The dead of L.A.

(I found one of my mom's old notebooks from the eighties.  her handwriting is atrocious but I'm transcribing her poetry)

************

Pinched and twisted

In the dead of L.A. –

Lost and more lost, she wanders,

Not one word exchanged or offered-

Bury and buy

Again + again

He exits

Dripping gold

Silent and dripping indifference

Peripheral vision

Revealed him

Not to her. 

Sheer wonder in

Compromise .

He’s glowing rays

Of hate, death.

Could his meaning have been

Tender curiousity?

The air is cool

The sky is late

The sidewalks are covered in

Pages from desk calendars

You (we) tread over days and days

Of last year

In which something happened – something –

Lived and died –

Putting me in a bleak park –

Another lost day and dead years

And dear but dead l.a.

December 28 1989

Fairness Poem

Sometimes my body feels like a rattrap. 

I can feel some small animal, hardly a morsel, sickly and slowing down inside my skeleton. 

Every day for a year and a half straight I pondered

the meaning

of every inconvenience.

Was a flat tire a sign that I shouldn’t leave the house?  I walked everywhere. 

I was always seeing something I thought I should write down –

a violent protest to end the war, a cop throwing his cigarette butt

on the lush green grass of a public park.  Eventually,

I tried to help homeless men and women and even children

decipher a meaning to life. I approached it like a math problem:

this one person has to suffer enough to cover a sadness deficit

so some other guy and his girl can live in a decent apartment

and both own cars.

You shouldn’t describe the meaning of life to a sick person

unless you are also sick. 

My body is a rattrap but I feel okay, all in all. 

I feel better when there’s so much noise I can’t hear that last disappointed moment.

I’m grateful for friends and for my health.

Native Angeleno

Framed beneath the smoggy, pink sunset,

the gray frankness of lonesome smoggy streets

lets Angelenos know that the city is a heartbreaker.

Good and bad and mean and nice and happy and sad.

Why does there have to be so many people?

How can there ever be enough attention

for each of us?

Dear Native Angelenos,

I have no siblings.

Can we be brothers and sisters?

Do you like me?

Am I pretty?

I like dangerous streets 

and safe ones,

too.  

I like attention but I also like being ignored.

The Circle of Life -- Short Story

The Circle of Life

One day when I was driving on Los Angeles Avenue in Los Angeles the city, I saw 3 cop cars worth of cops tiredly swooping homeless peoples’ possessions into standard issue blue tarps they were trying to fold into portable bundles for the harassed indigents to take with them to some other street or park. One cop was shrugging off a homeless man like he wasn’t there, as he collapsed the man’s tent, and another cop ignored a woman repeating, “That’s my stuff.  That’s my stuff.”  There was a pick up truck full of grocery carts being reclaimed from the homeless camp, presumably to be taken back to the stores they came from.  One woman began to charge at a cop but once she got inches away, she realized there was nothing she could do, physically; she just hollered up close in the police man’s face.  She had the kind of Midland American accent that I usually hate to hear, but in this situation, the aggressively nasal vowels added to the sense of her being the mouthpiece for the impoverished people of this country; she had the righteous bearing of a Dust-Bowl farmer fighting back in vain. 

“Where are we supposed to live, huh?  No one wants us in their parks or on the sidewalk -- are we just supposed to disappear into thin air?   You’ll get your own goddamn karma back in your face for this, you wait and see.  What you’re doing to us is wrong.” 

I was at a long stoplight so I watched this scene for what felt like an hour but was probably only a few minutes.

I wanted to pick a side, but it was so all-around ugly, it put me in one of my blue moods.  I don’t know if you ever saw the animated movie “Lion King,” but it was a really popular movie when I was a kid, and I went to see it in the theatre with a group of friends and my mom.  The determinist moral of the movie is that life is a circle that can never be unbroken, even if you want to:  a person is born, has kids, dies, repeat ad infinitum.  Sitting there next to my mom with her soulful, doleful eyes already growing wrinkles around them, I felt sorry for her and for myself too (which was sort of a gift in the long run, as it kicked off a frank closeness between the two of us that a lot of my friends are jealous of).  If this is just all a circle, what did that make me and my mother, then, but a couple of sad-sacks dutifully carrying out a boring destiny?  This is still the main thought that plagues me when I get sad.  It’s that whole type of question Philosophy Majors’ parents’ waste their money on in college:  What is the Meaning of Life?

That is what I was thinking about when I was watching the LAPD force the relocation of the group of itinerants.  I was thinking about how, even though it must be so horrible to be homeless, I’d had so many irritating experiences with panhandlers, and honestly felt relieved when I walked down a street in downtown without encountering a homeless person. 

On the other side, there were the weary faces of the cops who seemed not to like this part of their job, like it was an unpleasant thing they’d rather not have to do.  But of course I couldn’t really drum up any empathy for them either.  Trying to put myself in one of the cops’ shoes for a minute, all I could think of is all the stories of cops killing unarmed black people all year.

Is this the circle of life?  Everyone just lives and then dies and I can’t even drum up much interest in such a sad tableaux, the desperate hunger and untended wounds of homeless people?  The often unwanted job of carrying out society’s ideas of right or wrong?  I was bored and blue for at least a month after that morning, and felt purposeless for a couple years afterward.

Eventually, I snapped out of worrying about the pointlessness of it all.  It happened when I went to my girlfriend Sam’s house for the first time, our first Thanksgiving together, and encountered one of those implausible coincidences; her brother was one of the cops I’d watched evict the homeless people from their tents and boxes not too long ago. 

That Thanksgiving night is one I don’t describe in detail.  It was Sam, her parents and her brother Joseph.  We just all drank too much, that was the mistake, and after a while, my lips numb and my equilibrium completely gone, I looked around at all of us at the table, my intelligent and beautiful girlfriend, her well-read mother, her honorable dad and the pleasantly quiet and unperturbed Joseph, who kept belching and then laughing at himself and saying “I’m sorry, mom!” 

Drunk, Sam’s mom didn’t bother to divide her love evenly between the two siblings, just letting Sam’s conversation starters clunk down awkwardly, while buoying each of her son’s short sentences with a charmed tinkle of laughter.  

I saw Sam and her dad flirt with each other a little, and Sam and I had a quick fuck in the bathroom, even though we knew everyone was probably hearing us and feeling angry or grossed out.  Even with Sam’s mom refusing to dote on her, it probably still made her feel wistful, or protective, to hear her having sex with me.  “We’re all just animals,” I remember saying out loud to my reflection in the bathroom mirror, when Sam’d just left and I was splashing cold water on my face.  Here we all were again, all us people stuck in this circle, the idea of wrong and right not mattering, when nothing really matters anyway.  Sam’s brother would have a kid and his own dad would die.  Then eventually he would die.  Then someday his son would die.  Then someday his son’s son would die. 

I left the bathroom and, while Sam was in the living room loudly teasing her mom for how underdone the turkey had been, I followed Sam’s brother to the rec room, where he was going to get the dart board, and I surprised him by pushing a kiss hard onto his lips with my own lips.  The instant look on his face was of guilt.  

“Oh my god,” I blurted out, immediately sorry and embarrassed, “you must think I’m such a bad person.” 

But he just said, and meant it, “No, it’s okay, it’s okay.  Don’t worry about it. I know you didn’t really mean it.” 

Now I just try to forgive everyone everything, all the time.  If life is meaningless, I forgive fate for its own cruelty.  I forgive everything for being itself, because we none of us can help it.

Nostalgia

I’ve long had this wish that it’d be possible to live inside the ground zero of nostalgia.  This is more of a daydream, along the lines of sci-fi and the idea of teleportation.  My more realistic version of trying to embody the bittersweet peter pan root of nostalgia is to imagine training myself to adapt my thinking to nostalgia, the way Buddhists train themselves to be zen or recovering alcoholics train themselves to be sober.  That’s what December is like for me.  I know that Christmas Day is at its most basic a few hours of exchanging gifts, a few hours of cleaning up afterwards, a couple hours of appreciating the gifts and then a festive dish for dinner; that is at least the make-up of my Christmas days.  There is no getting around the fact that Christmas ends.  Nonetheless, every December I plan which Christmas light displays we’re going to drive to and marvel at and which Christmas movies feel the most special to me and will be watched a million times all month.  When I’m looking at the beautiful light display on some house, or hearing those little asshole Peanuts kids finally yell “Merry Christmas, Charlie Brown,” making everything better, I wish to myself that there’d be some way to make the sentimentality last forever.  But there isn’t.  Also, nostalgia is a regressive state, and counter-productive to the present and even the future.  Still, I can’t help but wishing, just illogically, regressively wishing, time would freeze in the month of December, when most offices just let their co-workers fuck around all month, when neighborhoods are lovely with colored lights and animatronic reindeer, when I can still hope that the gifts I give are going to transform a life instead of ending up one more item to find a place for or maybe even to add to someone’s clutter.  I wish I could bring my son and husband with me into a state of matter comprised of childish abandon, that we could somehow comprise the delicate very filament of a Christmas light. 

MY INTERVIEW WITH PLEASANT GEHMAN

 "SHOWGIRL CONFIDENTIAL"  (Cover Photo by Dusti Cunningham)

PLEASANT GEHMAN, AUTHOR OF “SHOWGIRL CONFIDENTIAL”

BIOGRAPHY

Pleasant Gehman is a true renaissance woman: writer, dancer, actor, musician and painter. A Hollywood icon, during the 1970’s, she was one of the first punks in Los Angeles, documenting the scene she helped create in her fanzine “Lobotomy”. During the 1980’s, she toured across North America fronting her three bands, all of whom released multiple recordings: The Screaming Sirens, The Ringling Sisters and Honk If Yer Horny. She was also the booker for the seminal Los Angeles clubs Cathay De Grande and Raji’s.

 Since the early 1990’s, under the stage name Princess Farhana, she has appeared internationally as a professional belly dancer and burlesque performer and teacher. She has danced and acted in numerous motion pictures, in music videos and on television. She has appeared in many documentaries on belly dance and burlesque, performing and as an interview subject. In 2009, she was the star of Steve Balderson’s film “Underbelly: A Year In The Life Of Princess Farhana” which was released worldwide in theaters as well as on DVD.

From the age of sixteen, Pleasant worked as a journalist and cultural commentator with literally thousands of articles published nationally and internationally on everything from rock ‘n’roll to homeless teenagers. Her memoirs, short stories and poetry have been widely anthologized and many works were recorded on her spoken word CD Ruined.

She is the author and/or editor of eight books.

 Showgirl Confidential chronicles just some of Pleasant Gehman’s amazing adventures  from over thirty years spent constantly on the road.  From cross-country punk rock tours in the early 1980’s to her extraordinary belly dancing escapades in Cairo during the Arab Spring, from the dressing room antics at burlesque shows to unnerving paranormal experiences, this memoir is as finely crafted as it is riveting. The easy finesse of her writing, her keen memory and eye for detail will leave the reader devouring each story while remaining hungry for more.

“Pleasant Gehman (aka Princess Farhana) is possessed of talents too numerous to count. But she is, most of all, a formidable wordsmith. Her writing surpasses all her talents and that’s actually saying a lot because she is so goddamn good at everything. Each time she writes anything I am anxious – jonesing like a junkie sweating for morphine – desperate to get my hands on it, devouring every word in a kind of literary binge. Her descriptions and details are devastating. She’s like a seasoned jazz musician in her approach to literary pursuits, making up her own chords and time signatures, defying every convention while at the same time adhering to every one.”

Just read her. You need to.

-Margaret Cho

www.pleasantgehman.blogspot.com

www.facebook.com/pleasant.gehman

www.facebook.com/princess.farhana

www.twitter.com/PleasantGehman1

www.princessfarhana.com

www.princessraqs.blogspot.com

 xox INTERVIEW xox

1.  Your wild punk rock n' roll chapbooks were the first I ever read, in Junior High (they blew my mind).  Were your wonderful books inspired by an earlier writer or were you, as far as you knew, the only person at the time creating that kind of work (the funny lists of purse contents, the punk poems, the boozy self portraits)?

When I was writing and compiling those chapbooks back in the 1980’s and ‘90’s, my roommate (and current publisher) Iris Berry and I were doing those independently, with no outside influence. We were both working crappy temp jobs and bartending and we wanted to make books, but there were no avenues for “street poets” like us to really get published, so we did it ourselves, stealing paper and copying them from our temp jobs!  At that moment in time, we were both unaware that anyone else was doing anything like that.

2.  I consider you a quintessential Los Angeles personality.  Are you originally from L.A.?  Have you ever lived anywhere else?

 I always wanted to live in LA, as long as I could remember- but I didn’t live here until I was fifteen. I was born in New York City, and lived in Carmel, New York ‘til I was nine. Although, I did live in LA the year I was three- my whole family came out here for the year because my father was a writer. I remember walking down Hollywood Boulevard and going to Coffee Dan’s every morning! I’ve also lived in Connecticut and Massachusetts.

3.  Who is your favorite L.A. writer?

 I’m rather partial to my life-long friend, the aforementioned Iris Berry. We were roommates in the 1980’s, wrote together, and were were in bands together.  Aside from her, Eve Babitz, Pamela Des Barres and Lauran Hoffman are probably my favorite LA authors. Of course, I also love Charles Bukowski and James Elroy- who doesn’t?

4.  How did you get involved in belly dancing?  Would you like to expand on your involvement?  I understand it's a big part of your life.

 Belly dancing is a huge part of my life… and has been for almost 25 years!  I started dancing in 1990. I was on the dance floor at the long-defunct Club Lingerie in Hollywood, just dancing to a band that was playing; I think it might’ve been Fishbone. A woman came up to me the ladies room a girl asked if I was a belly dancer.  I asked why she thought that and she said to me  “You move like one”.

 I’d always been fascinated with belly dancing, and when I found out she was a belly dancer, I begged her to teach me.  She didn’t teach, but she introduced me to people who did. I became obsessed with it immediately, and I had a knack for it.

 Soon after, a friend gave me a ticket to Greece, so I quit my job, added on Cairo and left. When I came back, I was still taking classes, but I started working professionally, and started using the name Princess Farhana for belly dancing- cause nobody in the Arab clubs could pronounce “Pleasant”.   My involvement with burlesque started in the mid- 1990’s, when I was “drafted” into The Velvet Hammer by the troupe’s creator, Michelle Carr. I was with the Velvet Hammer until it ended.

5.  It may not be your style to kiss and tell, but in case it is, do you have any past relationships of particular interest to share?  Ever run your fingers through Axl Rose's carroty locks, etc?

  Ha! I already Kissed And Told a lot… in Pamela Des Barres’ book  “Let’s Spend The Night Together: Backstage Secrets Of Rock Muses And Supergroupies”!  I have my own whole chapter in that book!   You can see me on the back cover of that book as full-on jailbait, lying across Iggy Pop’s lap.

6.  What projects are you currently working on? Tell us about your book.

My new book, “Showgirl Confidential” is almost all touring stories from the 1980’s to the present, from punk rock tours with my bands to belly dancing in Cairo. It’s a memoir of fabulously misspent time on the road!

  I have another book coming out in November 2013 too. It’s called “The Belly Dance Hand Book”, and of course, it centers on belly dancing. It’s not memoir, and it’s not a how-to, it’s more of a lifestyle book for belly dancers.

 Also, two films I was featured in will be coming out soon.  “The Far-Flung Star” is making its debut at The Raindance Film Festival in London next week. I play a washed-up B movie actress in that. The romantic comedy, “Occupying Ed” will be out in 2014. Steve Balderson directed both films.

7.  What is your favorite band?  Movie?  Show?  Visual artist?  Song?

 Favorite band/ musician: David Bowie…favorite movie: “Cabaret”…Favorite show: “Mad Men”…Favorite visual artist: Larry Johnson…Favorite song; too many to name!

8.  Are you familiar with Love and Rockets comix?  In some ways your work reminds me of them.

 Yes, I LOVE them!  And a lot of people have told me that they think the work is similar, which is very flattering.

9.  How is your cat's health?  Do you only have the one cat?

I have three kitties right now- Ni-Ni, who is twelve, Tab who is nineteen and Sphinxie, who’s six. They’re all good right now, Ni-Ni had an operation recently, but she’s doing great. I’m a card-carrying crazy cat-lady!

10.  What is your favorite and least favorite LA restaurant and clothing store?

My favorite restaurant is Moun Of Tunis, a North African restaurant in Hollywood. When I’m in LA, I belly dance there on the weekends-come and see me!  As for clothing , I prefer garage sales and swap meets.

11.  Any parting thoughts?

you can get "Showgirl Confidential here: http://www.amazon.com/Showgirl-Confidential-Life-Onstage-Backstage/dp/1940213754/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1379912557&sr=1-1&keywords=showgirl+confidential

And please come to my up-coming “Showgirl Confidential” readings! They’re all free and open to the public:

Sunday, Sept. 29, 2013 NORTH HOLLYWOOD CA

Book Release Party Skinny’s Lounge

4923 Lankershim, North Hollywood, CA

6:30-9:30pm 21+ FREE

Monday, Oct. 14, 213 AUSTIN, TX

The Continental Club

1315 S. Congress, Austin

8:30-10:00pm FREE

Wednesday, Oct. 15, LOS FELIZ, CA

Skylight Books

181 N. Vermont Ave, LA 90067

7pm FREE

Thursday, Nov.14, 2013 ECHO PARK, CA

Stories Books & Café

1716 Sunset Blvd, LA 90026

7:00pm FREE

 Sunday, Dec. 14, 2013 LOS ANGELES, CA

Chevalier's Books

126 N. Larchmont, LA 90004

4:00pm FREE

 

Pleasant as Princess Farhana ( BELLY DANCE),  Photo  by Maharet Hughes

Photo by Maharet  Hughes/GRAPHIC VIBE

 PLEASANT 1977 - PHOTO BY  THERESA KEREAKES

unstuck in time again

I’m always mentioning on here how I try to make dead things from my past (dead people, friendships, places) come back to life by researching them online.  Well I spent hours trying to use Google maps to get an aerial view of a house of a friend of my mom’s that she doesn’t know anymore.  This man was a packrat, but if you have to be one, he was a pretty good one – his floors were littered with money and old paperback books of Peanuts cartoons, his favorite, and also weir things like that Snoopy Sno-Cone maker from the 1980’s that many of us my age may remember.  This packrat indoors was cool in its way but I’m way too used to packrat environs to be interested in all the half-buried treasure trash for long, but he lived in a pretty neighborhood, and his back yard was absolutely one of a kind.  Hidden in the overgrown grass was some of the most beautiful tilework I’ve ever seen.  I had a suspicion that some famous tile person must’ve made and laid these tiles him/herself they were so lovely.  I can’t go back to that house but I thought if I spent long enough on the computer, I could find a picture of it, at least, but no dice. 

However, I did find a current picture of the Glendale bungalow where the ghost that leads me, Bill Tunilla, used to live, also from google maps, and I’ll share it here.  I remember one time when I parked in the lot to the side of the bungalow, I walked past his bedroom window to get to courtyard and his front yard, and I heard him say “Hi Robin,” and, straining to see through the window screen, I saw him laying in bed, reading a novel, maybe Saul Bellow or Barbara Pym, with his cat laying down with him, and I just loved him so much then.  My mom told me a serial killer used to live at his apartment (after him) but I tried looking this up, and, nope.

Tender Monster Destiny

Tender Monster Destiny

            Hope Street is a street just like any other in Los Angeles, except that its name makes it seem promising.  A useless person sitting in his or her car at a stop light and seeing that they are about to intersect Hope would probably think, Could this be a sign?

            Are there plain white college boys hidden in apartments on this street, writing screenplays for a movie they’re going to make someday for Public Television about their L.A. experience?

            The name makes this street sound full of action and import, a street with a secret, a street that lives out its charm with the clean bend of palm trees and Hopscotch formations drawn on its pavement.

            It was on this street that Joe’s car passed Judy and John Freshflower, the ex-proprietors of a Chinese restaurant that used to be next door to Joe’s store.  It’s Christmastime, and these are Christmases lived covertly in the lives of our imaginings, our imaginings being the sanctuary against what’s real down here. 

            From the age of seven, I knew I wanted to be famous.  I wanted to be the Beatles, so that I wouldn’t have to lay in bed listening to them on the radio, growing anxious thinking of how I would never be able to express in words the way their songs on the radio made me feel nostalgia even for the present moment. I wanted all the other people who were listening to the radio at the same time as me to be listening to songs sung by me, and I would sing songs about their favorite memories, of a father wearing a Santa Claus beard, a hydrangea bush peeking out from under a blanket of snow, going on a game show, drinking beer with a first boyfriend.

I didn’t become famous.  I became a typist in a mortuary.  The antique shop Joe owned went out of business, and he became an old man working at McDonald’s. 

Tender. Monster.  Destiny.  At night when the curve of a freeway overpass moves your body closer to death and waitlessness, the lit-up McDonald’s seen down below seems the perfect beacon.  I’ve been to McDonalds’ throughout the country but I was never an adventurer.  I was an agoraphobic who would tell my hosts when they’d get home from work that I spent the whole day feeling out the city, when really I’d spend the day sleeping the sleep of store-bought pills I got in a 30%-off bin at the grocery store Nora and I used to live near.

       In college, my roommate Nora and I ended up with two cats, Blackie and Rose White. The grass and wildflowers in our back yard grazed the low slopes of hanging clotheslines. We mostly slept over at her boyfriend’s house because our own house lacked panache and never had any food in the fridge.  She’d pull her car into the space next to the trash bin, and Blackie and Rose White would gallop through the weed jungle to     greet us.  Nora and I referred to the cats as our family, though we often forgot to feed them.  Rose White ran away, and one morning I found Blackie curled up behind an old paint can in the garage, dead.

            Judy and John Freshflower owned the Chinese restaurant near Joe’s old antique shop.  What Joe and I had was the surrogate father and daughter relationship that could only be shared by a man who thought he drank too much to have his own family, and the daughter of a woman abandoned by a man who’d said he was just going out for a pack of cigarettes, just like all the fleeing husbands of the nineteen-fifties are purported to have said to their wives.  What Joe and I had with Judy and John Freshflower was the kind of friendship that people sharing the same small square of carpet in a giant city develop.  When Joe would babysit me at his shop, he’d park in a lot overlooking the alley behind his and the Freshflowers’ businesses.  Often, exiting the car, we’d find Judy sitting at the wire table she’d set up in the alley, drinking tea from the blue kettle on the table’s yellow tablecloth.

            One time, she let Joe pass ahead of me a little bit before stopping me.  “Young girl, I would like to show you something.”  This was our first moment.  Judy grinned a big, Americanized grin.  “Are you ready?” she asked.  She pulled back the yellow tablecloth, and there, sitting under the table, was Blackie.

            I did not know who he was then.  I didn’t yet know about time travel.  Then, I was just a quiet eleven year old. I wore my pink satin baseball-style jacket with the denim heart sewn on the back and my name written in cursive letters with fabric paint in the middle of the heart.  Years later, I would go to college in another town, where Kurt Cobain’s ghost never walked me to Planned Parenthood but where the ghost of a happier rock star would tell me, “Hey, take it easy.  You’re young and life is so cool!” and I would never listen.  Years later, I understood what Judy had revealed to me that day in the alley.  Immortality.  Tender destiny.

            The day mom realized dad was never coming back with his cigarettes, she walked to Joe’s shop and invited him out for drinks, his treat.  She was pretty and complex.  He remained her best friend through all of the new boyfriends she met and walked away from.  There was a schizophrenic with a beard, who glued covers of mystery novels to pieces of cardboard and sent them through the mail to our subdued apartment in the valley, where we dutifully threw them in the trash and wished out loud that he would not stalk us.  There was an artist with worn-through long-sleeved shirts and silky hair, who jumped up and down on the Murphy bed with me one night when I couldn’t get to sleep, and ruined holidays with his moodiness.  There was a Vietnam Vet who was homeless when we first met him.  There was a lawyer who used to live in New York in the apartment where Rosemary’s Baby was filmed.

            Joe was the man who drove me to and from school when mom was at work, and who drove me from school to her work, to pick her up.  For awhile, Joe and I had a routine of stopping every Tuesday morning before school at a small bakery, for cheese danishes.  “Does the woman who worked there still remember us?” the little-girl-me who wanted to be famous asks.  We also had a routine of going to a video arcade after school on Fridays, and one of renting movies from the Central Library.

            Tender.  Our longest-running routine was of waiting in a park near mom’s office for her to get off work.  The drive there from my school was a drive through Mexican neighborhoods with colorful tigers painted on grocery store signs and baby girls dressed like morning glories.  This was before mom started working at home.  Joe and I would sit together in the park, not talking, the actual moments as quiet and poignant as memories.

            Monster.  I am now the kind of young women who forgets to feed her cats, letting them run away or die.  When I moved back to L.A., I put my Bachelor’s Degree in a desk drawer, and, not foreseeing any way to ever become famous, became a typist.  Joe’s antique shop went out of business; eventually, the building was torn down.  I dream of that place, but without its electricity or walls, or its merchandise.  On the other side of the shop there used to be a bar called Nardi’s, with a juke box that played lovelorn songs by Elvis Costello and the Pretenders that we could hear through the wall as we sat in the shop, playing card games or checkers.  Now it feels like Elvis is dead.

            Destiny.  At a red light on Hope Street, on our way to a coffee shop where mom waits for us, Joe spots the Freshflowers and decide to pull over. 

            “Joe.  I haven’t seen you since the store got torn down.  How are you?  How have you been?”

            “Not so bad, John.  I was selling things on E-Bay for awhile but I wasn’t making enough money, so now I work at McDonald’s.  It’s…and you?  You guys moved the restaurant over to that marketplace across from the new Target, right?”

            “Yeah, but we’ve been having some trouble.  Actually, we’re closing down in a few weeks.  We’re going to have to find a location with cheaper rent.  But you have to come to the restaurant before it closes, have a meal on us.”

            “I certainly will,” Joe says, but he never makes it to that last meal. Christmas morning, he wakes up with the stomach flu, and once he has recovered, he finds Judy and John absent from the space where their wasted efforts occurred.  What matters, though, is this chance meeting on Hope Street.  Judy is carrying a purse made out of woven white plastic straw, with blue and red and yellow plastic flowers sewn on it.  “I have something for you, young lady,” she whispers in my ear, smiling.  Her purse moves with something alive inside of it.  I open the purse.  Dear god, it is Blackie.