HELD

The idea that it can’t be written any other way because it is complete, permanent, and stoic. A kind of formalism I guess. The first word births the next word births the next, and then the last word births the first. You lose the rush of spontaneity, but then you lose the gibberish of it also. Because it can’t move any other way, it must move forward, and it moves like a heavy rusted gear that wrecks your back. I like that. This though, is not that.

I come from a place with lots of trees where the grass stays green all year round even with snow on top of it. My insides shrivelled when we ran over some tumble weeds and they took a spin in the wheel wells of the minivan. There are more miserable locations, like federal penitentiaries, concentration camps or Somalia, or, if you really want to chase this unlucky rabbit, maybe go down into a hole in the rubble of a collapsed building. A lot of places where one could be thirstier and lonelier.

They took my suitcase and said I needed only my toothbrush. I couldn’t have a book, and anyway, I wouldn’t have time for it. At night I opened the window but there weren’t any trees to listen to, and I missed the sound of them more than the greenery. The mornings brought nose-bleeds, which I learned eventually to promote my blowing violently to get out of breakfast formation at six.

My roommate was a girl from Las Crucas, New Mexico whose mother had died, replaced by a beautiful but evil stepmother who forced her to eat food scraps off the floor, so she said. She was so fucked up it was hard to decide which of her stories were just made up in order to be wound tightly, like a tourniquet, around her wounds and their seepage of the unmentionable abuses. Her name was Micaela Heller. She slept on the bottom bunk because she didn’t want to fight me for the top.

I told stories too, about the reason I got sent there. I said that my mother was so selfish that when I outgrew my sneakers, she wouldn’t buy me a new pair, and I had to wear them two sizes small with my toes sticking out. I said that she had no problem blowing wads of money on her gigolo boyfriend, and had gotten him a Porshe for Valentine’s Day and a cottage on the seashore where he could work on his horrendously bad paintings of ducks. I snuck into her room and stole a diamond bracelet which I pawned for five hundred bucks which I used to buy a plane ticket to go visit my Cousin Liza, a heroin junkie in Toronto. My mom found me there after three months seriously messed up and weighing seventy pounds. We had a big fight, but she promised to set up a trust fund for me if I got cleaned up. I moved back in, but a month later she caught me blowing her boyfriend, and that was the last straw.

In fact, my parents were quiet people who were still married, and Dad drove a minivan and Mom couldn’t drive and didn’t own diamonds. The baddest thing I had ever done, in their opinion, was refuse to clean my room for a month. They wanted Jesus Christ in their lives, but not me.

Elena is on the phone with me. I figure if she’s going to pop her pills and smoke and go trotting off into her dangerous crooked alleys, I’m not obligated to follow too closely. I’m going to write and read an article or two and tune back into her conversation when like right now, she talks about the ghosts in her grandmother’s old plantation home and the two hidden rooms in the basement with the chains that she and her sister discovered and got thrashed for discovering as kids. There was an axe and a jug too, she says.

Let’s talk about it, for God’s sake. Up North we were too enlightened to keep people in chains, but out of thirty students, I don’t have a single black kid. Out of four hundred students at the school, there isn’t a single black child. Isn’t that a little too obvious to scoot under the rug?

When I taught privately in the Midwest, four out of fifteen of my kids were black, and it’s not like this was some kind of proactive search–they were just normal kids and parents who wanted lessons. So I just don’t get (or I do get it, but it’s too risky to blurt out) why Massachusetts is so segregated. It’s totally fucked up. People pretend to be outraged with anything that hints of racism, but they have ways. Waspy, quiet ways.

I hate that I sound like a small white girl, especially when I sing.

Too much wine–the lawyer down the street and his slightly kinky girlfriend, mousy brown hair, bangs, gold hoops and necklaces and a potty mouth. A lawyer who doesn’t work for the ruling class. You can talk for three hours on the one thing you have in common: living on the same street. The weirdo neighbours and a comparison of whose house is shittier; our with the dropped ceiling panels or theirs with the wood panelling.

If I drink a lot this month, maybe I’ll be able to sing jazz by 2010. Ach du, I’m never going to be able to coo.

Class pisses me off so much. Artists are always servants. Rich people buy you. But is there any other way? Even after you’re dead, they still buy you.

The guy who owns Yacob Funds LLC is playing Mary Had a Little Lamby in twelve keys.

You know, I hate how Google makes me so paranoid. I am checking with Google to make sure Yacob Funds doesn’t exist, and praying that my reference to a children’s song doesn’t get pulled up by a home schooler who might know me because I taught piano to five of her nine children. Google, you are a blackmailing pimp.

Mary was for real. This, you can also Google. She lived in Massachusetts. When you see a watercolor drawing of her, with buttercups and a lamb, she’s six or seven years old. The real Mary, however, was eleven when the incident took place, so the question of why she didn’t tie the lamb to its post or put it back in its pen leads me to speculate that Mary was a prankster. Then, to capture the event for posterity, Mary’s friend John wrote a poem about it, and inexplicably, like a stupid cat video, Mary’s song infected the globe. (They had their songs, we have our Youtube.) Perhaps we can find one person on this globe who doesn’t have the tune stuck in their childhood neurons, in Upper Mongolia or Deepest Africa.

Mr. Yacob is turning deepest African red (water buffalo-kill red) stumbling through Mary’s song in the key of C-sharp, with a I-V7 accompaniment. “I’m going backwards. Not only am I not learning anything, I am actually going backwards.” I’m inclined to agree. I am failing him as a teacher.

I am checking out his thighs, looking past his hands. They are muscular, and they stretch tight against his pants. His hands are fat and hairy. I have to blow my nose. I get up and blow my nose, and wipe my hands with the alcohol sanitizer that sits on top of the piano.

Mr. Yacob is short. Possibly only three inches taller than me. When he goes home before his lessons instead of coming straight from work, he changes into a Yale sweatshirt and clogs. Have you ever seen a man wear clogs? Don’t ask me how, but it totally works on him. The Yale sweatshirt not so much, but he’s proud of his kids.

I am going to have to be a better teacher for Mr. Jacob.

At our last two lessons, he’s talked about being Jewish. Maybe because I wrote a four-hand arrangement of Havah Nagila for my kids. He said that the one thing Jewish parents provided for with no questions asked was tuition for college, and I’m thinking immediately of the three or four Jewish kids I knew with single moms who had to scrounge around for scholarships. I tell him I don’t know how the hell I am going to provide for my daughter’s education, what with Freddy’s job as an envelope-tearer-opener. (I filled out some job applications for him and was tempted to put “678 envelopes opened and sorted per hour” under “Additional Skills”.)

It’s funny like Kafka, I tell myself. Freddy works with Puerto Ricans and they bring in spicy pork and chicken for their breaks while he has to make do with cup-o-ramen because I don’t cook much these days. He flirts with a single 22-year-old mom named Jennifer Lopez who wears her thong so that is shows above her low-waisted jeans and fights to be in line at the microwave with little guy named Axil Rosa.

Mr. Yacob advises me with which stocks I should buy and tells me to start saving now. I don’t have anything to save. I have a keen business sense (really, I do) but that doesn’t help when you have nothing to begin with. The one thing that I could sell is myself, but I don’t want to. It’s a lot of unpleasant work, and you have to deal with people you can’t stand.

Zulieka has gone away, and left in her stead is this uptight mousy thing with hag hair, hair and bones. It takes fish oil and Vitamin D supplements, and stashes fifty bucks into a mutual fund instead of getting a haircut. You think you want pictures of it, boys? You are warned, it’s like an albino octopus from the deep, weird in an eww way and not something to stick in your mouth. Throw a blanket over it, quickly.

I wanted popcorn. He would stop the movie and pop the corn if licked his stick a minimum of three times with the promise to complete the task afterwards. The ritual of sex to me is become as boring and bland as dry turkey and cranberry. (Fucking turkey day again!)

He pinned my arms down to keep me from shielding my breasts. He has very long arms, and can reach just about everything else with his nose while holding my wrists up by my head. So this was a new thing, the mock-force, and there’s no point in hiding the fact that I was turned on by it. He’s so passive in daily life, so the hard-on (sanguine, virile, all pumped up and thrust out while the rest of him sleeps) and just the fact that he can overpower me in some way, if not in mental capacity, at least with strong arms, deserves respect.

He goes down on me and sucks at it hard so that it’s a raw nerve being zapped. Excruciating. I lay there and try to distance myself from the pain and just observe, because this is funny shit. My muscles are spazzing involuntarily, and the lower half of me is twitching violently as if I’m being electrocuted. He does his pokes and prods and I am his Frau Frankenstein. But I will not come at his bequest.

You might wonder if it’s such torture, why I fell for him. Because for the simple in and out, no frills, Freddy has everyone beat hands down. This is how Zeus would do a shepherdess. I hate him for it. I am a really sweet girl after he fucks me. It changes my personality. He thinks the sweet one is the authentic one, but we know better.

Please find me at www.zulieka.blogspot.com for now. This site should be up in a month.