Day Sixty-Seven

At first, my days felt robotic.  Every motion the same as the one at the exact same moment as yesterday.  Each day leaving me as deserted as the last.  Even when a bowl of tea, steaming with leaves swimming, dropped and cracked against the kitchen tile it didn’t even feel authentic.  But today...something felt unique.

There is a man that sits on the crooked corner two blocks from my apartment, I’ve walked past him for a fortnight, his eyes peering at peculiar trash, while I tap my worn sneakers against the sidewalk, counting tips frenetically or staring into the night.  Two nights ago for the first time, I saw him wearing a green tie instead of his usual dark violet.  I wondered where he got it.  I wondered what means it took him to get it.  I admired him as I looked downward maybe even inward at myself and it suddenly felt different.  The doorknob turned cleaner, my bed warmer, the sun against the black road shined brighter into my eyes, burning exquisitely as I walked down the street.   

The road feels good and rough; my strides are strong as I walk home.  There is something about these streets that has gotten into me.  Deep in my veins there is something flowing now, flowing for the addictive energy I’ve found ever since the green tie.  I miss the places I’ve been and the feelings I’ve felt, but I’m getting used to this feeling.  The one I felt when I opened the door panting, late due to a subway accident on fifth, tributaries flowing from my watering hole temples, to find a pitcher of the most refreshing Chinese Ginseng tea I’ve ever tasted laying on the table cloth one of the kid bus boys must have done for me when he saw I wasn’t there.  The same feeling that came when Vincenchi and the four other people I walked on eggshells with for two months cooked beef stew with all the food we could scrap together.  It was so good and someone made a joke almost everyone understood. 

            I wake to the papaya light peaking through my bedroom and it no longer feels musty but refreshing.  I see tunnels in my mind, with lights at every end. 

Day Forty-Six

Sole, pad, sole, pad, pit patter, pit patter along the pavement.  My walk to work.  The same three streets, today the addition of two alleys, the fastest route if I’m late.  Sometimes I long for my calves to burn because of the intense incline of the road.  Sometimes I dream about the out of control sensation you get when your body can’t keep up with your legs because of the downward slope and your intense high from the fear of falling.  It feels as if the stage where I stand and play my life has no elevation in sight.  I look over the mesa trying to connect the synapses with dendrites but there are no boulders, no tornados of relationships, no crushing career moments, no joyous moment with friends, no glimpse of anything.  Flat like the chopsticks I lay down on the tables.  Flat like the wooden floor my mattress lays upon.  There is a picture in the restaurant of The Great Wall that their son took.  The Wall looks long and hard and twisted.  I dream of that picture sometimes and I wake up panting.  Does someone come and tell you when the time has come that today is the today where life is now classified as officially average?  Somewhere in the file cabinets of whoever is keeping track of the state of souls, will lay my file, stuck in between lawyers of innocent men wrongly accused and twelve time marathon runners,

File: SK 1991-2080 Life: Average Classification: Middle

 

I open the door to the restaurant to Mrs. Yio tap, tap, tapping her watch with her bony finger; her eyes teary from chopping onions.  A few strands of silvery gray hair run wild across her forehead, while others are tight to her head with sweat.  The surrounding skin around her eyes is wrinkled but the black yeux are deep with stories. I nod in remorse as I hang my coat and I do feel sorry.  She hustles me extra hard all morning, making me do double the work.  Later she rubs her finger along my ear as she swiftly walks by on her way into the kitchen, most likely to yell at one of the chefs for not putting enough sesame seed on the chicken feet.  That’s her way of saying she forgives you, and when I go to leave I find a to go container of pork fried rice.  I don’t hate the Yios as much as I would like to.  In fact, this pinhole in the wall of an establishment has started to become the only place I feel comfortable and the people inside my only friends. 

I see Chenzo outside walking bitterly with a dark whiskey bottle in hand.  He takes swigs in between telling me chopped stories of his last few days.  He hadn’t come into the restaurant and missed the first Thursday there in nearly a year.  To my surprise, I was actually worried.  He asks if I want to go Mellow Mushroom, a little Italian place down the street that serves calzones with cheese oozing out   They let him sit there after hours and he says he needs to talk so I agree.  When we sit he fumbles through his pocket and slides me a bunch of pages that look as though they’ve been ripped from a library book titled, A Thousand Plateaus-Capitalism and Schizophrenia, by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari.  I’ve never heard of the authors but he says I should read it.  The garlic knots Chenzo orders come to the table warm with steaming marinara sauce in a paper cup next to them.  I listen to Chenzo talk of his sister’s illness as he swirls the knots in the red sauce ignoring the fact that it is getting all over his fingers and under his nails. 
of them.

Cheese stretches from my mouth to the counter as I watch a waitress and her boyfriend share a pepperoni, giggling and brushing each other’s hipbones under the table.  The guy tossing dough behind the counter has an I’m-always-going-to-work-at-a-pizza-shop goatee. 

            I crawl onto the padded mattress and flash my phone light on the pages Chenzo gave me.  I can’t help but wonder if I come off as a little schizo, trying to figure out the reasoning behind him giving me the pages.  I wake to my face stuck with sleep to one of the pages; my limbs sprawled awkwardly around the bed. The page comes off easily and my blurry eyes come into focus on lines Chenzo must have underlined with a pen he took from the receptionist. 

 

“A plateau is always in the middle, not at the beginning or the end.  A rhizome is made of plateaus.  –Greg Bateson

“The middle is by no means an average; on the contrary, it is where things pick up speed.” 

Day Twenty-Seven

My thin tank top is drenched in sweat when I wake up.  It normally is.  A small fan next to the bed that clicks as it rotates is the only form of circulation this side of the apartment gets.  I count seconds to the beat. 

It’s raining when I step outside.  Children jumping and splashing in puddles on the sidewalk, girls with soaked dresses and boys shirtless, finally relieving themselves from the wretched heat.  It is still early morning and the puddles are colored from the reflections of the street lights.  I pass a group of red ones, then green.  It’s the first rain in weeks since the streets were stricken with the thick summer heat.  Droplets of sweat form above my brow and lip as I trudge through the slick streets with my holey boots that allow small pellets of rain to wet my socks. It’s that summer kind of rain-short but exquisite, the refreshing kind but it still doesn't stand a chance against the summer heat, so you're skin feels sticky and clean at the same time.      

A few servers are bustling around forking spoons and laying knives square to each other on the tables.  I walk towards the coat rack through the kitchen.  My eyes tear from vinegar and sesame oil.  Tofu is crisping in the fryer while the two chefs argue in Mandarin.  One sous is washing a big pot and checking on is rice cooker every few minutes.  Poorly cooked rice is a sin in Chinese culture.  The other is chopping shallots and herbs, moving quickly, it is hard to keep his hands in clear vision.  

 What day is it? Tuesday?  My first customer will be Chenzo, a sour balding Italian man with thick-rimmed glasses and a gimp leg he supports with a cane.  He comes every Tuesday and Thursday and complains of the food the whole time.  He talks to himself as he waits but sometimes he tells me of his life in Italy.  He says the heat is nothing compared to summers in Italy.  On breaks, we sit outside when he had nothing to do, which was often, our knees buckled side by side and our butts against the wet pavement, him smoking cigarettes and me taking the occasional drag.  All his family is still there.  His house is on a narrow street by a parchment store called Pitti Palace where his family gets the postcards they send him from.  He shows me them, with wrinkled hands and downward eyes.  “It is veird zey sen me pictures to remind me of ze only place I von’t ever forget.  What is all around me vis not home,” he said to me in his broken English.  He tells stories of when he was a boy.  His friends and him would steal gondolas and go down the river to markets and steal meatballs from the back door. Sometimes he said things that stuck me with all throughout the night.  They would creep back into my head as I scraped chicken and broccoli into the trash and then again as I turned off the outside lantern right before leaving.  He gives me things sometimes, pictures of places he’s seen, poems he’s written, chess pieces and jacks he's found thrown in the park, and meaningless knickknacks. As I walk home passing under the streetlights, I examine the book he gave me today, Nadja.  He talks about surrealism paintings that decorate his home in Italy. 

I imagine running away to Italy with Chenzo, getting lost in the winding streets stepping on shadows of chapels and stores.  I reach home and climb the rickety fire escape to the roof and begin paging through Nadja with the light of the moon.  Maybe this is how Chenzo loses himself for a bit.  I need to lose myself. I wake up, my face burning from the sun and my shirt dry and crisp for the first time since summer began in the city.

Day Nineteen

My forehead is beaded with sweat when I finally reach the apartment after the twelve-floor climb.  It hasn’t gotten any easier and whoever said always take the stairs to get in shape is a liar.  Out of frustration and pure exhaustion, I bang my head against the door at the mere thought of entering.  The pain is numbing and sensational.  Harder than I intended but at least it will deaden my senses for a few moments so I can bear to enter this alien place.

Mr. Win is the only one home and is passed out with just a sheet, drool forming a shallow pool below his chin in the dip of the mattress made by the pressure of his mammoth of a middle.  I walk on parts of the hard wood floor that aren’t littered with garbage-mostly empty beer bottles, take out containers, and cigarettes. 

The door creaks open when I enter my area, it doesn’t even classify as a room, but Vincenchi made us all rectangular frames reminiscent of doors in order to keep any of the remaining dignity any of us had left. I tumble onto my mattress, uncovered with a single pillow that’s so worn it’s nearly split in two.  The tiny window above my bureau leaks murky light from a nearby streetlight into the room, polluted with smog and sulfur oxide from the city.  The counterfeit light makes me feel worse as I slug another swig of my Heineken. 

There’s a place hundreds of miles from here, where the sun is so close, that you can’t look up because you’ll be blinded the white.  Real light.  The aureate kind that spangles off the water and burns your skin dry.  The kind that is so hot but so invigorating you couldn't imagine feeling more content. Aphids suck the sap off the veiny green leaves; the water running strong, ignoring the boulders in its path.  The mist cleanses your tainted skin as you float into the Catalina blue of the rapids.  Every entry feels as if you are being reborn into the person you were meant to be.  The blistering light of the sun streaks your skin through the trees.  This is what being alive feels like, you think. 

                                  Out here there is nothing. Out here there is everything. 

I wasn’t always here.  Living in a two-room apartment filled with six, at the dirt end of Chinatown that smells of ferrets.  Between us, there are four different languages spoken-so very few words spoken at all.  The silence is not the tranquil one I’ve once experienced-but is phony and ear shattering.  The light is not the same, even outside.  The street lights, billboards, and buildings don’t radiate my mind like the resplendent light from the stars of the place I once knew.  I am left only to dream.

I drift off to sleep as a familiar light begins to vibrate against my face. A text message from Mr. Yio: "Can you please come in earlier? 9:00 am."  I throw the phone making another tributary in the stream of cracks along the wall.

  

Day One

Day 1: 6:00 pm-2:00am

Around three or four a.m. is when they tell me they normally start cleaning and preparing for the morning.  I envision my mother cackling at the thought of me 'getting ready to serve' the type of people who come to this kind of place for brunch while canoodling with her latest meal ticket in the Caribbean.  Mostly all the customers have left except a fairly drunk woman and an exceptionally drunk man.  I begin sweeping the dining room, brushing white rice and snow peas into the pan mindlessly.  My pores leak soy and my skin is spotted with duck sauce making my fingers stick to one another and every surface I touch.  The lanterns always shed the same shade of dull yellow and you can never really know what time is it. 

            Red silk cloths cover the tables lined one by one like cadets reporting for morning roll.  Water drips from rock to rock into a small pond in the center of the room under the belly of the golden lion statue that is said to bring the restaurant “peace and prosperity.”  Maroon columns decorated with dragons and monkeys hold the water worn ceiling upright.  Thin gold trims trace along the corners of the walls helping to cover the building’s true age.  Each table is dimly lit by a single tea light, just enough to see the movement of hands and the whites of eyes.  Metal lanterns dangle from any open space.  Pictures of plum blossoms and the Great Wall are spread about.  The place looks authentic and phony at the same time.

            Back in the kitchen, a black cat grinds against the oven next to the fryer where extra dumplings are sizzling for the employees who are here late cleaning.  A hair goes in the peanut oil.  Shredded cabbage and daikon litter the tile floor. Whisks and woks pile high in the sink.  Two children chase each other around the kitchen fingering bowls of noodles and slurping sauce straight off spoons.  Blenders, pots, and knives are tossed about and they punch them as they run by making the plastic cutting boards jump and fall onto the floor.  I scrub the stubborn grease stains that are splattered from end to end of the kitchen.  My eyes are caked with crust and under my fingernails are thick strips of a black grainy mixture of soy sauce, dirt, and grease.  My hair smells of chicken feet all the way home. 

I step into the night and the authentic blackness of the sky reveals the real time-four o’clock.  The streets are slick and dark.  The only light comes from a lantern hanging on the overhead of the restaurant. The light guides me the sixteen blocks home, while I contemplate how I will return the lantern to the Yios if I don’t come back tomorrow.