QTNOEK - First Draft - Now with explanation!

L. Gamari

First Draft

Fiction II

February 21, 2012

The Quiet Things No One Ever Knows

by Magali Roze Herrera

Franklin Forrest Foster: I

Las Vegas, Nevada is no place for children. Less than ten miles off Flamingo Road, you’ll find the same meth-lab-trailers and discarded-black-rubber-tires which litter the rest of the state: nothing different here. The exception, of course, being Vegas; sitting like the Hope Diamond on a pillow of orange dust. Either way, they’re just damn rocks, cut and made pretty.  Naivety is easier to come by and more dangerous than any drug or itch you might pick up on the Strip. You’ve got to be careful or you might as well live with your heart outside your chest; running around just waiting to get tripped up. Let the ruby organs of you go splattering across some inconsequential sidewalk – another mess for others to avoid. If you want to survive, whatever you do: don’t be a fool and don’t fall in love with strangers.

Bright lights striking the black night. Spinning wheels of fortune. Warm, heady clubs packed with sweating men and scattered rhinestones. Vegas is a promise it can’t keep and has no intention of keeping. Vegas is a lie told to save face at any cost. Vegas is where my father raised his son.

We could have moved after my mother left. Gone East to Philly, or North to Seattle. Packing then would have been lightest as I had no memories yet to take with us. But he stayed and drove his unlicensed cab, selling narcotics out of the trunk while I sat on benches watching the parades of feathers and jewelry and heels and furs and wigs and jelly breasts like chicken cutlets, and once a pair of false teeth, inspected quickly by their owner before being popped back into place just in time to lay a wet kiss on some unwitting dope. Here, everyone is a whore. Anything can be bought.

So I grew hard and prickly as a cactus, surviving where flowery fragility has failed in the dry, eternal sunshine of the Mojave. That is the secret of the city, the mirage: beauty found where it shouldn’t be, where it doesn’t belong; it’s enough to delude the freaks, the escapees, the idiots, the vagabonds, the romantics who flock to a glammed up dump like this, but I know better.

Magali Roze Herrera: I

The most interesting person I’ve ever met? On a bare wooden table in Herrera’s Bar, Magali crushes out the end of an unlit cigarette, not watching the white paper snap and scatter the tobacco as she reaches for her drink. Franklin Forrest Foster. Taking a sip, she sets down the glass with an uneven thud-clang. What a stupid name.

She yawns and her lips part, red with wine. Under the buzzing of yellow and blue neon, she’s been drawing all morning, all through the previous night. Sketches fill three notebooks, grey with graphite, and one that’s warped with spilt booze. Eyes clear. The lashes long. And his hair, shaggy no matter what; golden even in low light. Oh and shoulders, arms - slim but strong. And that damn flannel.  Magali opens a new pack of Menthols, letting the plastic film fall into the dark expanse beneath the table. Smoke twirls up into ceiling fans, up into the rafters, weaving and crossing in two snakes of white, like the shadow of a double helix. Balls, something’s not right.

Magali! Her name comes pouncing over the bar.

It’s probably just Ted. Yeah? She calls back.

He’s howling: Mah-Gull-Eee-Get-Ohver-Herr-Nahow-Pleece.

In the kitchen, Ted is snorting cocaine with his usual rolled up hundred dollar bill, perhaps the only one he can hold onto, bleached white from daily use. Next to him is a woman wearing too much make up and too little clothes; the strap of her dress falling over her shoulder mirrors the smear of mascara arching down the side of her face. No other details are necessary for Magali to register - a whore’s a whore. First thing she learned working for Ted: don’t ask a question if you don’t want to know the answer.

Ted stands, dusting off his nose with the back of his hand. Without looking at them he says, Magali, Sandra, Sandra, Magali. Play nice now.

Franklin Forrest Foster: II

Scared of the cockroaches, I could lay awake for hours – parched – my breath turned to dust – rather than flip on the kitchen light and watch them scatter. Instead of dreaming, I look away from the naked window’s street lit glow and watch squiggles play tricks in my eyes, my own personal kaleidoscope. I also listen, can’t help but listen, to the nocturnal cantata of my neighbors. Their buzzing fridges and blowing fans; voices low and high, back and forth; fucking, fighting, sometimes both. Just before the world turns blue, my father comes home; always keys first, then a thud, and then the bolt returning to its locked position with a brassy ka-clunk.  He will knock on my door in a few hours to wake me for school, and to the closed door I will say I’m sick, and he will let me stay home and sleep or read until noon. Then we’ll go to the Strip.

The money he makes as a cabbie is enough for rent. The money he makes selling drugs from the trunk of his cab is enough for everything else, which is enough for me. Cushioned in crushed velvet, not a burn or a stain in sight, the Oldsmobile is my father’s life and everyday of it, he drives. On the East Coast, towns blur into one another, overstepping their boundaries and crowding each other like desperate teenagers on a dance floor. Here there are miles and miles of nothing and then, suddenly, you’re somewhere.

Shots of music fire from passing cars while giant palms scatter sunshine across wide avenues. Surrounded by deliberate towers of glass, structures and idols and solid stretches of concrete, I am already feeling claustrophobic. Pulling into Herrera’s, I can feel my hands sweat and I grip my wrists, tugging on the cuffs of my flannel. My father calls the owner his friend, which means he sells him coke. If you think it’s stupid to bring your son along on a deal, imagine how stupid it’d be to bring one who doesn’t know jack shit; one who would get all bored and curious. You can handle anything if you know what you’re dealing with, and you can get out of anything so long as the other guy doesn’t.  

My father returns, as he always returns from every business in town, with a Styrofoam box. Herrera’s always gives us the holy grail of sandwiches – layers of roast beef, sourdough, melted cheese, and a pickle. Things have their benefits.

Magali Roze Herrera: II

Magali wipes down the tables in three quick motions. Sandra watches, her dress returned to its proper position, an apron now tied around her tiny waist and neck.

Whenever you’d like to start would be great, Magali snaps.

Sandra looks sleepily at the spread of cups and chairs askew throughout the bar room, as though they might warm up to her and plea to be petted if only she stood there quiet enough for long enough. Magali was ready to snap again when Sandra let out a little squeal of delight.

Oh drawings! I love art! Sandra says.

 Magali picks up eight sticky beer glasses, four in each hand, clamoring them down on the bar as a means of reply, but Sandra clearly does not take hints easily. Bubbling, she asks, Did someone leave these here? Are they yours? What were you drawing?

People I see around the bar, mostly, says Magali.

Oh they all have titles! Sandra points to the top of each page. Right? That’s what these are?

She hadn’t seen the girl pick up them up, and now she was out of reach to snatch the drawings away. Something about the girl’s fingertips near Franklin’s unfinished chest made Magali’s stomach turn over.

Sandra chanted them aloud: The saddest. The most beautiful. The smartest. You know all these people personally?

No, of course not.

Then how do you know if they’re, like, the smartest?

I’m intuitive. Can’t you just look at somebody and pretty much tell – I mean give or take…?

            I don’t know, not really, I always learned making assumptions is a bad idea. You know what they say – an ass out of you and me, right?

            Give them back to me, please, Magali whispers. She hadn’t meant to whisper, but she didn’t want to scream. She mustn’t lose her temper, not over something like this.

            Sandra did not hear her, or pretended not to. Instead, she gaggled on, absorbed.

            Magali looked her over. She couldn’t be older than 18; probably dropped out at 16, just like Franklin. Did she put on an act, like him? Could she be anything like him? You’re from Vegas? She asked her.

Naw, Utah. Mormons. Hell of a place. She’s bubbling again. You from here? You like it here?

She says Hell like she doesn’t say it often enough. Sweetheart, you’ve got a big streak of make-up on your face, Magali says, lifting a tray of silver cutlery and clinking shot glasses, You should go take care of that.

Franklin Forrest Foster: III

My father isn’t home and I can’t sleep. I find the box in the back of his closet, under a stack of old dirty magazines. It might have been their hair, pushing the limits of gravity, or their cartoonish appendages that produced more amusement than deep, groinal yearnings, but I lost interest in that years ago. From the box, I put on the glasses first. I wiggle my head to make them fall forward and then press them back as she might have done; first up the middle, then from the side. Next, a big, blue hat woven with straw or grass; it covers my ears and I feel like Dumbo. Slippery and cool to the touch, silk, and light red, I wrap the scarf around my neck and for a moment imagine there is something mysterious about me – something I don’t even know. There are gloves, the Cinderella kind, pure white and all the way to the elbow.  A dress, a wedding dress, my mother’s wedding dress; it fits me as if my own mother had stood at the hem with water in her eyes, so happy that I was so happy, and proud –

            Keys. Thud. Ka-clunk.

            Stitches split as the dress rips from my body pulling down with it the hat and scarf and glasses and I stuff all of it violently under my bed. My heart pounds in my ribs, my chest; like a fat, round lemming that’d be damned if they didn’t jump out and off the cliff. Moments pass, and I am still standing in the window-light, pale and bare, except for my boxers and those damn long, white gloves.

Magali Roze Herrera: III

            Herrera’s is brimming over with patrons by five o’clock most Friday nights, but tonight isn’t one of them. It’s seven-thirty, and no one has bothered to turn on the jukebox; the TV set only shows closed captions. The few old men around, each alone on stool or chair, don’t speak. Magali sits near the door, sketching. She hasn’t seen Sandra in over a half an hour, and Ted is never around unless he feels like it. She crosses her legs and lights a fresh cigarette.

            Hi! Sorry! I’m back! At Sandra’s appearance, Magali kills the smoke, but too fast, burning the tips of her fingers. She bites down hard on the soft inner flesh of her bottom lip, unwilling to let this girl see her at anything but her best.

            Sandra is oblivious. She’s wearing different clothes, but somehow the same amount of fabric. You’ve got a hot date tonight? Magali asks.

            Yeah, actually – it’s okay if I leave early? I mean, it’s pretty dead, right?

            No problem. Just go when you need to.

            Sandra squishes up her face in false embarrassment and says, Uh, that would be now –

            Magali turns to find herself nose to nose with a familiar young man. Almost every afternoon, he and his father come to Herrera’s. Magali is sure to take out the trash every day at that time, so she can watch him sit in the Oldsmobile and wait. Hey, she says, backing into a chair and sitting down though she hadn’t deliberately meant to, but still graceful enough to pass.

            He nods to her, his blond hair – even in the low light –

            You know each other? Sandra asks, still full of nervous energy.

            No. I just see him – you – here a lot. With your dad? You’re usually out in the car.

            His voice is gruff, more so than she ever imagined it would be. Yeah, he says, my Dad’s friend’s with yours.  

            Ted? Well. Anyway, you know - I make those sandwiches.

            What? His eyes aren’t clear, they’re puzzled.

            The Styrofoam box?

            Oh, yeah, sure. I’m a vegetarian, so Dad usually eats them, but thanks, I guess.

            Anytime, Magali replies, but no one hears her. Imperceptibly inching toward the door, Sandra has him by the sleeve and sings out, Thanks again, Magali!   before pulling the young man with her into the night. 

****

This is meant to be a story within a story. My original intent was to portray the disconnect between perception and reality - how reality is a manifestation of perceptions (as in: we all exist in our own heads/writing itself is a reconstruction of reality/"it's real to me" kind of ideology - hence the lack of quotation marks). That concept lead to using the artist and her work as a vehicle for this kind of philosophy I was trying to illustrate - which sounds a little like a parable, but still, it's unclear. Then my failed attempt at acute tension (between Magali and "Franklin") was mean to further illustrate the space of one's mind/reality. It's really a silly, common thing for a girl to have a crush and it's not returned, but that's what I liked so much about it. Magali speaks like her life is an epic, but really it's just all she has to hold onto.

For instance, in "real life" Magali's "normal" is routine, not just anywhere, but in a fantastical place. She longs for her mother and resents her father. She's smart, but alienating, skeptical, and judgmental. Magali works for her father, Ted, who owns the bar and buys coke from a guy who brings his son and leaves him in the car. Magali's amusements and hopes in life are drawn solely from the little stories in her head, and the only way she can connect to her true problems is by making up these stories. So she gets a simple crush, but in her mind it explodes. She feels closer to him - this stranger - because she forces her own circumstances on him, her own issues, as she's too preoccupied with being "tough" to deal with them directly.  

Comments? Let me know what you think. Be cruel to be kind.

Thanks for reading! 
 - L.

 

Persistence

The mind is a map
crisscrossing,
intersecting
highways,
one-ways,
back country roads,
and a few tolls.

A million raging spider-men threading passages of sticky black pavement through the night in an ever winding web that shifts and spreads away from the always busy, always modern, always current City’s center into the past. The farther you drive - the deeper into nostalgia and unchanging country side. These rural outskirts are as picturesque as they are lawless; a sweeping golden meadow is neighbors with the woods eclipsed in fog where serial killers hide the dismantled bodies.

Whenever I’m in town, I like to drive past the house.
This time, wannabe-white-suburbia siding has been plastered all over the outside.
The whiteness covers the hideous green paint from 5 years ago,
which covers the more hideous yellow paint from 4 years before that,
all of which is suffocating the blue like a squelched candle.
My blue; the textured powder-blue stucco of my childhood home.

My first memory is of her.
Sunlight has poured into the room through the sliding glass doors, making the scene hazy and soft; illuminating the yellowed, peeling wallpaper patterned with roses and other indiscriminant flowers. My tiny fingertips run over its vertical lines and grooves as I venture slowly into the hallway, peeking around the corner. An old woman on a sunken, floral couch is staring at a buzzing television screen. Her posture is hunched forward, a cigarette burning between two long, womanly fingers knotted with arthritis, knees parted and bent up against the coffee table. The coffee table is as it has always been: Sunday’s newspaper, Neccos, a bottle of Lubriderm. Red check book, Marlboros, Kleenex. BIC pens with blue ink, Lifesavers. I don’t remember who she is, and looking at her, I am playing process of elimination: “Gram? Mom? Gram? Mom?” Realizing I’m there, her voice carries to me….


My grandmother was the Titanic.
My Gram didn’t knit. My Gram didn’t clean. And my Gram sure as hell didn’t cook. The woman wouldn’t even boil an egg; at age 6, I was master of the microwave. She smoked cigarettes and fat, sweet vanilla cigars. Watched NASCAR, horror movies, Wheel-of-Fortune and Jeopardy, Colombo, Dick Van Dyke, and things in black and white. We ate at McDonald’s at least three times a week. She had this upper class air of dignity that overshadowed her “white trash” small-town life. She was unsinkable.
Possessed mild to moderate road rage.
Worshipped Elvis Presley and Frank Sinatra.
Wore dentures. Cursed often. Irish to a fault.
And sometimes she told me stories.
“What do you think I am, a goddamn story teller?!”
Sometimes.

She loved to embellish, exaggerate, manipulate, personalize; the stories she told all held devastating importance.
They had lived in Florida where the cockroaches were the size of rats.
Working in The Mill, she’d sat next to a woman who was scalped by the roaring machinery.
Florence Henderson once called her a “plumber’s daughter” and she punched her so hard in the face that “Mrs. Brady” was knocked through the double-doors behind her.
Her own mother took away her first born and gave it to a relative.
Her Daddy, the most beloved man in her life, played for the Boston Red Sox and single handedly installed all the plumbing in North Adams and Williamstown.
I lived with her because Mom was mentally ill and thought the porcelain dolls could talk through pointed teeth telling her the Devil was coming and she needed to kill us to save us and so Social Services had taken me away.
You never did know what was completely real with Gram.

Driving, you come to a bridge that has crumbled into the sea,
the end juts out
over the edge as a
dangerous
stub.


If memories change over time, can truth change? If memories can be lost, can truth be lost?
Without truth, can there be reality? Without reality, can there really be honesty?
What if we don’t want to remember?
Without our memories we are the sea.
Building nothing of permanence.
Existing everywhere, going nowhere.
Moody emotion pushed and pulled by force and gravity.

Something wasn’t normal, but I didn’t know it.
I knew my lunches at school were free. I was allowed to eat breakfast before class, and I was let out in the middle of the day to play games downstairs with a woman named Glenda. It never seemed to matter what time I showed up or if I’d done any homework. We used perforated paper to buy food at the Big Y. Silver aluminum meals were left on our door step.
My parents weren’t married,
Daddy had a different last name,
and I lived with Gram.

We had a car.
I would start the ignition for her and had dreams of driving before I learned cursive. We had cable. My favorite show was “I Love Lucy” on Nick-at-Night. I would brag to kids at school that I could do whatever I wanted, and I could. I opened jars for her. Reached things in high places. Skipped school around Halloween and Christmas to look at decorations through the windows of her red Ford Thunderbird. When she had me run into Val’s for her cigarettes, the clerk didn’t protest. We had an above ground pool with green water and a swing set in the back yard. I had an attic full of Barbies and toys and books. Having a birthday on Christmas was great, back then. I would rub her back, littered with brown moles, like freckles or stars.

Looking back, everything was like the difference between freckles and stars.

The point where I had to look away from my life and forget these paths of memory or else be consumed by the forces outside of my control, engulfed in a spectacular but unmerciful, unyielding light. The headlights that blind you just before the collision.
We lived beyond our means, and yet she always made it work. I was aware of it all, but I was still a child.

Like her, I thought the rules just didn’t apply to me.
And I could be a terrible brat.
We would be in the red Ford Thunderbird with its fuzzy matching red seats, and my mother would drape her arm across the space between the driver and passenger seats. At first, this bothered and annoyed me – sitting strapped down in the back, I couldn’t see with her arm in the way. So I’d tell her to move it. Gram would back me up. Every time it happened, I’d tell her to move just for the control of it. Just for Gram’s approval and support of it. The longer it took her to move her arm, the more hostile I’d become. Screaming. Kicking. Physically pushing her away. After a while, I just sat in the front seat, and she sat in back. Gram hated mom, and so I hated mom.

Gram would always scream at her:

“YOU LEFT YOUR TWO
LITTLE BITCHES ON
MY DOORSTEP!”

It was all a great big production sometimes. Like when people slow down just to look an accident, just to spot the victim. Caught up in excitement and pity, apathetic to who caused it or who lived. Then they’d drive home to their comfortable houses with lit fireplaces and sink into their beds, sink into the perfect darkness of easy sleep.

I couldn’t sleep at night until I had hugged her.
“Sweet Dreams”
She would say.
“It’s 11:11. Make a Wish”
And I would.

Her last memory was of me.

Mom asked me if we should call the ambulance.
I said, “No”.
Stepping out of the bathroom, I clutched the white towel close around my body. Mom was sitting at the dining room table. Gram sat in a wheel chair, he arm wrapped in rosy linen bandages from last week’s run in with her car and somebody’s porch. The television ticked and spun with people winning money-

Her head tilted backward, a gasp left her mouth as though
something was being pushed out instead of sucked in, and her chin
came to rest on her chest.
My mother asked me if we should call an ambulance. I said no.
Gram didn’t want to die hooked up to machines. She’d always said so.
I think what she really wanted was to drive off a cliff at a hundred miles an hour in a top-down convertible with Elvis and Sinatra blaring into glory.
Gripping my towel, I knelt before her.
“Gram, are you alright?” – “You’re drooling a little, Gram”
I held a mirror up close to her face like I’d seen once in a movie.
It was sparklingly clear.
I hugged her, tight.

“Sweet dreams.”

Standing, I turned to my Mother,
“Fine! Call, but she’s going to be so pissed.”

March 4th, 1999
She was 68 years old. I was nine.

There’s some asshat behind me honking his horn. It’s not a busy road, he could just go around.
Memories or small town roads, you can’t stay anywhere for too long. Not when you’re in the middle of it anyway. Be idle when you get home; be idle when you’re dead. These road maps in our heads aren’t sold with keys and legends – we have to make those ourselves. Seemingly disconnected, some memories are like passing through a small out-of-the-way place, and there’s always a gas station and a diner. Others are landmark memorials and freak side-shows; our own fields of Gettysburg, beaches of Normandy, Las Vegas, Hollywood, World’s Largest Ball of String. Driving through our minds, reliving past road trips, we always see something we didn’t before.
Meanings change.
Dreams change.
But existence is persistence.
Frowning with disapproval at the old house, my eyes crinkle at it endearingly. I step on the gas and continue on my way, where ever it is that I’m going.
I just hope I’ll remember how I got there.