My mother's hands and feet are falling off in layers. There is nothing she can do.
She asks me to help her push in a thumbtack. It will split her finger open if she does it herself.
She wont go see a doctor.
I yell at her. "You're a fucking leper and you don't care! It's disgusting, ma. Really."
She says she's too busy. She clips on a pair of earrings and throws a shawl over her shoulder. "Looking real good, ma. Just bring a pair of gloves. And forget about the sandals. They'll run away in disgust before you even show them the house."
My mother is kicking off her real estate career at 56. She got a lucky break on leads, and now gets bankruptcy referrals out of the ears. She's found her calling. Her own bankruptcy, when I was 13, has given her an empathetic understanding of her clients. It's all so far behind her now, but still she carries the sadness from those evil years deep within her, neglected. Just like her hands and her feet.
She rushes out of the door and gets into her $50,000 lemon, a black BMW that looks more like a vehicle for transporting gangsters, hitmen, mafia, or the dead. She paid for it in cash.
"Ma, I'm leaving for Washington state. I'm driving north tomorrow."
"Yeah, right. You're not going alone. Bye!"
I'm 27 years old, and have lived all over the US, and traveled across Europe solo. Before you go thinking I come from privilege, let me say this: I was more of a shoestring traveler than anything. I slept in libraries, streets and benches. I hunkered down under trees during lightning storms and begged the police to find a place for me to rest when they treated me like a bus depot bum.
"This isn't a bus depot" they said to me once, as I stood chattering, chatting to my long-distance love, a man 14 years my senior, (who had a cutting problem and serious anxiety disorder). That was at Swedish hospital in Ballard, a suburb of Seattle.
Obviously, I made it Washington state. My mother hasn't visited. But she says she will.
There's nothing I can do, though, to keep her ship on an even keel. It seems destitution never lingers far behind her. The bubbles keep an ebb in her cash flow: she never manages it well. Feast and famine. The story of our lives.

Brewing

By now, at a ripe-old 28, I should have been married. I should have miscarried several of my ex-boyfriend's children, been seduced into marriage by my hormones. I might have even changed my name to any one of those that I scribbled naively in my notebooks, with a Mr and Mrs in front of it. But no. Gwen Stefani, though you may have made 1950's hairdo's and husband trolling popular again, this was not my biology.
Serisouly, Gwen did it. It was soon after the "Simple Kind of Life" song came out that "Desperate Housewives" debuted on whatever network. Girls rushed back to the pages of wedding magazine and flirted with their destiny by pointing a flowery fingernail at the dresses of their dreams.
It all started.
People rushed out to buy real estate. Home prices flew high and then crashed. What? the American dream spilling over into reality?
Now, 51% of women are living single. That's right, so if you're not paired up yet girl, you can count yourself in the majority. That doesn't mean it's the new black. I just think it means people may actually be using judgment, rather than society, to dictate their lives.
Once you say "I do", the letters need to stop going, and coming. The perfumed stationery must be thrown away, or burned. The hidden connections cannot be explored, and the water must be still and deep. Life as a head-banging, ball-crushing, soul-pervert must come to an end.
There may be little hope in losing your libido, keeping your crushes from gushes, and hands on the wheel rather than on the er, lever; as long as you're like me: A lusty, crazed, eccentric with a flair for drama in their soul, a willingness to take chances, and a divorce card waiting in their pocket. But the therapists say no. The priests say no. Even some religious boys who would make great fucks say no. And I applaud them.
But still, Pandora's box has been opened to reveal games, gadgets and gizmos that strikingly resemble feathers, leather cuffs, strap ons, and other pleasure giving devices. And next to them are the faces and bodies and souls of those who you KNOW would like to be satiated, soul-satisfyingly, and that's the problem.
All artists are lechers. I am one of them. I am bad. I am repugnant. I am damned.
I am sorry, Mr. Youngbuck, for dancing on your youth with my heavily callused, age-old, time- hardened, worn-old feet. I am sorry for liking you so much that it nearly disrupted the universe's promise to be nice to me in 2007. And I am now going to fully apologize to every delivery boy, bike-messenger, UPS man on the street I've winked at over the passed few months. And I am sorry to my boyfriend, for nearly breaking our fragile contract that binds us.