Image by wakingphotolife:
Chapter 1.
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Everything that I wasn't able to sell or give away, I moved to Doris and Ray's garage next door. They offered me their basement, converted into a spare bedroom, until I found a new place but I told them it was alright.
“Stay as long as you want,” Ray said, “I know what it's like.”
“Honestly, it's nothing.”
“You sure? It's just Doris and I.”
“Nothing but a setback. We all go through them right?” I said.
“Yup.”
We were at the Golden Bear; he stopped me when I tried to pay the bartender. “I got it. Don't worry about it man.”
Besides the bedrooms, my house is empty. In a week, I will no longer call it my house.
The landlord gave me a month before she'd change the locks and hand the keys to the new owners. This is how she phrased it. Maybe it was the beer bottles I forgot to put away, my unshaven face, the pile of magazines and newspapers strewn about the sofa, and the broken ceiling lamp from when she came over to talk to me about the deposit.
I have been restless through the entire summer and now there's only a week left. I regret not doing more. The few freelance clients I had left stopped calling after going through the last rounds of pushed deadlines.
Eleven o'clock, ten, twelve—on my days, I wake up late in the morning. The sun is at the top of the blinds by that time. I am listless through the afternoon and kept up at night by the guilt of having nothing to show for the days.
Lhasa is somewhere in the house. Either under the staircase, in the pantry, or behind the curtains of the kitchen window where a tall cherry tree shades that side of the house. This cat has spent the entire season in hiding.
I call her name as I walk, checking all her sanctuaries throughout the house. Today, she has chosen the staircase.
The house is quiet and I can hear her claws clack off the hardwood floors. I have become use to a silent house. Every aspect of it—the delayed sound of water traveling through the pipes, the natural creak of the walls at night, the clank of the blinds against the window, Lhasa in her daily wandering—moves in to replace the lack of human noises.
Though she does like to be handled by anyone besides Anne, I pick Lhasa up anyway. She struggles against my forearms and chest but I hold her steady, stroking the underside of her chin until she closes her eyes and settles herself. She runs hot and cold, from craving your affection to you not existing at all. I am running hot and cold now as well. I will be the one that's dictating.
“Tell me, when is your master coming back?” I say.
She looks away.
**
Saturday today. There are still some boxes in the corner of the room. Books, movies, things from the kitchen. Last night, I found and dragged one down from the attic. I wrote “Misc.” written across the front with a Sharpie but hadn't bothered to look inside. A gallery contact offered to buy some prints so I went out to meet them. When I came home, I forgot all about it.
Lhasa starts to contort herself. Knowing her bite, I set her down and watch her go down the hall and back to her space. I am never in control, not even today.
August. No fans around.
In the downtown Victorians, the heat hangs itself from the ceiling and forces you to be aware of it at all hours. You can see the distortions in the air if you focus long enough. The windows are open but nothing is going through them even though the leaves of the cherry tree are rocking back and forth outside.
I look at my watch, it's noon and already, my t-shirt is clinging to my back.
There's a bag of baby carrots, celery sticks, some eggs, and two bottles of Pabst inside the fridge. I take the Pabst and walk into the living room and open the box. “Alright, let's have a look inside.”
There are nothing but photo albums in the box, stacks of them. The top one is bound in a brown leather cover. When I thumb the edges, it comes off onto my finger like saw-dust. How long has this been in the attic? I don't know. How did it get there? I don't know. I open it.
Family photos. Photos from my childhood.
My fat cheeks fill the frames. Cheap blue jeans, torn t-shirts, sweatsuit outfits with misspelled labels: Rebok, Nika, Adias. I'm standing in front of a merry-go-round with my mom next to me. She's holding my hand while smiling into the camera. Free arm at my side, my shoulders are slouched forward, and the corners of my lips turned down.
Teal paint is chipping and peeling away from the edges of the horse carriages and tea cups.
My mom and I are composed left of center. My dad took this photo. I know because this is how I would've placed ourselves, left of center. We are in between two flying horses. The lens flare travels over our faces, the light casting everything under a pale magenta all the way into the bottom right corner.
I slide the photo out from underneath the plastic cover. On the back in slanting cursive, it reads June 25th, 1986—Great America, San Jose. My fifth birthday.
Before we moved, my father's cameras were a fixture in my parent's bedroom. They were placed high above the shelf on the entertainment center. The first camera he bought was a Minolta Maxxum 5000. In one of the photos, he is standing behind me in front of the store counter as I am setting up a tripod in the foreground. The description says January 2nd, 1986—Ritz Camera.
It was the first camera produced with auto-focus and a motorized film advance; the shutter release held the sound of the '80s. My mother and I relived our lives in rolls of cheap Kodak film.
This is the same camera that I started with.
I sit against the wall and turn to the next section of the album. It's marked by a post-it note written in the same sprawling handwriting, Middle School—12 to 14, the note falls out of the album when I turn the page over.
My face is beginning to even out. A chin and jawline emerges. Instead of a bowl-cut, my hair is combed to the sides, and faded high in that typical '90s “A-Z-N” cut. The center part comes through like a white chalk line on my scalp. Red dots populate where they my long and jelled bangs end. They are where the acne would later sprout like cauliflower.
Lhasa is coming down the hall as I'm looking at the album. I can hear her footprints. She passes by me in the living room. She jumps onto the kitchen counter-top and except for her tail lingering around the center, she is hidden by the curtains. My forearms are slick, leaving damp marks on the thighs of my jeans. I'm due for another beer.
The mist from the fridge is cold and spreads along my arm when I reach into it. I take my glasses off and open the top freezer compartment. I stand for a while in front of it, leaning forward, I want to stick my head in there. For some reason, the image of Sylvia Plath with her head in an oven comes to me though I thought I'd die from putting my head into the freezer.
When I touch my temples, I can feel the shallow contours of the acne scars left there. I remember that this is why I turn towards the camera or away from it, whenever Anne or anyone else tried to take pictures of my profile.
The photos from middle school were different than the ones at the beginning. I am placed at the far ends of the frame—arms, legs, feet cut off. If not, then I am dead center. My skin is oily and lifeless under the harsh camera flash.
None of the photos are dated.
We moved to Sacramento in 1993. My father stayed in San Jose for the first few years while my mother and I lived alone in our new home. I saw him on weekends. Or during the middle of the week, the headlights of his Buick climbing along the wall in my parent's room late at night, in dream like sequences where he stood in my doorway and was gone by the time I woke up for school.
More than half of the photos from that part of the album were from my graduation.
It rained on that day. I have the faint image of my mom wearing the chunky Minolta, using it as ledge to place her crossed hands, around her neck. All the photos came out blurry under the dim gym lights and I am indistinguishable from any of the people next to me.
On the way home from the ceremony, the crew blew a flat. This is my most vivid memory: tire iron in hand, I knelt on the wet asphalt in my only pair of dress slacks.
I take my head out of the freezer. My face feels cool; my ears are burning.
The thermostat above the recycle box, where I put the empty bottles and cans, says 97. It is likely triple digits outside. I can see Doris on their backyard porch through the window above the sink. She's laid out across the recliner with a book in front her eye. Ray and Doris have one month to go before the ninth.
I return to the photo album and sit on the stairs. It's late mid-afternoon now and the sun has crept up along the walls in the living room. Lhasa is nowhere to be found.
I have a more difficult time trying to read the handwriting on the next post-it label. Same slanting letters bending over themselves towards the right. But this time, the lines are not as uniform, not written in one smooth stroke. They start and stop with tremors in between.
High School—14 to18. Four pages, sixteen 4x6's in all. Like the section before it, most of them are also from my. But there are also dates on the back of these.
My face is fat again. Even more so with the pair of thin silver half-framed glasses I have on. My mom is now a small and petite woman standing next to me.
One of my hands is lifted in a thumbs-up sign, the other is putting the graduation cap on top of her voluminous perm. She's clutching my diploma in front of her, both hands, and is looking directly into the camera. Her crossed left eye is more prominent in these photos and it makes her appear as if she's looking at something off the frame. May 31st, 1999 – Half of our work is done is what it says on the back.
It's the last picture in the album. I close it and set it's disintegrating shell back into the box.
It's been more than half a decade since I've last seen or thought about these photos. I look around this empty house and then at the closed album. They are of me but I don't belong in them; I look at the back of my hands and turn them over. I am in the but not in them. I close my eyes and comb through my memories, trying to find the scenes that are in the photos. Except the day with the flat tire, nothing registers. Nothing that was taken.
I touch the scars on the sides of my head again. The deepest impressions are hidden under my thick glass frames. They have become apart of my face. Without them, I can't see anything, not even the features of my face in the mirror.
“I want to see photos from when you were a little kid,” Anne asked once.
“I don't have many and they're all at my parent's place anyway,” I told her.
**
It is evening now. I've fallen asleep on the floor with my arm underneath my head. I massage the muscles there. After dinner a quick dinner, instant noodles, I carry the box to Doris and Ray's place.
Ray answers the door after I ring the doorbell. “More stuff huh?” he says. He's standing, in his shirt and tie, in the doorway with a spatula in hand. The air smells of bacon and eggs and in the background, I hear the sizzling from the frying pan in the kitchen.
“Yeah. Besides whatever is left upstairs, this is the last of it,” I say.
“Come on in. I'm just walking a quick snack. Do you want something to drink?”
“Sure.”
“Johnnie Walker?” Ray says behind him while on his way back to the kitchen.
It's quiet. The only other sounds are coming from the evening news on the TV.
“Yeah. Not too much though. Where's Doris?”
“She's taking a breather on the sofa.”
“Ah. I see.”
I take the box down the hall and into the garage where I set it beside all my other belongings on the far side of the wall, away from Doris' Toyota. I pull my t-shirt off my chest and fan myself. It's musty. I can traces of dust drift through light by the open side door. Even at nine o'clock, it's still light outside.
A whiskey glass with two cubes of ice stands on the kitchen nook when I go back inside. I finish it in three sips and lean against the counter. From here, I can see Doris sleeping on the sofa. The ceiling fan is on high flutters the stray locks of hair bordering her face. She's in the same gray maternity dress from when I saw her in the afternoon.
I realize I don't remember how she looked before she was pregnant. The idea that it's only been a year and a half since Anne and I had come over for Thanksgiving dinner, to meet the new neighbors, is strange. It should have been longer than that but no, it's only a year and a half. On other days, it feels shorter than that, a month or two ago.
Still...a year and a half.
I'm amused by my forgetfulness and I try to think about what has happened to me.
“Nice weather huh?” Ray says. He turns the fan above the stove off and sits down on a stool across from me.
“Do you want something to eat?” he says.
“I'm alright. I just had dinner before I got here.” I say.
“It's going to be a scorcher this week.”
“I'm sweating already.”
"The heat makes people go crazy; they do all kinds of things.”
“I thought it'd be the other way around.”
“No at all. Have you heard of the Santa Ana winds?”
“In Los Angeles?”
“Yup. People call it the Red Wind because they think it makes the rates of homicides go up.”
“It's the same in Sacramento?”
“Nope. It's just an urban legend. It's all bullshit.”
Ray laughs.
“That's great for you then,” I say.
I pour myself a shot.
“So you're going to stay in Sacramento?” Ray says.
“Probably. I'm a valley kid now, 916 lifer. Maybe I'll just move down the street.”
As I'm leaving, Ray hands me their spare garage door opener. “Just take it,” he says, “You still got a bunch of stuff right?”
Baby acne
Image by A-A-A
Anika has had baby acne since since her 3rd week. Unfortunately it can last until 6 mo. Can´t stop taking pictures for that long!
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