Temporary Housing
On a car ride home from Schnucks, the grocery chain in these parts, I realized that never would I’ve imagined I’d end up in Tennessee. Tennessee. The drive from Austin to Memphis was a scary one. As we drove further into East Texas I tried not to look. It got worse in Arkansas. But, when my dad told me that we were in Hope, AR, Clinton’s birthplace, I relaxed. I smiled. I fell asleep. I woke to see the Mississippi River as we crossed from AR to TN. It’s big and all, but the bridges just aren’t that impressive. Deeper into Memphis, the freeway developed color: graffiti. Just beyond, I could see abandoned buildings, boarded up windows, and, more graffiti.
“Memphis is a third world country,” my dad said.
I locked my door. Later, it began to look civilized. The street pavement turned from a pot-holed gray, to smooth clay brown. We weren’t in Memphis anymore.
We now live in the city of Collierville. Collierville turns into Germantown, which turns into Memphis. A long road, Houston Levee, leads to our house in the Halle Plantation neighborhood. The two names evoke negative connotations. The first: levee; I can only think of Katrina. And, well, plantation needs no explanation.
The view from our kitchen is the fourteenth hole of the Memphis National Golf Club’s course—I only guess the number: how am I supposed to know if they don’t label it? In the mornings I like to sit at our old kitchen table, the one my dad has had since college, the one that has already broken cleanly in half while my dog was under it—I came home that day and wondered why she smelled of coffee—yet some Elmer’s glue fixed it.
At my house we brew the strongest coffee we can; my parents guzzle two pots before starting their day. We use a large hourglass shaped device to brew it. My mother pours me a cup, and I sit down to stare outside at the endless green lawn. Weekdays are the worst. Especially when you see younger men playing. The older, retired men I can understand playing on the weekdays, but the younger ones? No. One such golfer approaches our low, barely there, wooden fence looking for his ball.
“I took a sick day to play in my new Nike golf shirt, and this is how I play? Fuck,” I imagine him saying.
He bunches his eyebrows and facilitates the wrinkling of his forehead. Something about his tan makes him look abusive. I think about his young wife at home, dealing with the kids. Asshole. He throws his hands up, while his buddy comes over to help him. They scan our backyard, and my mother gets closer to the window with a face that says “not in my yard,” and my dog quickly follows her, tail taut, with a bark that translates as the same. We all stare at the golfer. His buddy walks behind him to keep searching. The buddy finds his own ball and slyly throws it a couple of yards further.
In the late afternoons, when its not too hot, or the clouds threaten rain, I sit outside on the patio and read with an Ikea cup filled to the brim with iced Perrier, and a fourth of a lime wedge. It condensates in my hand, and drops of water run down my arm. Frank O’Hara sits open on my lap. I think: How many languages did he actually speak? Is that superficial of me? As long as he didn’t know more than I do at the time when he died.
A birdhouse totters on a pole, reminiscent of the tether ball games we used to play at school. If you lower it, you can see it’s full of mites. Perhaps that’s why the purple martins fledged early this year. The birdhouse has a balcony. Nests don’t have balconies; how will these babies ever survive in Brazil where they can never touch the ground? Who decided to put the balcony on in the first place? The balcony failed anyway. Minutes away from my house, on the drive from Austin, my mom called my dad and relayed the news: the babies had fallen. All I heard were groans of disappointment; I began to wonder if someone had died.
I’ve forgotten O’Hara. Partly because of the guy who maintains the golf lawn; he passes by, barefoot, with a tan to die for. He looks like a lifeguard in his red shorts and white t-shirt. I’m jealous at first, but then thank God I will not look like a knock-off Louis Vuitton when I’m older. The Perrier has lost its carbonation, and I contemplate going inside. My dog has already sniffed around in the garden where a chipmunk resides. He likes to bask in the sun, lying on the brick steps. She hates him.
The sun sets. This is not home. The jalapeño peppers are more expensive here, and they’re not as hot; my mom is growing her own and some habaneros, too. Oddly, the house came with no microwave, and my dad thinks we can live without one. We never really ate frozen food anyway, but what about the leftovers? My dog insists that she would rather lie on the cool tile. I agree; I’m better off looking from the inside.
Because I had to get one before I go abroad…
I did it. I’ve gotten a blog. I don’t know why I’ve been so hesitant to begin one. But, here it is.
The blog title comes from a short story I read in the Spring 2009 issue of Zoetrope: All Story. It was the “Latin American Issue,” and it included several illustrations from the diary of Guillermo del Toro. Daniel Alarcón and Diego Trelles Paz served as the issue’s guest editors, and wrote an insightful introduction. Many years have passed since the Boom era of Latin American literature that produced countless masterpieces from such authors as Borges, Puig, and Márquez. Since then, we have, for the most part, ceased to hear of new literary achievements in Latin America. This issue showcases short fiction of the current “Post-Post-Boom” period.
The specific short story I reference is “Family,” by the Bolivian writer Rodrigo Hasbún. He writes the story in first person from the point of view of an older man who has serious regrets about his life, mainly the way his daughter turned out. The first time his daughter enters the story, she calls and says nothing but “dad,” and he proceeds to set the phone down because his daughter “could spend the whole night without saying anything, a terrible silence, bottomless, dirty…”
Numerous instructional writing texts stress that we should use adjectives and adverbs sparingly. If we do use them, they say, then we should pair them alongside nouns and verbs we wouldn’t normally associate with them. We’ve all heard of awkward silences, well, how about dirty ones?
