Peek-a-boo
Wednesday's birthday was mostly about big joints meeting finger tips and lips and compliments, but for me...
I told two fathers simply about the dream I had where my child lay in discomfort, crying for resources, and how the baby was so huge and so heavy I could not lift it on my own. I would rely on others to assist in diaper changes or feedings and I was oh-so-stressed-out and in need of a walk. After a good time away I was miles from home before realizing that I had left my infant at home unsupervised. Surging with panic, I raced back to the crib.
The fathers hung their heads. One asked if this was a re-occurring dream.
I said I was unsure whether I had the dream once or twice, but it was certainly no more than twice.
The other father explained to me that having a dream twice, would make that dream 're-occurring' and laughed while his Coors Light melted and his halter-topped girlfriend grinned in more lipstick than clothes.
I left this conversation immediately. If I had two licks of testosterone, things might have ended badly or better depending on how you look at it. Maybe depending on how much testosterone you've got.
A few more stubborn conversations later I found my keys on the floor, and I was reminded to leave. I grabbed my purse and kissed good night the birthday honorees, just missing a man in the corner that I hide from nowadays that maybe hides from me too.

We wound around Akard Street so much that I have no idea where we were. We’d just left a tiny unmarked warehouse space showcasing experimental music made with Commodore 264s, line-item-printers, and old Atari sets. The Underground so fresh, so underground, that I’d found myself looking the trends up and down the same way my mother had done me in those same clothes years ago.

But we ended up in my kind of place. Only, like I said before, I can’t tell you where my kind of place is. A belly button to the city, where people that go missing end up. Atlantis. Roanoake. Elizabeth Smart. My baby’s daddy.

The parking lot was just dirt for a shack made from scrap wood and its front porch sloped with an overhang like an old west saloon. We pushed the front door open, and bright warm smoke put it’s arms around us and walked us down a short hallway that ended in a big puddle of old friends that had long ago dropped out of the scene. We laughed and bumped each one heart to heart, and the hollow wood floor thumped.

This is where I learned how to play low stakes dice games on borrowed quarters and a green felt pool table. Mark Cotton coached me on a three dice game the boys called C-low. 4,5,6 wins; Craps is out. Tripples beats the point. The point falls out from the standing die between a matching pair. Everybody in the whole place was in; even the bartender.

What I saw was that some men roll like ass-holes. Some men roll like children. Some men roll with no respect whatsoever and some men roll dice like they’ve been waiting all week for Friday night come. Nobody chats over a game of dice outside of shit talkin’ and prayin’ so you pretty much decide who you like and who you don’t by the way they toss. I don’t like the assholes, the children, or disrespectful folk. Straight-shooters only. One or two quick clicks in the fist is perfectly acceptable, but then let them go clean.

It doesn’t matter whether I won or lost that night. Mainly because like I said, it was borrowed money. The game died out when people got to drunk to toss. The first die was lost to the right corner pocket, and not even the sober white-aproned bus boy could stretch his arm far enough into the belly of the table to retrieve it. Someone made a desperate attempt to make a game out of two cubes, and a few hung in there, but just rounds later the second one got swallowed up too.

Deadly sins
As winter settles in, the tongue gravitates to upper lip; stretching the meaty middle over the ridge of top front teeth. I bite up and contract the cheeks to draw the little nub inward. After a month of tending to my winter succor, the bottom jaw crackles stiff from all the pulling and sucking.

The blister is almost a birthmark. As a baby at my mother, I took in her milk so hungrily that it burned a blister, and the effect will be life long. It dries and peels, swells and hollows, reddens and whitens with the seasons. A glass of crimson wine will stain the defect’s edges, and an application of lipstick will all but fade but for my little mark. A mark for gluttony and for greed.

The popArt darlings were born about ten months under warm low hanging lamps at a little grandma-style diner. It was just Heliohead and me asking short stacks of pancakes age-old questions about why art happens. Maybe not even why art happens, but why people make it and then insist that it be consumed by the public. Why people describe themselves as artists when they spend 40 hours a week behind a desk, behind a counter, behind some one else’s face. What makes some people artists, and some people, like us, not?

My mother thought this meant that what Heliohead and I were doing was supposed to be a joke: a joke on the pretentiousness of art. Maybe at first it was…but by now…it isn’t.

We decided to use found objects from thrift stores, trash dumpsters, and the dark recesses of our closets because we don’t have a lot of money, because Heliohead does have a lot of STUFF, and because refuse isn’t pretentious. He actually has an uncanny gift for finding riches from garbage heaps out curbside, and as I soon found out, the hunt for objects was addictive. Too many times Heliohead would give me a gift of something he found that ‘seemed like me’ that left me stunned and touched by generosity.

What we discovered:
First we found out that wine and building art do not mix. You end up passed out on a pile of wood chips, tiny plastic soldiers, and dress patterns only to wake up with a drill bit poking you in the butt and a glue gun burning your face and no art made.

We found out what it means to work as a team and individually at the same time. We flexed the courage and curiosity to ask for guidance about what balances, about what tools to use on a job, and how to develop a personal style.

We learned how to commit our time and energy to each other once a week. How to follow through. How to support the other when something good came out, and how to gently prescribe criticism when it didn’t. Then we took that criticism, worked around the criticism, or blew off the criticism completely. We never constructed any piece here, without the other present, although sometimes one had the inspiration, and other didn’t.

We learned patience because sometimes things didn’t come together in one day, and sometimes it didn’t come in two. Sometimes I’d sit amidst a pile of scraps on Heliohead’s kitchen floor, and nothing would come. Sometimes, it would happen in twenty minutes, and then sometimes, nothing else would happen. Sometimes, we’d have to just walk away and drive around the neighborhood or dig around in dumpsters to shake off the disappointment and then call it a night.

We learned how to get lost in our task, and it was an indulgent way to pass time.
We learned to devote ourselves to a long-term project without a defined conclusion and just let go.
We found that our own pride in the product was its greatest compliment.

So, the big day is here. And it seems more like a birthday. Like planning the birthday party I’d want to go to. I blush too much to call myself an ‘artist’, but most people I’ve known that can, still use words like ‘being true to yourself’ or ‘we do it because we don’t know anything else’.

A month ago I felt him creep back into the city, and I’ve waited.
He was there the night they served me the Irish coffee
with bad milk.
I was spitting into my little cocktail napkin,
the curdled milk dripping through my curled fingers,
lipstick smears across my mouth and cheek.
He was coiling between chair legs as
his renowned guard stood vigilant,
glancing times at which way my eyes swept
while holding court to ladies with terrible hands.

Again the very next week at Motel 55
trembling vodka tonics bruised the lime inside
and never did go down smooth.
Adoringly, the manager would spin another girl-shot with compliments,
and satisfy himself to light my too many wobbling cigarettes.
On account of all the suspense,
I did not hear even one of the notes at the pub,
or taste the short purple juices.
That frightening star of David
raising a shiner to red whiskered lips…

He knew of me by slumping into his chair,
massaging his temples into the back of his head,
and then dragging his cheeks down toward his chin.
His thirsty watcher came closer beside me and took his look
then reunited to circle the door and back several times
for no reason.

Attention
the poor bruised limes
the vigilant bartender
the music without pitch
the man to my right who says he’s in television
and keeps calling me ‘baby’

For all my waiting
I slipped out the back door
and piled into the car quickly
to keep out of the night as much as possible
Away from the stars and the dark and the watch
and rathered aside the company of round glittery girls
with birthdays and gay best friends
that still use punchbowls
and carefully place crab dips
on decorated table tops.