Do What a Father Does

Week 8
I'm dashing this off before Lucha gets here and wants to tell me all about her daughter on drugs. It's more than I can take. She's on the phone all day. The b knows it and doesn't care. She calls rehab places and parents of teen agers who have gone there, and is back and forth with the insurance company. And then fights with her husband over what they should do. He believes the girl, Jody, will outgrow this. Yesterday Lucha was screaming at him Do what a Father does. If you had she wouldn't be like this), and then at Jody (I know you're using again. You can't fool me. Don't talk about my drinking, it's not the same thing.) Last night I was playing back my video of me at my desk talking to a teacher on the phone about how to build a group story when from one day to the next the group isn't the same. In the background you can hear Lucha screaming, “Who do you know outgrew heroin?” Machi said, “I get it. Why I don't make art is the art.” He thinks his mother is clever. I'm glad he can't see through to my despair the way I'm always afraid he can. How can I get him to believe that life is good when I can't tell? The teacher, his name is Reinaldo, is the same one who doesn't want to deliver free labor. “How am I going to make these texts when I'm teaching 9 to 3? When am I going to transcribe them?”I played my video over and over thinking I should make a loop and Machi started to pay attention to Lucha's voice in the background. He made the connection to his girlfriend Sammy too. “I didn't want to tell you she hasn't been back to school. She told me she's got a job dancing. I think it's exotic dancing. You know what that means. I don't believe half of what she tells me.”
I lived through my reading at the Casa Espana. I was so out of my body I had vertigo looking down from where I floated near the chandelier from Spain at the little figure of myself in my good luck black reading dress clutching the japanesey black and white jacket my old student lined in red. I was a speck of disembodied protoplasm. The woman Jacobo never loved. “Do you remember how you were when we first met?” He said that to me. It made my head spin and I threw the beer bottle. I didn't say, “You mean you were lying when you said I was a dazzling, brilliant poet and you booked me to do readings at your club? Him reading my poems, admiring my poems had given me the courage to write and produce and act in plays. At last my Papi was giving me permission to write. While I was reading at the Casa Espana the speck of my essence that was left of me floated just above the glittering crystal tear drops, as if my being a poet had lived inside Jacobo's gaze. His fucking gaze. Well you psychopathic sexual predator, you serial philanderer, I'll show you. Every morning since the reading I've been getting up to write at 5 AM. I wake up terrified and can't sleep anyway and I grab my notebook and before I even get out of bed to pee I start to write. Kafka used to work at his bureaucratic job until the early afternoon, come home and take a nap and write all night.
While I was reading clutching myself looking down at my book on the podium the words of my same old novel sounded like they came from no mind, let alone my mind, and it's only when I got through the last sentence that for one moment I came into my body and felt solid and truthful. Who did I see in the audience just in that moment but Xiomara! I hadn't seen her since the Island Libertad Party days and those didn't end well. After the reading was over a thin young white guy from a publishing house was giving me his card just as Xiomara rushed me, grabbed my hands, and kissed me on the cheek. “You always said you wanted to be a writer and now you are!” She probably came straignt from xagency, from her new formica shiny office on the top floor close to the commissioner. I couldn't believe it when I saw the Memo announcing her appointment as Deputy Commisioner for Community Relationships. She was still in some sort of corporate suit, red with a tight skirt, and had the same incongruously pretty face that never prepares you for the knives up her sleeve. While I was with her I was glad to be with her, such is her charisma. It's only later that it ever sinks in what it was she was up to because she always is up to something other than whatever the moment seems.
I can only imagine she bothered to turn up at the Casa Espana to see if I still remember how much I hate her from the Partido days, to neutralize me. So the first time I ran into her wasn't in the hall at work where her competence would dazzle me as it did in the ILP. Somehow the kiss was supposed to keep me from telling anyone what I know about her. Little does she know the bb already pumped me.
I wanted to be a writer but I'm a bureaucrat instead is what I didn't say to her or to Machi who was so taken by my little why I don't make art video tape. I go to dead star readings and read old texts I barely remember writing. I'm a zombie right now because I got up at 5 to write this morning. I haven't been writing regularly for months. I couldn't remember the characters' names.
Lucha's here. She stormed past my desk grunted good morning and grabbed the telephone. “Well now she's flunked out of the outpatient program. She tried to slug somebody in group. Are you going to let me bring her in to residential?” Somebody give that woman some valium.