Motel Cinderella

I felt inspired to write this song after seeing the photo I posted in my previous entry “Vagabondage.”

 

“Motel Cinderella”

What started with a titty ends in a flask

Those Big Apple cheeks became a mask

From Long Island Railroad to Mickey Mouse

She crumbled to pieces in a cookie-cutter house

Punk-rock teen queen with panic attacks

Skipped class to learn more from Kerouac

Black Clash T-shirt on the open road

Sad-luck goth girl, the femme Tom Joad

 

Chorus

She’s a chip-toothed Motel Cinderella

Room to room, knees on the floor

Cracked her glass heel at the whisky store

Ain’t no Prince Charming ever gonna come

While she’s playing solitaire, rolling a Drum

She knows her place but forgot where she left it

Knows her mistakes and lives to regret it

Knows her bounds but they’re all kinda gray

Too tired to sleep, too high to pray

Motel Cinderella passed out today

 

Traded orange groves for red dirt and peaches

Then traded Georgia for the SoCal beaches

The Twin Towers fell and smog choked her soul

And her partner-in-crime became a black hole

Escaped Hollywood to green chile stew

Cactus in New Mexico, till death was the news

Grandma was gone, then Grandpa as well

And Tony tried to call from his padded cell

(REPEAT CHORUS)

 

Back East wasting time smoking grass

And nothing’s half-empty from a shot glass

Brain cancer took him, the caller said

Only 36, and Tony was dead

Ran away to Brooklyn for Whitman’s truth

Rehashed the storylines of her misspent youth

When even New York stopped feeling like home

Motel Cinderella just had to roam

(REPEAT CHORUS)

 

Orlando again like some humid curse

So she loaded a van as a getaway hearse

Blazed up a J on the Oregon Trail

Young enough to dream, too old to fail

A writer friend who took her in

Hoarder with a DUI from too much gin

The Portland she knew became cold, gray doom

Cash-strapped and hungry, couldn’t pay for her room

One state down, in the land of wine and gold

She followed the highway for a hand to hold

(REPEAT CHORUS AND FADE)

 

 

 

 

 

Vagabondage

Nothing ever stays, only the pink mark of tightness around my waist when I unbutton and let the thrift-store jeans fall rumpled on the mattress.

Everything is closing in on me.

I am the misfit among the outcasts.

Too smart for my own good, too dense to learn right the first time.

Where is there left to move on to when you’ve already tried every corner? Every place I go I become that irregular cardboard piece that you must force into place in the puzzle to make fit.

Pensive with my pen. Too broke for paper. It could line a bench and keep the chills away, but I smoked my last dime.

No safety, so the words don’t come out. They are cash, and I am spent.

Exposed as a fake Beat with a stream of no-consciousness, and Ginsberg is spitting on me. But everything works as something else when you want it to. A pencil is sharp as a knife when the words come out right, when you are shading in the gray.

Penciled in those Portland skies, but she tried to set the paper on fire.

I have hidden behind dilapidated Union Pacific Railroad cars, the tracks long eroded, just because I know the train won’t budge.

Wish I didn’t know that I have no control over the wind—makes it harder to push against. The moon glares at me pissed and clouded, behind palms and one-way parking lots, slot-car neon signs ignored and a howl of white noise. No wonder I cannot hear you.

Chained in vagabondage.

 

 

Vagabondage.

 

Read my Medium Raw challenge essay: Have Salt, Will Travel

 

Read my Medium Raw challenge essay: Have Salt, Will Travel.

(I wrote this over a year ago as an entry to a contest Anthony Bourdain was having. Enjoy.)

It’s 94 degrees where Cheryl and I are sitting, at a parking-lot picnic table in an office park in Orlando, smoking generic cigarettes outside the high-priced culinary school we’ve been attending Monday through Thursday for a year. I’m inching painfully toward 40, unmarried, broke, a smartass New York Jew with a Zoloft prescription who got laid off from my formerly-stable editorial job as soon as the economy started tanking in early 2009. I’m in the Sunshine State–a misnomer considering it’s actually gray and rainy half the year–because my parents live here, and I needed a place to lay my head after losing my job and pissing off my last roommate. Some days, I feel like George Costanza with lipstick and big tits. But I’m a damn good cook. So I enrolled here despite the cheesy commercials the school shows on late-night cable espousing “sizzling careers.” Cheryl is a few years older than me and grew up in Jersey. We bonded over memories of decent pizza and bagels, and the not-so-decent men we’ve gotten involved with for no good reason. Every day we fume over the actions of the ADHD-afflicted 19-year-old lame-brains we go to our kitchen classes with, who mispronounce Escoffier’s last name and truly believe that Olive Garden has the most authentic Italian food around. I work in the school library part-time, and I can barely pay the interest on my student loan with my paltry salary, but at least I’m employed; Cheryl has to sell plasma so she can afford to fill up her gas tank. There’s a reason we are making these sacrifices, we believe. We have dreams of moving to California should the state legalize marijuana and then opening a coffee shop called Baked, where we will sell pot brownies and baby-green salad with hash-oil vinaigrette. But we’ve been burned by a lot more than sheet pans; those are just dreams. I know what it means to cook food well, and it has nothing to do with charred burgers with gray insides.

When I cook food well, and add just the right amount of lemongrass, galangal, coconut milk, dried mangoes, and green curry paste to the pot of browned chicken thighs, even though I don’t even have the gas money to get to the airport, I can visit Thailand with my tongue. Cheryl and I keep practicing our knife cuts and French omelets, knowing that cooking food well will take us to a place far away from the abusive bastards, the shit jobs, the repossessed cars and the debt collectors—even if it’s just for the 25 minutes it takes us to babysit the perfect risotto.

Never forget or never remember.

He was tall and thin and looked like Alan Cumming, but with better eyebrows. He wrote about film for some website, liked Vicodin and Nick Cave and rough play, and wanted to meet my dog. He cried a lot and worked at home. He seemed refreshingly sensitive in the self-absorbed smog of Los Angeles. He was shy and awkward and afraid to meet my friends. His last name was Black, which appealed to my goth sensibilities. And he was bisexual too.

I had some suspicions that he liked the Vicodin too much, but he shared with me sometimes when I had no weed. And he gave me all the Red Bulls and vodka I wanted. He was generally agoraphobic, but he didn’t mind when I flirted with our pink-haired waitress at the Denny’s on Sunset when he finally ventured outside the house, and he liked Beat poetry too.

But he was so self-conscious. Even in bed. He was the most submissive dominant I’ve ever met. We clashed physically… neither of us could pick a role, and we’d end up wrestling; I would joke that I was an “aggressive femme bottom.” We’d end up just kissing and laughing and having very vanilla sex after all our talk of being so sexually enlightened and experimental.

Except for that one time, when I wasn’t ready.  And it hurt. He mistook my pained deep breaths for enjoyment and kept going. One finger after another, until his entire hand was pushing inside me. Admittedly, something appealed to me about the pain; I think it reminded me of my first girlfriend, but her hands were soft and small as she stretched me open.

Still, sometimes I’d rather feel pain than nothing at all. I submitted like a good girl and let him go on, feeling debaucherous and uncomfortable and cool and depraved at the same time. It didn’t quite register to me when he stuck his finger up my ass and then shoved the same finger in my vagina. I was drugged and drunk and starved for attention, and the Beatniks wouldn’t have worried. I wanted to be penetrated to capacity, to just feel something besides loneliness. When I left his place that night, though, I knew I never wanted to see him again, never wanted to coddle him again, and never wanted to question him again about why he was so afraid to meet my close friends, who I knew would not judge him as he so feared.

*****************************************************************************************************************************************************

I had a land line, as everyone did. Cell phones were for self-important assholes. I’d stayed up late listening to KCRW and pledged some money to get a free ticket to PJ Harvey. And he wouldn’t stop calling that night. I finally picked up the phone when call-waiting beeped through, and he was crying and telling me he couldn’t bear not seeing me again and not playing with my dog again. He promised me that he wasn’t addicted to Vicodin. But I knew better. I told him I didn’t want to see him again, and I felt empty and uncaring and cold. And I felt pain inside me where he’d stretched me. I took the phone off the hook and went to sleep. I was looking forward to seeing PJ Harvey and not seeing his syringe refrigerator magnet again.

A week later, I was in such pain I could barely walk. I went to the Rock ‘n’ Roll Ralphs in my dirty, piss-stench of a Russian-Mexican-homeless neighborhood and spent money I didn’t have on yeast-infection creams and urinary-tract-infection home remedies.

I called in sick to work and looked up some Jewish gynecologist in Beverly Hills in my health-plan booklet. Drove my piece-of-shit Mazda, a veteran of my cross-country move from Atlanta, to the doctor, alone. He asked questions nastily, judgmentally, invasively. He filled me with KY Jelly and prodded his fat fingers around. I cried when he said it could be a tubal pregnancy or an ovarian cyst. He was brusk and cold and snapped at me when he saw the tears, while I feared cancer or wondered if I’d have to get an abortion. But he gave me an Oxycodone prescription. Opiates, just like Mr. Black took so religiously. I took my pills. I spent the rest of my afternoon in a haze watching Judge Judy and wondering how could I be pregnant. We used condoms.

I called my friend XX and she listened to me cry and offered to escort me to the emergency room the next day for a second opinion. We agreed that there was some irony in planning a trip to the emergency room on 9/11.

******************************************************************************************************************************************************

I’d never been colder in Los Angeles. XX hugged me and held my hand as I huddled and shivered and watched CNN in the waiting room. The triage nurse wouldn’t give me a blanket right away. My teeth were chattering, and it felt like my insides had been scratched by an angry cat. XX had to ask about four times for a blanket. The chair was hard plastic. The television was a blur of airplanes and the World Trade Center and smoke and pain. I’d come so far from my birthplace of New York, so far away from my roots, my family, from Ellis Island. Why had I been so selfish? I was scared about my brother, who lived less than a mile from the WTC. I was doubled-over in pain, and my mental anguish wasn’t helping. I yelled at the receptionist who had some type of insurance issue. Couldn’t she understand how much pain I was in, how scared I was about these planes crashing into the Windows of the World restaurant?

My grandmother still had a photo in a frame from the World Trade Center, in which I was wearing my ruffled navy shirt with the white sleeves.

It wasn’t a tubal pregnancy or cancer.

It was a generic bacterial infection, the doctor said. He gave me more pain meds and antibiotics.

XX held me close. She was from Connecticut and felt too far away as well.

******************************************************************************************************************************************************

I’ll never forget 9/11. Or Black.

 

 

 

 

Your Poetry Nooner!

Home

Between letters never written and letters never sent,

I would be queen.

But nobody sends letters anymore.

Someday I will laugh, but today could be different.

Mary Shelley, I need advice.

The yellow T-shirt brings out the stains on my teeth,

and my dirty mouth sent everyone away.

I’ve lived here a month and I still haven’t opened the cellar door.

I’d rather just listen to the ghosts.

Rusted bicycles, a green bottle of Indian Head nickels, a blond split end on a dusty workbench.

I wonder where the last strand on my head will fall when I go.

Nighttime only with the absence of dark.

That time between sleep and dreams.

I think I know my place.

 

 

 

 

 

Even More Pretentious Poetry Corner!

Some Rag

It is beige with blue swirls, polyester. Oil stain in the front. It doesn’t fit me.

I don’t want it to.

I thought I wanted it then, tried it on. You liked me in your shirts.

It was tight across my chest and made me self-conscious.

You got it at Goodwill, you’d said.

I remembered that.  She probably never even knew.

A lot of good it does me.

I have to squint real hard to see the stars in the daytime.

My night vision is wrecked.

The glasses need wiped clean.

Thought I threw it away.

But everything reappears in boxes.

Across state lines, dragged.

Stacked in garages.

The papers we left shoved into books,

Skipping ballpoint scrawl.

Happy birthday.

You had your hair black then.

Mine was in knots.

Still is.

Can’t believe I’m afraid

to throw some rag away.

 

 

 

 

 

Pretentious Poetry Corner

Red

A farm stitched green in the dirt.

Trees line up like it’s Christmas in August. Tall and waiting to die. They don’t sway like Florida palms.

All I notice. All I want to see.

I don’t kiss like a Florida girl. I don’t talk like you.

Why talk when I’m afraid to hear?

I don’t know if I exist some days. Only pores and fallen eyelashes and a vessel for insomnia.

A habit.

Smoked a day away, and too lazy to watch the world go by.

Cracked inside. Cover it up.

Hide in the brush.

Start a fire just to see everything in red.

Pierce of Pie

Piercings are cute on some people, hot on others, NOT on others still, but I live and let live. I had my left nostril pierced several times in the ’90s, but various corporate handbooks dictated that I had to let those holes close. I’m more into tattooing, myself. Yeah, the Jew with the tattoos. Take that, Leviticus! Besides, while you can have as many tattoos as you’d like working in a kitchen, the National Restaurant Association and other food safety/hygiene powers that be say no jewelry (except for possibly a single wedding/engagement/promise ring) is permitted in the kitchen.

I am very careful to remove my lipstick, rings, earrings, and watch to prepare for job interviews that might require demonstrations of my cooking skills in a professional kitchen.

My first “stage.”  The word is snootily–and yet correctly–pronounced “stahjzh” by a pretentious type who must have forgotten that we are indeed in A-murr-ica, in the Pacific Northwest, and far from Paris or even Montreal, where it would be entirely appropriate. I’m not sure how I feel about this whole staging thing. It’s a short-term cooking/prepping gig, for which you don’t get paid, and during which you are watched like a hawk by someone who may or may not know their job especially well, and who may or may not have even the slightest semblance of social skills. From what I understand of the food business, restaurants do stages all the time; most of them simply and honestly for job placement, while some seem to have constant stages to get free labor, usually of the mass-food-prep variety.

I’m a candidate for a job making pizza at a trendy Italian place in Southeast Portland. If I do well in my stage, I may get an actual job that’ll pay. My hair is off my face with the aid of a scarf and a headband, and pulled into a neat ponytail. I remove my rings and wipe off my lipstick. I’m set. I arrive with only a minute to spare, but I leave my apprehension in my roommate’s car, which I borrowed to get here; they cannot smell my fear. Besides, I have a “good luck” text message on my phone in my knife kit. I will do fine, I tell myself.

Joe #1 is scrappy but clean, about 5’7″, and wearing skate shorts, a T-shirt, Vans, and an apron. He has a beard, like most guys of a certain age in Portland. He has nickel-size holes in his ears, but they are plugged snugly with black discs. He shows me around the kitchen, which is busy and loud and full of industrious and happy white people who use words like “nebulous” correctly and laugh. Maybe I would fit in here. But everyone is Caucasian besides the Mexican dishwasher, which kinda weirds me out. I snicker internally when I hear someone pronounce the toast/tomato appetizer bruschetta as “brush-etta” and not “broo-sketta,” which is actually the correct Italian pronunciation. (Hey, they opened themselves up to such criticism when they called this a “stahjzh.” It’s just everybody seems to mispronounce that menu item, and it irritates the living shit out of me.)

A cute boyish lesbian with a tiny diamond stud in her right nostril extends her hand and introduces herself, and I feel a surge of sisterly hope. Apparently we are waiting for Joe #2 to arrive for his shift–he’s the pizza cook I’ll be working with and trying to impress, which could be tough since the ad for this job said “pizzaiolo.” Fucking fancy. It’s just round flatbread, really. I’m just a cook.

I am ripping about my 200th stem off a fresh basil leaf when Joe #2 arrives.

Aside from the dual nostril piercings, the septum piercing, the lip piercing, the tongue piercing, the wide-gauge lobe-plug thingies, and the numerous tattoos, Joe #2 looks nerdy and bookish. He is wearing a wedding ring, but I still catch him staring at my chest. (Please, please, please let this work to my advantage, God! This is still a sexist business, and I’m not above flirting my way in so I can prove myself anything BUT a “typical female” once I’m on the clock.)

“So, where’d you work in town before?” he asks. He has heavy eyelids and needs a shave. Jeezus, they are actually playing Morrissey in this kitchen. I want to break out my dour British falsetto, but I restrain myself.

I tell him I’m new to Portland, most recently from Orlando, Florida, but I’ve lived all over, and make sure to throw New York into my reply; that often impresses cooks, especially pizza cooks, er, pizzaiolos? Pizzaioli? You know what I mean. I tell him I haven’t worked at all in Portland, but that I externed in a high-end Tuscan restaurant at a luxury hotel in Orlando and made many pizzas with ingredients such as prosciutto and truffle oil and fresh mozzarella. I tell him I just finished culinary school.

“Well,” he says with a tone that suggests he would be scratching his balls were we not in a professional situation, “I never went to school for it. But I’ve been making pizzas my whole life!”

“You Italian?” I ask.

“Nah, Irish.” I examine his wedding ring more closely, and it’s a claddagh ring.

Joe #2 then shows me how they stretch out the dough here, with no rolling pin like I’m used to, then takes a sip of water from a cup–without the health-department-required lid and straw–that sits on a counter in open view.  He glances over as I am reading the menu to familiarize myself with the house-specialty pizzas. He throws the dough about three feet above his head, which the chef who trained me back in Florida says is unnecessary and for show-offs only. Joe #2 preps his pizza. They don’t use a special-blend pizza sauce here; they use only a high-quality Italian-import tomato sauce, which is simply strained tomatoes: no salt, garlic, pepper, basil, rosemary, oregano. They use very little cheese. He shoves the uncooked pie into the wood-burning oven with a pizza peel, and the whole thing cooks in about one minute. It looks charred to me, but I think that’s how it’s supposed to look here. There are throngs of Portland gay cuties in the dining room, one of whom bears a striking resemblance to John Cameron Mitchell, the director of Hedwig and the Angry Inch. Joe #2 has never heard of the movie when I mention this possible sighting. He very matter-of-factly places the pizza on a plate, then asks me to dress it with arugula tossed in lemon oil. Only he pronounces it “ah-roo-gew-luh,” and it’s supposed to be pronounced “ah-roo-guh-luh.” 

Joe #2 lets me make a “staff pie.” I use very little sauce and cheese, as I was instructed. I push that peel into the 900-degree oven and pray. It looks nearly identical to the Margherita Joe #2 made earlier. Turns out I was supposed to be impressing Tall, Quiet Boss Man, and I didn’t need to worry about Joe #2 so much. TQBM takes a slice and looks nonplussed. Why are all these emotionless, non-Italian, non-New Yorkers, not-even-Chicagoans or San Franciscans judging my pizza?

“Really good pie,” says TQBM, “but a little too much cheese.” He is obviously gay and obviously unimpressed by my bosoms. I try a slice after he walks away. It would be much better with garlic and salt and pepper and a touch of oregano. But I’m not Italian. Not Irish even. What do I know?

I don’t think I’m going to get the job. I have no idea. I know how to pronounce things correctly though. I wish my vocabulary could pay the rent.

I think I need to get my septum pierced.

Julia Child spins in her grave, Part 1

French bistro? They want to talk to me about a job? Me? They apparently like my resume, probably because I omitted all my editorial work from it and sound younger than I actually am. I seem to look younger than I am, too, as evidenced by my getting carded at the Plaid Pantry for scratch-offs and Pall Malls in the blue pack. I’m a younger, Jewish, nonalcoholic Janeane Garofalo: short, chunky, with a few meaningful tattoos, donning faded indie-band T-shirts and the requisite vintage-look specs, and still wearing the same Revlon Colorstay shade I’ve worn since Cindy Crawford did the commercials. I never really grew out of the ’90s, and in Portland one doesn’t have to.

3 p.m. Wednesday. The time is set after an awkward phone call filled with pregnant pauses. I stay up half the night Tuesday refreshing my memory on how to make the perfect Hollandaise and how to cool large quantities of soup so as to avoid bacterial growth. But how do I pretend to like pate? I wish this place were Thai instead.

I search on the TriMet Website for the quickest route to the restaurant, which the chef says is “in the Pearl,” a trendy neighborhood adjacent to Old Town and Chinatown. I board the train, and a hefty woman wearing a Backstreet Boys T-shirt, gladiator sandals revealing unclipped toenails, and a Walkman cassette player over scraggly dishwater-blond hair crams next to me; I tense up my arms at every turn to avoid hitting her left breast, which sags sadly beneath Nick Carter‘s perpetual baby face.

It doesn’t look like a trendy neighborhood. I don’t see Portland Mercury boxes anywhere. I inhale the familiar stench of week-old addict piss as I walk past the dim doorway of an adult shop inviting pervy passersby to experience the “new glass” in the peep-show booths. Hello again, L.A. Good afternoon, Bed-Stuy; meet Portland, your downy-white cousin in the Pacific Northwest. 

Le Something Bistro is on a quiet corner across from a gigantic club with rainbow flags hanging above the windows. I am hoping to God this chef is a lesbian so I can maybe name-drop some of the gay magazines I worked for in my former career. And maybe she will like my lipstick or the fit of the professional pants I purchased at Ross back in Florida.

“Hi,” she says, even her voice blushing. “Take a seat back here,” she adds, walking me through the empty dining room. In the corner of my eye, I see a counter full of plates lined with doilies; that probably should have been a rouge flag.

“I am the world’s worst interviewer,” she tells me, chuckling uncomfortably. She has an obviously bleached mustache, the tomboyish gait of a soft-butch dyke, and a red bandanna that brings to mind Leif Garrett. I will get this job. It will impress my friends and family when I create witty Facebook posts about escargot and baguettes. She is probably one of the world’s worst interviewers, and I am probably rambling, but she’s too shy to hold up her end of the interview. She also claims she is one of the world’s worst managers, just a really good cook. She seems sweet though. I think I have impressed her. She’s got to be gay.

Part 2 is coming when it’s not nearing 3 a.m.

The first rule of Fret Club

You are pacing the dingy gray carpet at 3:40 a.m., salty tears pooling on your bleach-stained black T-shirt, pondering whether you will be alone for the rest of your time on Earth, but you don’t want anyone to know you are not as well adjusted as they thought, as this vulnerability is probably terribly ugly and makes you out to be desperate, which you are not but you also kind of are, just too tired and apathetic to begin anything with someone who doesn’t meet your ludicrously high standards. Maybe God knows, but maybe you don’t believe in that Higher Power stuff. And if God exists, why would he/she/it/that tree over there torture its own creations like this?

You see homely duos clasping hands at the Walgreens, and you wonder how it is that these two misfits found each other, and meanwhile you are picking up your Zoloft prescription, wondering if the clerk was staring because she thought you were stealing or found you attractive. (After all, you put on that burgundy lipstick and fluffed up your hair before you even made it to the drugstore, because “you never know who you might run into.”) You imagine she is going home to her generic box apartment in some complex called Willow Pointe or The Bluffs at Lake Whatever, crawling into bed with her “old man,” who is weathered in a strangely sexy way and works nights stocking the shelves at Home Depot. You, however, are going home and popping your Zoloft and wrapping yourself in mismatched sheets on a twin air mattress, cataloging every romantic mistake you’ve made since the age of 14. But you didn’t hear that from me, because I don’t know about these things, and I promised I’d never tell.

You have no weed to numb this, and you drank the last beer a few days ago. Besides, you were never really drug-dependent in the first place, but your bullshit sob stories always seem more tragi-romantic when illicit chemicals are involved. Sadder still, you momentarily envy Sid and Nancy, Kurt and Courtney… they had the money for the good drugs and at least they had each other. But you have $60 to your name, your precious Zoloft, and half a bottle of generic Excedrin. And you already got the last head rush from the Reddi-Whip can. But you don’t want to tell anyone that you are pathetic enough to still do whip-its past legal drinking age. Maybe they will think you are lonely and empty. Which you are and aren’t, but that’s your business.

Tomorrow you will be guzzling Cafe Bustelo and sorting laundry. You will pick up a Miller High Life on the way home from the shitty menial job you are lucky to have. You will leave dirty dishes in the sink for three days simply because you live alone and can. You will laugh to yourself on the subway over something nobody else would find remotely amusing. You will smile when no one is watching.

You wish you’d posted this, but you didn’t. But I won’t tell.