendo la comida, arroz con habichuelas, todos los dìas, there was no money for anything else.

She wore his culture like a badge of honor, he dressed her in it like a muñeca, she learned to dance to salsa, learned to cook pasteles for twenty, moved us to Puerto Rico for a while to live in a tin roof shack assaulted by swarms of flying cucarachas pinging off the tattered window screens, shrouded our beds in moquiteros, mosquito nets, to save her girls from being eaten alive. We threw the chickens leftover rice and went to town con Tìa Chari to sell the eggs. She learned to speak fluent Spanish. She forgot how to speak Italian.

The long winter he was unemployed and migrated back up to Nueva York from Florida to find work we ate Wheatena for breakfast, pb and j for lunch, rice and beans for dinner. For six months. Mom bragged about how nutritious Wheatena was when me and my sister mewled for the seconds that were never there, she told us how strong and healthy we would grow off of the good food she cooked us.

At night she held her growling belly and wept into Papa's pillow.

My legs grew long, my tits swelled against my training bra, I threw off Catholicism like a dirty rubber, wrote notes about boys in class, smoked my mother's cigarettes como un good luck charm, made lies and snuck out my bedroom window.

Papa saw me, growing soft as cement, yielding as a battering ram, tried to squish that growing sprout under his bootheel, tried to grind my cement into dust, tried to use those grease blackened hands to destroy, to soften, to disinigrate, to shame me bloody into long sleeves, little lies, ice packs and probing school counselors.

I never told.

Soft as a mattress, crumbling like wallpaper, mom told me it was my big mouth, my tongue like a knife, my cigarettes, my cement heart that made those bruises blossom on my flesh. She took a jet plane into the Florida of her mind, to warm winters, the truth melting like snow in the sun. She sighed defeat in yellow clouds of menthol smoke. She cursed me in Spanish and walked away.

19 and pregnant, no time for one more smoke before the pains got too strong. 22 and sorting through piles of snow covered bills. 25 and choking on the sheetrock dust that my baby daddy tracked in on the carpet. Looking in the mirror at the new bruises flowering on my cheek, the blood dribbling down my chin.

I packed my little girl up in the back of my '79 blue Toyota last night, alone, and started driving for Florida. My cigarette smoke curled out of the window, like smoke signals, the blood on the styrofoam butt, like war paint.

Soy dura como cemento. I am hard as fucking cement.

Apologies (1999)

by goatgirl

20 Things About Class

(found at www.steamiron.com/payday/class-20.html)

20 things you will hear if you try to talk about class: The working class is disappearing * Class does not exist in America * Define working class * We're all really working class because we all work * My grandparents were working class * Can anybody cite statistics to show that a working class exists in late capitalist America? * You wear your working class background like a badge of honor * Unions are obsolete * I read in the paper about a janitor who makes $50,000 a year - can you believe that? * White working class people are racist, homophobic and sexist * But you don't look poor * Why are you so angry? The men who work for my dad's construction company are all cheerful, happy guys * You're just being divisive * I saw a woman in the grocery store buying lobster with food stamps * I know you understand this, but you're different - most working class people won't get it * Working class people don't read * You have a chip on your shoulder * Lighten up - white trash is hip * You're too smart to be working class * Once you get a college degree you're no longer working class * Nobody who lives in the suburbs is working class * You're not working class because you make too much money * You're not working class because you're not a manual laborer * You're not working class because you're on the Internet and working class people can't afford Internet access because they don't have enough money * ...Why are you so angry?