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CHAPTER 1
DECREPIT
I'd want a range life If I could settle down.
If I could settle down,
Then I would settle down.
— Pavement
We were performing a play about this maggot on our kitchen floor who grew until he was squishing out the windows, suffocating us and all those who came into the Ranch House.
The maggot play was meant to be retro, like Godzilla or King Kong — one of those huge-creatures-dominating-humanity stories. But we were wasted on Xanax, dressed in red dresses and red feather boas, so it had a New Wave feel.
"Don't eat me, you maggot," I said to the two-footlong papier-mâché maggot lying on the floor.
"I vill crush you," said Heidi, in a low, Kruschevian maggot/dictator voice from behind the door. "I am zee maggot."
That's the only part I remember. The script was pathetic.
Heidi, Annie, and I — roommates — renamed the Blue House the Ranch House. It was a one-story, spread out, casual Craftsman-style place.
Everything was decrepit: termites ruined the walls and vines grew in the windows. We spent our time learning Carter Family songs. Sara and Maybelle are easier to imitate than A.P.'s baritone parts. I can still play "Single Girl," "Wandering Boy," and "Wildwood Flower" on guitar. We had pie parties and sang to guys we invited over to eat elderberry pie hot out of the oven. The elderberries came from trees in the park because we had no money to buy grocery store ones. Countryfolk wannabes for sure.
My first night in that house I raided the basement and found a shawl, rusty tools, and knitting equipment. I had a spooky meeting with the ghost of the old lady who died there. She was making the rooms cold. Drafts of winter air were leaking through sealed windowsills even though it was summer. I told her to leave because three girls were moving in. I was alone and sensed her in the corner of the den, rocking in her invisible rocking chair. I heard the chair creaking and could smell the stale scent of the elderly. She'd died in the 1970s and no one had lived there since, the realtor told me. It made sense, then, that someone should tell her to beat it.
Back when I was nine my aunt told me that to get rid of a poltergeist, I should be firm. It really works. The Ranch House Ghost departed that night. Our theory was that she'd been buried under the avocado tree in the backyard. It had years of leaf debris piled beneath it, and grew avocados the size of cantaloupes. We figured the human compost had beefed them up. Also, next to the tree was a defunct incinerator — convenient. Her son must have folded her up, shoved her in, fired up the stove, and burned her into an ashen pile, ideal for fertilizer. That's why our tree kicked ass.
There are a lot of ghosts and good avocado trees in The Echo Park. I didn't know there was a "the" before Echo Park until I went to the local liquor store, House of Spirits, to get tequila for our "ranchwarming" party. I was talking to the lady behind the counter, telling her I'd just moved back into the neighborhood.
"It's the only place I feel at home," I said.
"So many kinds of people. Less old people now. They're all dying," she said.
I knew she meant the Echo Park Convalescent Home down the street, where heaps of old people roll around in wheelchairs and smell everything up. No one likes that haunted house.
The guys behind me in line started in.
"You used to live somewhere else?" one asked. He looked tight in his L.A. Dodgers cap, oversized white T-shirt, Dickies shorts, and Nike Cortez sneakers, with white tube socks pulled up over his calves. All his friends looked the same and had shaved heads.
"Yeah. But I missed stuff, like kids setting off fire-works. Or wild dogs," I said.
"You always come back to The Echo Park," he said. "You can't ever leave The Echo Park." He nodded his head at my tequila bottle.
I saw a dead body while I was living in the Ranch House. Not in the house, down a couple miles in the donut store parking lot. I was walking by, and there was yellow tape all around as if the cops thought people were going to poke the body or something. It was lying in a conspicuously contorted position, legs bent in wrong directions, neck turned too far over. Man, middle-aged. No blood. Almost like he'd been pushed out of the passenger seat by someone driving at high speed and rolled all the way into the parking lot. I associated the body with the donuts and haven't eaten there since. After all, Ms. Donut is right around the corner. It's the feminist donut shop.
"What kind of life would you have if you could change yours?" Heidi asked me one afternoon while she washed potatoes in the sink.
I stood leaning on the doorjamb. "A range life," I said. That was my favorite song. I'd drink gin on the porch and listen to it. I'd gaze at the corn we planted where the lawn used to be and think about settling down. "Why?" I continued. "You sick of me? Just because I refrigerate butter?" Heidi left it out on the counter in a country-style butter dish. I hate soft, hot butter.
"Remember when the cats attacked it?" she asked. Her green gingham apron was spotted with potato bits.
It was Easter morning. We were out hunting colored eggs under the avocado tree. When we shooed the cats away, there was this little pile of butter scalloped into a pyramid shape by lick marks from their sandpapery tongues. Land O' Lakes, unsalted — with the box where you can tear off the Indian princess and fold her knees into her chest area so she has major hooters.
There were two rules of the house: wear clothes only when necessary, and always burn candles and incense to appease spirits. Nudity made us feel closer to those in nether-regions. Bare skin seemed more ghosty. We weren't trying to attract ghosts, but we respected them. The Old Lady Ghost was gone, but we still smelled her occasionally. I'd catch a whiff when I opened the medicine cabinet or stepped into the laundry room. She smelled like the nursing home, like musty sweaters and dirty flannel sheets. Ghosts smell pretty much the same as those about to die — which is totally separate from the way dead bodies smell. Ghosts aren't rotten, but there is a hint of putrefaction that makes me aware of their status: not dead yet, or already dead and separated from the physical body. Why don't ghosts smell fresh and young? Maybe old people don't remember how they smelled as kids so neither can ghosts.
* * *
There was another old lady next door, alive but barely. She grew candy-striped beets and okra in her front yard. Yet she didn't smell like she was dying. She prided herself on her odorless house.
"I hate bad smells," she said as she gave the three of us a tour of her house one day. It was a Craftsmanstyle too, stained dark wood inside, black velvet curtains over the windows. The bank was threatening to take it from her. "Your house smells," she added.
"Just that one time," I said. Some zucchinis in the crisper had gone bad. "Myrna, what can get candle wax out of carpet?" A votive candle had burned all night, tipped over, and run between the carpet hairs in our living room.
"An iron and a dish towel," she said. She showed us the method, making ironing movements in midair.
We fell asleep huddled on the floor around a candle because my mom called and was having visions of a murderer living next door to us, waiting to strike. My mom had psychic powers that we took pretty seriously, not seriously enough to move out that night as she had requested, but seriously enough to burn extra candles and incense, and to keep all the doors locked with the cats inside.
"Why is there so much spiritual drama here?" Annie asked that night. We listened to Let It Bleed by the Rolling Stones while locked in.
"Welcome to Echo Park," Heidi said. I thought again of that old folks' home down the block, and pictured their garden filled with car exhaust–coated agapanthus and weedy impatiens, barely tended to. The institutional garden, devoid of love.
"Do you two ever get a bad feeling when you walk past that convalescent hospital?" I asked. I kept thinking of that awful place. I took it as a sign, but I didn't know of what.
"No, except that everyone there's going to die," said Heidi.
"Maybe all their fears combine and rub off on you," Annie said.
That night I dreamt I was Sara Carter. I was dressed in raggedy clothes and holey leather shoes. The next day I tried to write a song about Echo Park, about how when I'm about to die I hope people will bring me back and bury me ... but not under an old willow tree. Where then? In Echo Park Lake, under the lotus flowers littered with McDonald's wrappers and devoured cobs of corn? Further down Alvarado Street in MacArthur Park, where so many dead bodies are dredged out of the lake? Would I be buried under the aptly named House of Spirits? None of these places are worthy of my corpse, I thought. Just as in the old ballads, I want to be buried by the seashore or under some significant tree.
We got evicted from the Ranch House when the bank bought it. Shortly before we got kicked out, our dog died, which was the first sign of things winding down. Then Myrna, our neighbor, declared bankruptcy and lost her house. The third sign was when our friend Melissa moved out of her house up the street because she kept hearing machine gun noises on the ground floor. She found out that her house had been a gangster hideout during the bootlegging era — lots of people died in it. My mom was hospitalized for hearing voices. A gardener chopped down our avocado tree.
I wanted to be buried under that tree, with the cremated Old Lady. It's the only place that comes to mind when I think of drafting a will. I'd like to be charred in that very incinerator, but I don't think the guy who lives there now would allow it. I've driven by and seen him on several occasions watering his lawn where our corn used to be.
The Carter Sisters are like ghosts, singing about the space between heaven and hell. Do not disturb / My waking dream / The splendor of / That winding stream. That land doesn't seem to include Los Angeles, or anywhere west of the Mississippi. I worry that I come from a place with so few legends, or, to be more accurate, legends that are speculative. Big deal — old ladies, gangsters, tequila, banks taking houses away from people, people getting killed in front of donut shops. There's no real way to know the other people who lived in these rented houses, apart from rummaging through what they left in basements then concocting harebrained ghost stories about them.
On the nights I lie awake wondering where to be buried, I sometimes recall staring up at the Ranch House's stuccoed ceiling — the plaster sparkled with glitter. I'd wake up in the middle of the night imagining it to be the night sky. A burning candle made it twinkle even more. It was disco and country at the same time — glam-rural — a combo that makes me realize the irony of a band called Pavement singing about Range Life. I know I'll be an old lady ghost because I lie in bed feeling young and old at the same time. Young in experience, but old because I wish to be part of some tradition. I crave a past but don't want to live in it. Eras run into one ageless mess. Ghosts live in different times simultaneously. They yearn for what's lost. I haven't even lost anything but I still find myself yearning for it. Not knowing where you come from is dumber than never wanting to leave.
CHAPTER 2
HUMMINGBIRD MOONSHINE
The Summer of Ailments sucked. Nerve pain extended from my ass down the length of my left leg. I walked heavily on my right leg, so that my right foot developed calluses. I bought a specially padded pair of sneakers but my feet got hot and unbearably smelly, and I had to throw them out. Hangnails plagued me. A sunburn turned into a skin cancer, and the doctor left laser scars on my chest when he removed it. My eyes were tired from reading too much. I had a broken rib from slipping on the edge of a pool at a barbecue. At the dog park, an Akita bit me — I got stitches that ran from the tip of my forefinger to the base of my thumb. The stitch-line got sunburned, which made it puffy with infection.
Friends told me that simultaneous injuries meant good luck because I'd used up all my bad luck at once. How much worse can it get? I wondered. Am I cursed? Who would have cursed me?
I made a trip downtown to the Million Dollar Pharmacia, a botanica full of folk curatives, paraphernalia for casting spells, incense, candles, charms, and portraits of the saints. I'd been there many times before to buy votive candles with Buena Suerte prayers printed on them. Fast Money Blessing, Law — Stay Away!, and The Omnipresence of God were the most recent candles I'd burned. I also stocked up on La Chuparrosa stuff, anything with a hummingbird on it. "Song of the Chuparrosa" came printed on a box of hummingbird soap, here translated from Spanish:
Oh divine hummingbird!
You who sucks the nectar of the flowers!
You who gives life to women in love!
I rely on you — I am a sinner.
Your powerful fluids protect me and provide me With the faculties to control myself as well as to experience enjoyment.
I keep you in my saint's locket so I may walk with you,
My beautiful hummingbird.
Recite this prayer on Thursdays and Sundays,
with a lit candle, while imagining her.
After my boyfriend Matt saved a hummingbird's life, I started collecting La Chuparrosa and reading scientific books like Hummingbirds by Crawford H. Greenewalt. The hummingbird flew into Matt's loft then exhausted itself looking for a way out. When it fell to the floor, he picked it up and sprinkled a drop of water on the back of its neck, since he'd heard that could revive tired hummingbirds. As the bird came to in the palm of his hand, he took it outside and watched it fly away.
The pharmacy was especially busy, but the man behind the counter recognized me and asked what I needed. He spoke English, which helped because my Spanish was limited.
"I don't know what I need, but I think I've been cursed," I told him. "I've had bad luck this summer."
"What kind of bad luck?" he asked.
"Physical, mostly. Pains all over. Bruises, sores, cuts. Do you think someone hates me? I try to be nice —"
"Perhaps someone is jealous of you," he interrupted. "You have something someone else wants, and they're bitter about it. Maybe a man."
"A man is jealous of me?"
"No, another woman," he said, leaning over the glass counter. "She has given you the Mal Ojo."
The pharmacist walked me around the store, filling my basket with oddities such as a blue candle shaped like a penis, perfume whose bottle bore a picture of a hand, and a charm baggie containing a red ribbon, a doll's eye, a fake lock of hair, and a tiny gold horseshoe. Finally, he gave me a talisman from behind the counter — a giant brown seed tied with red cord. "Ojo de venado," he said. "Wear this around your neck at all times."
Matt slept over after I showed him all the knickknacks I'd been given to protect myself from Mal Ojo. The deer's eye necklace was gaudy but seemed more prescribed, and therefore more likely to help me than the hummingbird prayers, incense, books, and videos lying around. I burned the penis candle on the nightstand as we fell asleep, which I think worried him a little.
The following morning he asked, "How'd you sleep last night?"
"I dreamed I was sledding in the snow with hordes of baby penguins. They were so cute!"
"You're cute," he said.
Over coffee, I pulled a penguin book off the bookshelf. I read about the fossil remains of a five-foot penguin that weighed 250 pounds, and envisioned a penguin larger than myself. The chapter entitled "The Emperor's Domestic Life" documented a battle between two female emperor penguins who were hot for the same male. I imagined slapping some girl with my black, rubbery flipper. I'd do it, I mumbled. I'd knock her over if I had to.
"You'd do what?" Matt asked, as he sat down next to me on the couch.
"I'd slap any girl who tried to steal you, just like this penguin is doing here." I showed him the picture.
He smiled and pointed to the bottom of the page, past the caption that noted how the male ducks out of the way while the females glare at each other over his head. There were two penguins — one tall, one short — touching bellies. The caption read: The victorious female stands chest to chest with the hard-won prize and warbles the penguin love song.
"There's us, after you knocked her out," he said. "They're kissing," I said fondly, taking another gulp of coffee from my mug. "That is so insanely cute." It was then I realized I'd called penguins cute twice already that morning.
After the cuteness of the penguins waned, hummingbirds were still on my mind, several of them in fact. My head was like a plastic raspberry-shaped nectar container; birds were poking their beaks at me from all directions, chipping away my skull to get the sweet gooey brain matter. I contemplated their mini machinery. I recalled that the Calliphox amethystina, one of the fastest, can beat its wings about eighty times per second! Hummingbirds are also the only birds that have a "reverse gear," which is why they can fly backwards. They're like small power tools, I thought.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Wide Eyed"
by .
Copyright © 2005 Trinie Dalton.
Excerpted by permission of Akashic Books.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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