Something is drip-drip-dripping. Something is tap-tap-tapping.

I’m furiously digging through my apartment to find the source of this indescribable, but ever-obnoxious, repetitive sound.

It isn’t the faucets, but I turn the hot and cold handles tightly toward their origin. It isn’t anything spilling, slowly, from the refrigerator, but I align all of its contents to prevent such a thing. It isn’t my watch, because I don’t wear one.

Drip. Drip. Drip.
Tap. Tap. Tap.

There are about five time sources in my apartment, but none of them are synchronized. Each clock differs by about fifteen minutes. One is set an hour early because it forgot about daylight savings. Another clock is set fifteen minutes late as to trick myself into hurrying, to trick myself into being on time. This clock, however, was set fifteen minutes ahead of a time that was countless daylight savings ago. The oven reads a time jolted by a power outage, a time suspended, static, before it reset itself to the time zone of some place I’d probably love to travel. The microwave read 2:30, neither 2:30am nor 2:30pm, but two minutes and thirty seconds into the heating of a cold cup of coffee.

“He hasn’t called in two days,” I tell my friend in London, so many time zones away.

“I don’t understand the multi-day incubation period between first and second dates,” she tells me in a way that suggests that after a year of living in Britain, she has mastered the art of appropriate communication between the romantically interested. According to her, it boils down to being completely inappropriate, not considering appropriateness, and being downright impetuous.

“You meet someone at a pub and they’re likely to text message you within the next thirty minutes,” she cackles.

“That’s sort of insane,” I tell her, just to give her a vocal response. What I’m really thinking of is is how brilliant such uninhibited communication seems, and how relieving it must be for her nerves. Why can’t American men be like British men? Apparently they’re all very flowery, emotive, suicidal. Why can’t American men be more like Morrissey?

I’ve asked many friends, from different locations in the world, friends of different genders, and friends of different sexualities to evaluate my romantic situation.

“What is the appropriate amount of time between a good first date and a second date?” I ask my straight roomate. I then give him the series of events that have lead up to my question, approximately a week after the said date.

And it was a good first date, in every sense of the idea. Good conversation, kissing, even holding hands. He told me, at the end of the night, that he’d call me “later in the week.” I’d talked to him a few times within the week, but they amounted to him having either a sore throat, or an office party, but reconciling these excuses with the words, “I’m not trying to blow you off.”

But I couldn’t help but feel blown-off.

“A week isn’t a long time,” my roommate tells me, with a “that’s so obvious” chuckle. The flickering lights of the television sitcom illuminate his expression.

“It just feels like a long time, I suppose,” I say elegantly, maybe like a forlorn British man would.

“You can’t call him again. In Fact, you can never call him again. You have to wait for him to call you first.” I look at him, with woeful eyes. He is so confident in his cynicism - he’s seen too much to be longer optimistic. But he’s single.

So I don’t call. I pine, repress, only to be met with another message, the following day, with those confusing words: “I’m not blowing you off, but…”

But, what?

Drip. Drip. Drip.
Tap. Tap. Tap.

I can’t tell if the sound, the nuisance, is mechanical or organic. It seems to be somewhere in between the two adjectives; the sound is now in between my weary tolerance and my steaming agression.

The day before, I smoked cigarettes and drank coffee with another friend, a friend whose romantic dilemmas always parallel my own. No matter how outlandish or how prosaic my news to her is, my words are always met with a disgruntled “tell me about it” or an empathetic “I know!”

“You know what, fuck the text messaging bullshit, and fuck the games,” she tells me while smoking a Korean-brand cigarette. “Just call him.”

Her advice, promoting agression, hit my heart in a more gripping sort of way than the passive advice of my roommate. I mean, why not be direct? Why play fucking games?

“Maybe some guys just need to be reminded, to be pushed a little,” I think to myself. But where do you draw the line between being direct and being, well, pushy?

My mother always tells me, with wide, glimmering eyes, the story of when she met my father. My mother believes in happy endings.

“I didn’t want to move to Dallas, to work at that store,” she tells me, her southern twang escalating in excitement and satisfaction. “But I did. And the night before I moved I met your father, who was in Oklahoma for the weekend but lived in Dallas.”

So my mother moved to Dallas and started to date my father. “Although I did call him when I got to town,” she tells me, expressing a doubt with a tone that was obviously moving toward affirmation. “He wasn’t in, even though he told me to call at that time. But then, I’ll be damned, the secretary of the office where he worked asks me, ‘Is this Tracey?’ And he called me that afternoon. We were engaged six weeks later.”

Six weeks later? And now celebrating their twenty-fifth? Their courting period, before the formal engagement, could not have afforded the week of doubt that I now feel.

But then again, in six weeks, no way and no how, could I fathom such an escalation of interest. In today’s defensive standard, I’m markedly insane for admitting to even thinking about this.

Today, the contemporary dating single must be inhibited. This ideal man is not analytical, he is proverbially organic. He is not calculated, everything just comes to him naturally. He always has the right words to say, because there are too many fish in the sea, with the Internet and all, to afford him the chance of saying the wrong thing. And this messiah of cool, with his scuffed Prada shoes (showing he has style but is not vain, showing that he knows both the importance of luxury and the disclipline of hard work) is perfectly balanced between his romantic tendencies and common sense. Because he does Yoga every morning before work and doesn’t drink on weeknights.

I’ve asked so many people’s advice, retold my story so many countless times, that I may as well have a bulleted print out to hand out to strangers with a section at the bottom for comments.

It makes me wonder how, without cell-phones and email, lovers used to court eachother. It seems like such a foreign concept. But the world wasn’t so large then, there wasn’t so much possibility. Love at first sight was a more common phenonmenon, because people did not know better. But then I wonder if symbols replaced text-messaging; if ambiguous digital messages were replaced by the coy fluttering of a woman’s fan or the akward arrangement of a caveman’s stones. Three stones meant ’shack up in my cave,’ five meant ‘we’re serious’, but what did four mean?

I discovered that it didn’t so much pay off to be calculated, as my real emotions usually got the best of me.

I rehearsed the perfect voice message, knowing my interest was at work. The tone was going to be perfect, neither too excited nor too banal. The words were carefully crafted in such a way as to not sound interrogative or questioning, and at the same time not sound overtly confident. I was sure the message would seal my chances for a second date.

But the second I heard the recording beep of the answering machine, I felt my body tense. I immediatelly wanted a cigarette. My first word came out congested - I sounded like a goblin of sorts. There was the obvious sound of nervously grazing my thumb against a lighter. So, knowing that there was an option to erase and re-record my message, I laughed hysterically into the phone and pressed the ‘*’ key. I thought, “now I can confidently record my rehearsed voice message.”

But the ‘*’ key was not the ‘#’ key. I had actually sent the message, without the chance of being able to erase it. He would hear my hysterical laughing, my congested voice. He would not hear my beautifully crafted, head-tight-on-my-shoulders message. He would think I was crazy. Like I was on emotional laxatives or something. He would abandon me.

So I followed the message with another, unrehearsed one. It wasn’t perfect, and it wasn’t very smooth, but it actually came out. The chaos had somehow set me at ease. I had fucked up, and, well - fuck it.

Just recently, I read a book on screenwriting that my roommate had on the bookshelf. From time to time, I entertain the idea of writing a screenplay, which seems sort of appropriate due to living in Los Angeles and loving to write. Anyhow, the book is fairly seminal, and instructs beginner’s on the basics of writing a screenplay.

One of the first chapters was on the subject of generating ideas (the most critical and irreversible aspect of writing a screenplay.) The author emphasized the importance of writing from within oneself, because “all you are is you.” Writers who are too removed from themselves often produce disinteresting work, work that is decidedly distant. Now this isn’t to say that only memoirs and autobiographies are interesting, for one can find themselves in anything really… be it the French Revolution, the life of an alcoholic artist, or a documentary on pedifile priests.

The “all you are is you” line did strike me as a bit egocentric, a bit too familiar of objectivism. But it did ring true in the context.

I reached down to touch my chest, a gesture that usually follows feelings of anxiety. I remember, sometime during my senior year of highschool, running on a treadmill in the office of a cardiologist. I had convinced myself that I had some sort of heart problem, for my heart was constantly beating uncontrollably. Because I wouldn’t stop returning for stress tests and EKGs, the doctor finally diagnosed me with arrhythmia, but suggested I only take the mecidine if it was completely necessary.

A couple years later a psychiatrist told me that my rapid heartbeat and fear of dying were most likely due to anxiety, as the mind can convince the body of things that aren’t really happening. I had to evaluate everything that could have caused my anxiety, from my mother having cancer when I was a child to my father’s addiction and infidelity when I was in highschool. Being gay and in the closet. Dating an opiate addict.

“You have to find yourself in all of this anxiety. You have to find the child within you, the child that comes out admist these anxiety attacks of yours. You then have to nurture that child with reality.”

I see a ghost emerge. But my ghost isn’t like the much fabled Christmas ghost, with the apocalyptic presence and the dragging chains. My ghost looks like George Clinton and smells like hashish.

George Clinton guides me to Barrett, age four, peaking from behind a corner as my mother fixes a wig onto her head. She then takes the wig off, and I see myself screaming and crying, yelling, “Put it back on! You’re not sick!” Her bald head told me that she was going to leave me, abandon me.

Mr. Clinton wraps his big black arm around my shoulder, and his colorful dreadlocks begin to pour out colored smoked, creating a psychedelic cloud that leads me into Barrett, age twelve, squashing grapes in my young hands. We had just gotten home from the grocery store when my mother recieved a call from her doctor. Within a couple of minutes, she was crying hysterically into the phone like a child. “It can’t be… back.”

I saw the grape juice drip from the cracks in my fist. I began to cry hysterically, and my sister continued putting the groceries in the refrigerator, despite the beeping due to the regrigerator door being opened for too long.

Beep. Beep. Beep.
Drip. Drip. Drip.

George Clinton removes his hand from my shoulder, and motions with an open palm toward a younger, more curly haired version of myself. I walk toward me, the child.

I hold the child in my arms. I tell him, “everything is going to be fine.” I grab his hand, sticky from the crushed grapes, and hold it against my heart. I then close the refrigerator door.

And the beeping, the dripping, the tapping stops.

So I go to this retro/hipster/rockabilly barbershop to get my hair did. Its the only place I feel comfortable under the scissors, and its the first place I got my haircut in LA. In Hollywood, it was the nearest, most decent, and most affordable place on the red subway line. Now I live in the same neighborhood as the barbershop, mainly, and I admit this reluctantly, because of its reputation as a sort of hipster mecca; a place in LA where more young and more ‘real’ people can eat at independent cafes, shop at independent record stores, and shit in independent toilets. I’ve recently become aware of the fact that I am more of an observer than a participant of these hip amenities. While there’s an adorable little independent sandwich shop down the street, a charming bakery owned by a French family with stylish denim, I still eat the bacon-turkey-guacamole at Quizno’s. While theres a small bookstore owned by a friendly gay man with horn-rimmed glasses and a short literary name, I still mostly go to Border’s. So I guess the entire basis of my move from Hollywood to Silver Lake was the latter’s proximity to my barbershop; a barbershop I don’t even necessarily love, but I guess its beautiful in that all things that are familiar are beautiful.

The other reason for my move had something to do with Single White Female, the power-hungry maniac I lived with in the advent of my Los Angeles days. Her name was Annie, a name more suited for a robust, freckled, red-haired young orphan than the man-hating Leviathan that she was. Think the ever-bipolar Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction meets the biting lesbionic cynicism of Janeane Garofalo. It might even be apt to introduce James Spader (ala Secretary) in this comparison, except Annie exchanged red correction pens for alarmingly critical post-its.

“You left the television on while you were gone,” the first post-it read, ca. late August, 2004. The last post-it, adhered to the sink faucet, 7 months later, read: “You fucking still haven’t scrubbed the grime off the frying pan. This better be done by the time I get home.” I woke up the next morning to the frying pan propped against my bedroom door, so that when I opened it the pan toppled over and tickled my feet with its grimy steel-flesh. The next several days were constituted by me scrubbing the pan in those dark hours before she arrived home from her 9to5, and placing the What I Thought Was Clean Pan (these words still haunt me) on the countertop for her critique. I remember the way the blinds refracted the light of the setting sun, framing the rags and the pan - a potrait of my apparent ineptitude. Day after day it wasn’t clean enough, no matter what the sweat of my brow had to say about it, and it still wasn’t clean on the day that I left, February 14, 2005 - a chilling Valentine’s Day.

My new roommate is decidedly the exact opposite of Annie. He’s 27, straight, single, and probably the most intelligent and witty dead-beat that I have ever known. I met him through some friends at my school, who warned me of his flamboyant alcoholism, but reconciled it with the fact that he is one of the funniest and most sincere persons on the planet. While he doesn’t own a single thing in our apartment, not even half of our new digital cable or any shampoo, he fills the place with a sort of welcoming warmth that to me, after the Hollywood civil war, feels something like taking a shit on heroine. I’m constantly dancing around the living room with moves I never knew I had before, moves so fluid and ecstatic, moves that I thought could only be expressed and translated by recently liberated negroes, hundreds of years ago. The only critical remark I have is usually directed to him, with an arched eyebrow: “are you sure you want to start out he night in that way?” I say referring to the Sparks in his hand (the half energy drink / half beer voodoo potion.) He doesn’t control it, IT controls HIM.

And there are all of these vibrant idiosyncrasies roaming around the townhouse we live in. There’s the possessed cat, the one that rolls around the driveway with the enraptured, erotic ecstacy of Bernini’s sculpture of St. Theresa, the cat that looks at me seductively, religiously, with its poltergeist eyes. I’m both attracted to and afraid of it. There’s a nice, crippled hispanic lady with three toy dogs (her children), who constantly takes her yapping shitzus and malteses on walks down the block. There’s a girl with an eating disorder upstairs who blares contemporary Christian music as a sort of solace to seeing the face of Satan in the toilet before she flushes. And of course there’s the crooning queens, who I could fill pages of illustrious stories with, but are most notorious for their constant complaining and references to the rest of the tenants as “inconsiderate monkeys” in their Luther-esque bulletins constantly posted on our doors and car windshields.

Since the seasons in LA don’t change, and since I haven’t allowed myself a break from school, the transitions I have made in this city are most appropriately marked by the bad and even worse haircuts I’ve had at the aforementioned place. I’ve had everything from a premature crack-baby buzz-cutt to a criminal exaggeration of the proverbial Jew-fro. One lady worth noting ran her fingers through my hair and, with a slight, royal upturn of the nose, squealed, “who do you have to thank for this hair?” This was obviously not in a complementary tone - this was a tone that seemed to say, “you know, John Deere doesn’t make hair clippers.” And it wasn’t a rhetorical remark. She actually expected me to defend my hair, as if I had a family tree with pictures in my satchel. “Aha!” I would say, pointing to somewhere in the middle of the tree. I would demonstrate with my index finger the peculiarity of the black man adjacent to my Great Aunt Yamami, and to the italicized word under his picture: “slave.” Tears rolled down my cheeks as she obliterated my curls with a dull razor, looking like Faye Dunaway in Mommie Dearest, channeling her hatred of cheating husbands and bratty children through a midnight hacking of the rose hedges.

My haircut this afternoon was a sort of delightful anomaly. There was only one stylist in the queue who had yet to give me a terrible haircut. She was wedged between the cackling, fat, gay pacific islander with the awful faux-hawk (who bestowed upon me the same awful faux-hawk) and the skinny blonde lady who ambled slowly and indecisively through my hair as if her scissors were the fork in the plate of pasta she couldn’t bring herself to eat the night before.

“I’m Tanya,” she tells me, the industrial fan of the salon blowing around her damaged hair like the modern-day Boticelli Venus that she was, a little scathed and weathered, but still Muse-like. “I’ll be cutting your hair today.”

She took off my baseball cap and placed it delicately next to the mirror. I always wear the same hat on the days I get my haircut. Its a tattered Yankees cap that, instead of reading ‘NY’ in the essential script, reads: “you can’t imagine the horror you’re about to unfold.” She placed both hands symetrically along the sides of my head, and pushed her tongue from between her teeth - a look of serious contemplation.

I noticed the sloppy, seemingly erroneous tattoos dancing across her arms and hands. Etched in her skin were cryptic drawings of vulva-like botanicals and Twombly-esque iterations. Her natural hair color, her dark roots, pushed a strange auburn color to the tips of her split-ends, making her head look like the tail of a fox. She removed her hands from the side of my head, and looked at our reflection in the mirror. She then uttered these most beautiful words: “I love your hair.” I made her say it again, claiming that I couldn’t hear her because of the large fan next to us.

“I love your hair.”

There was ambient music playing the background. I felt entranced by hands that enjoyed my hair, confident in their acceptance. As her fingers kneaded deeper and deeper, fingers akimbo clutching small tufts of hair, my eyes rolled behind my head. The ambient music and her foxtail ticked my ears. All was silent.

Suddenly, I felt cool scissor blades sloppily graze my ear. The background noise, the harsh pinwheel of the fan, seemed blaringly loud. I looked up from my reverie, my short nap. My post-nap expression of beatitude was met my another similar gesture, although her eyes were still closed and her tongue had retracted back into her mouth. I nudged her.

“Omygod!” She exclaimed. “Looks like we both sort of dozed off there. Must be the heat… or the music!”

If I weren’t still in my state of sleepy relaxation, I may have been more horrified. I just smiled and watched her continue assidiously cutting my hair, compensating. It didn’t really matter whether or not I had another bad haircut. By precedent, I would be back. Hair or no hair, faux-hawk or cockatoo.

It ended up being a good cut. Maybe the first in over a year.

One of my most vivid memories, one of my most epic senses of “becoming”, one of the most powerful scenes in my unfolding bildungsroman was the moment when my parents left me in Philadelphia, on the college green. I watched them hail a cab and disappear into the buildings of center city. I reverted my attention to my feet, fixed on a cobblestone path. I remember looking at the research building to my left, the one designed by Louis Kahn, and to the skyscrapers to my right. I looked at all the people laughing and cavorting around the square. I looked at my hands, as they detatched themselves from my conscience and fumbled in my bag for a cigarette. Through the haze of cigarette smoke, I felt a sense of entitlement, an essence of premature independence. I knew that the feeling was fragile, crafted by ambivalent and naive hands, but it was very lively. I felt very much alive.

When I arrived in LA, I didn’t feel the same delicate anticipation. I also didn’t feel particularily solid. It was a sort of hasty transition, between the east and west. LA didn’t provide me with instantaneous gratification, it has gradually introduced to me to a sort of existential happiness, a happiness beyond my articulation. There were no a priori notions to my arrival here; if there were, they were completely wrong. My moments of epiphany and realization have been inspired by great contrasts. It has taken good and bad roomates and bad and worse haircuts, in a jigsaw succession, to trigger my feeling of being, my feelings of belonging here. LA never started as an abstraction, it was a concrete thing which I had to analyze, simplify, add and subtract from. LA has been deductive. They don’t call it “lala land” for nothing, its a city built on and compromised by dreams. Its a city unrealized, a city that is my trial and my error and my triumph, a subliminal, reactive city. Its a city that resides somewhere in my subconscious - a subconscious concealed by a really bad haircut.

She threads a finger through the hole in her sweater, using her other hand to a place her cigarette in an ashtray. She doesn’t use the combs designed to hold burning cigarettes, instead she places her Marlboro Red flat on the bottom of the ashtray, where it gives life to other, historical, lipstick stained butts.

Denise smiles at me, her lips smeared with pesto from a sandwich consumed minutes before our interaction. Her teeth are ornate with the greenery and botanicals of her side-salad. Bits of ash dance on her sweater like depraved constellations.

“Too bad there’s no Fridays at Five during the summer,” she says to me, still smiling like a well-fed llama at the zoo.

Fridays at Five is a weekly happy-hour event held at my architecture school, where booze flows freely, and the students indulge vehemently like sex-starved sailors on leave. Its the only anecdote to scathing critiques and ill-completed architectural renderings.

Denise, at the ripe old age of 45, is by far the oldest student in studio 3A. She’s run the gamut from commercial jobs to a brief stint as a nurse before deciding one day to embark upon architecture school. She’s shady, for sure, but her poorly-dyed red hair and tattered sweaters are hard not to find endearing.

Usually, Denise is the last person to leave Fridays at Five. The crowd starts to dissipate around 7pm, as the work-weary students make their ways home or perhaps to dinner. But Denise meanders around, bumming cigarettes (her pack smoked long ago), eventually replacing the bartender, now off duty. She pours generously for herself, and for the remaining stragglers, too blasted to safely drive home. Sometimes she ends up sleeping with those stragglers, as rumor has it (one straggler worth noting was a much younger man in her studio.)

My friend Rhett works at an art gallery in Beverly Hills. Often, he is assigned to deliver and set-up art at auctions in Palm Springs. His driving partner, for the last couple of visits, has been a middle-aged alcoholic lady who lives with an old, sluggish Labrador Retriever in a Brentwood condominium. Her duvet cover (I know this because some of his friends house-sat for her one night) is matted with black dog hair. Her own hair is long, blonde, and Renaissance-like. While throwing back a few beers, en route back to Los Angeles, she says to him, with Budweiser-breath, “You ought to have a boyfriend in every city. That’s what I used to have when I was your age.”

They say that a man reaches his sexual peak in his early twenties, and that a woman generally reaches her’s around age fourty. In parallel, a man is usually predisposed to alchoholism in his late teens and early twenties, while women usually hit the bottle in mid-life (hence the chapters in the fabled AA book about the alcoholic housewife and the lady who drinks vodka from soda cans at the Laundromat and looses her family’s socks.) Married women tend to fare better in midlife, I have noticed. But the single mid-life women that have confronted me recently speak implicitly of their demographic, leading me to believe that a certain point, if still a spinster, a woman reemerges as a teenage boy.

We emerged from the parking garage into the bustling theme park that is the Grove in Los Angeles. Within the various corridors of the complex are boutiques, department stores, movie theatres, and farmers markets; a whole gamut of entertainment. The architecture is decidedly Las Vegas, evoking a strange sensation of a Disney World / Lake Como / San Francisco conglomerate. Tourists and locales alike wander through the complex, shopping for a new pair of sunglasses or dining at one of the themed restaurants. Vendors align the walkway like gypsies in Rome. And a ridiculous trolley spans the short distance between Nordstrom and the Banana Republic.

The Grove and other developments of so-called New Urbanism are merely approximations of the “good-life” which create (architecturally or non-architecturally, this is debatable) self-absorbed visual storyboards of times past. The resurgence of the Main Street is sweeping warm-climate cities by storm. Shopping malls are now passe, cold, oppressive; their glory days dwindled a few years ago.

A man, dressed in an olive green t-shirt and blas� denim, enters the Grove. His eyes are first fixed on the dancing fountain, spraying mist on passerbys. His eyes then dart toward the epic movie-theatre, a psuedo-Deco cinema topped with a Pantheon-esque dome. Street Vendors wheel around him, selling BoHo (bohemian-bourgeois, can you believe?) jewlery and afghans. Hollywood types then catch his eye, munching on calamari and martini olives at the Italian restaurant. He stands akimbo, frozen in astonishment, as if he had woke from a nap and realized he was no longer in his Koreatown studio, but in the Australian Outback, where a bonnet-wearing kangeroo recites the opening lines of Beowulf.

Should he brave the Grove and see the Star Wars matinee, or run for his life?

Context is everything in sophisticated development. We’re right smack in the middle of an irresponsible Renaissance, a violent reaction to post-modernism that drags disparate eras past and reassembles them with the skill of a toddler at a jigsaw puzzle. The pieces don’t fit, but its a cute effort, and people still laugh, giggle, and enjoy it. At least people still in love, young in optimism, or shacked up in a Brentwood citadel.

There is, however, something to be said for propagating the identity of a city. When a city looses its contextualization to a bustling, themed edifice like the Grove, or when it acquiesces to a mainstream globalization, the city slowly marginalizes itself, it’s strategy, and its methods for growing inward. Theme replaces identity, and the city becomes the parable of a child raised by a schizophrenic crack addict. Why disjoint an already disjointed city?

Don’t get me wrong, I love surprises that disregard context and normativity. I delight in Renaissance Fair jousts and the pirate (replete with an eye-patch and pantaloons) that frequents my local 7-11. I’m fascinated by the new wave black hookers, with their hot pink lipstick and green acrylic nails, that hussy around downtown. But all of these things are accessible, non-interfering, and not guarded by fortress walls and expensive parking garages.

I’m walking through the Grove for the fourth or so time, so its not quite as suspect or spectacle. The sun traces the contours of the stores around my friend and I, the sun so brilliant that the facades, in their silhouettes, are empty entities, evacuated from their commercial wombs.

I imagine the walls suddenly falling down, the massive temples to consumerism imploding. I imagine the people, the pedestrians, the shoppers exposed to the surrounding city, finally slugs in absence of the shell of priced items. But instead of trembling in fear, hiding the genitalia of their indulgence, they continue to shuffle through racks of invisible clothing. I see a woman holding a void in her hands, a smile sweeping across her face as she lifts the void higher, as she illuminates it.

My new neighbors hate me.

It didn’t start out as such a sordid relationship. In fact, upon their arrival across the hall, I helped them heave a sofa through their doorway. They sort of poked their heads into my apartment. “We love your wood floors!” one of them exclaimed, and I pictured having afternoon tea with the both of them on the back veranda, comparing stories of our respective illustrious weekends.

Being Silverlake, the couple is, of a course, of the gay variety. One of them is considerably older, well kempt, sporting glasses of the subtly stylish genre. The other seems to be of Puerto Rican descent, with a passive, whiny voice that seems to echo through the air ducts of the fourplex in which we all inhabit. They’re a strange couple, strange in the epic sense, like Mutt and Jeff, or, better yet, Harold and Maude.

I’m loving that my house has a sort of Melrose Place vibe. The walls are thin, and I could pretty much give an up-to-date account of the dramatic lives of both my neighbors upstairs to the right and the cute lesbian couple to the left. As I was shaving one morning, the telephone conversation of the girl upstairs drifted through the wind shaft to my eager ears:

“I took a whole box of laxatives this morning,” she said through the phone, followed by a long and pensive pause. It was as if she was talking on the phone with me, her voice was that clear and intimate. “And I’ve started vomiting again.”

“No you DIDN’T!” I whisper to my lathered reflection, razor suspended in mid-air.

“I think we ought to have lunch sometime soon, to talk about this,” she continued. “You know you’re the only person I would talk to about this.” She apparently hung up the phone, and proceeded to call another friend with the same story, also assuring the friend that he or she was “the only person I would talk to about this.” She then blared contemporary Christian music, and it was completely pathetic. But I was delighted to know that the Girl Upstairs wasn’t the picture-perfect princess she flaunts herself to be, but rather she is a crazy bipolar like the rest of us. I later learned, through another meandering conversation, that she lived with her sister and her boyfriend because she was emotionally unstable and couldn’t handle living on her own. Now they’re all apparently moving out, drifting up and down the stairs, bearing a countenance not too dissimilar to that of Jennifer Connelly in the House of Sand and Fog.

The gay couple across the hall, now an entire month in residence, began their Beautification Extravaganza approximately four weeks ago - basically the day after they moved in. The Puerto Rican furiously hacked away the hedges, our hedges, that aligned the alley where the trashcans reside, in an attempt to clean up the area. He looked like Faye Dunaway, playing Joan Crawford, in Mommie Dearest, beheading the entire rose garden with angst. I didn’t really think much of it at the time, as I had no particular attachment to the shrubbery in the first place (basically a Christmas tree decorated with cigarette butts.)

The older half of the gay couple, with the subtly stylish spectacles, was seen the next day turning the back common area (a small patio with a grill) into a gay tiki oasis, with Pottery Barn party lights, Pier 1 candles, and “kitschy” glass flowers emerging from terracotta pots. This all nicely accentuated their yellow scooter, a fetish object for many urban gays. Once again, I didn’t think much of the spectacle, and admittedly enjoyed the new environment, however ridiculous and cliche it appeared.

Several days later, I was smoking a cigarette outside the back door, when I noticed a small gift outside my gate. My porch bore a terracotta pot (one finely “aged” with a green-moss colored veneer) filled to the brim with sand. Etched in the sand, in the vein of ashtrays at fine hotels, was the word “BUTTS.”

I didn’t know what to make of the gift. It appeared to be a nice gesture with ulterior motives. I did, in fact, need an ashtray. My butts were scattered around my porch, but it is my porch, and its totally disconnected from the gay love den across the hall. In fact, the only reason that they would have cross my porch would be to take out the trash. My roommate and I concluded that they’re trying to control the rest of the fourplex through passive-aggressive kind gestures. This assumption was confirmed when they installed flowerpots in the exterior window bays of the entire house.

The pinnacle of the one-sided duel occurred during my cookout fiesta a couple of weeks ago. I invited a few friends over for what I thought was going to be a nice barbeque. Instead, it was a complete and utter bloodbath. Total mayhem.

As I was unloading the groceries from the trunk of my car, I saw that they were having a late afternoon barbeque themselves. Casual greetings were exchanged, and I informed them that I would later be using the grill area. They seemed perplexed and dismayed by my announcement, and I couldn’t understand why. I didn’t plan on grilling for a couple more hours, but they insisted on keeping the coals burning. Every half hour or so, the older one would poke his head into my living room, saying such niceties as “the coals are still burning.” I later concluded that they were obsessed with cleaning up the grill area, and believed I would sully all of their efforts if I waited too long.

Hours later, my friends arrived, and we relocated to the patio to begin cooking. Casual conversation ensued; the coals were nicely flaming, and all seemed to be going well. Suddenly, the Puerto Rican stuck his pin-neck out of his bedroom window, which aligned the patio area, and crooned, “I can stand the constant chatter through my ear-plugs, but the fire-balls are keeping me awake.” We all started to giggle, of course, at hearing him refer to the grill flames as fireballs. Its not as if we were testing our baking soda volcano for tomorrow’s seventh grade science fair. We were goddamn fucking grilling hamburgers.

We did try to keep the conversation to a minimum volume, but apparently not minimum enough. Once again, the Puerto Rican stretched himself from the window, looking like a giraffe on painkillers, to announce that we ought to “move our party elsewhere.” We all refuted the idea that we were being boisterous, but acquiesced and moved to my living room, feeling defeated.

Several days later, after a mysterious absence of neighbor sightings, I saw the two gardening outside their porch. I waved at the Puerto Rican, who sneered at me (not obviously sneered, more like an unfriendly, passive-aggressive, diva-inspired lift of the eyebrows.) I sort of felt insulted, but continued to my car. Just as I was about to open my car door, I was attacked by their two small mutts (hideous miniatures of dogs that are usually much larger in proportions.) “C’mon, you two, you know Barrett won’t pay attention to you,” cooed the elderly one. How dare he passive-aggressively speak to me through their mutts! What he really meant to say was, “Barrett, you’re not paying attention to all of our obsessive compulsive attempts to control this entire fourplex, you’re ignorant, and an insult to the gay community as we have articulated it.”

Fuck waging peace. They’re waging war.

The aforementioned battles were one sided, as was their placing the pieces of their shattered glass flower (which they incorrectly assumed we broke in our boorish ways) in our trashcan. At that point, staring at the shards of glass which no longer composed a groovy flower, I knew it was going to be a war not of ambush and face paint, but of symbols and semantics.

My roommate and I covertly discussed plans of action. We whispered our ideas as the wind whipped violently around the corners of the house. All of the proposed tactics were furtive and sneaky, upping their level of passive-aggressiveness from orange to red. “We’ll invite the cute lesbians over for drinks one night, befriend them, slip them easily into our side. We have to build a coalition,” my roommate stated gravely.

I completely agreed, also suggesting we give them a gift of an even more authentic terracotta pot with the words ‘BUTT OUT’ engraved in the sand.

Gone are the days when I believed I could mend our lack of understanding with a note of apology, and perhaps a nice, scented candle. “I know we have had our mishaps and misunderstandings, but I wanted to offer you this candle as I reminder that I believe in the ability to grow together from differences, et al,” the note would say, scripted in calligraphy pen on fine stationary.

What a pussy-ass conclusion to the story that would have been. It simply isn’t that simple. Forget candles and fancy stationary. There’s going to be tiki-themed dog-kabobs, doors smeared with lambs-blood, cigarette butts arranged in nasty slurs, and real cacophony… replete, this time, with jack daniels breath and delicious combat - through rhetoric, of course. I will emerge, triumphantly, with bloodstained cuffs, a frayed collar, and a tattered shield - the Charlemagne of fags against insipid faggotry.

“Maybe he’ll change his mind… I know I shouldn’t be hopeful,” he says to me, from the other end of the phoneline.

I’m at a loss for words, because I understand his emotions and the desperation associated with loosing someone you love through a breakup. I think I know the right words to say, and its a lesson in acceptance, but I know that one year ago I wouldn’t be able to stomach such words. And its only through acceptance, which usually follows bouts of depression and gritted teeth, that growing happens. It’s certainly something one learns for himself, through trial and error, and even then one is subject to fall again at the next drawback, to feel as though he or she has learned nothing at all. I suppose that’s life - constantly seeking retribution and fulfillment while treading a hamster-wheel.

“I just talked to Clair, and her grandfather died,” I tell my mother, while smoking a cigarette. “Her grandmother died earlier this semester.”

“That happens a lot,” my mother says as she rests a mop on the countertop. “I hope that I die after your father dies, I can’t imagine being eighty without him.”

I think about Clair, and all the pain she is experiencing due to the loss of her grandfather. I then try to imagine her grandfather, at how death likely trembled more at him than he did at death.

I remember my mother saying similar things when I was a child.

“I hope your father and I die in a plane crash, or something. Anything - as long as we’re together.” I couldn’t figure out where I fit into this statement. What about me? A double loss would be much more excruciating than a single one. At that time, however, I knew nothing about love, or what brings and bonds two strangers together in such a dynamic, unexpected way. I knew nothing about how two lives can weave together into one.

Sometimes acceptance is very subliminal. I don’t feel like I accepted anything about my breakup a year ago, but I know that I accepted it, because I have grown tremendously as a person. It just seemed more like a messy conglomeration of mistakes, mishaps, and self-loathing that landed me where I am today - happy and awaiting the next trial. I guess that’s what happens, you recover only to have the capacity to recover again, from the next windfall-turned-devastation.

Life is often like a syllabus in a course of rejections. You accept smaller rejections (breakups, etc) until ultimately you are forced to accept the ultimate rejection, which is death - when life literally eliminates you. Or, rather, its in acceptance that one finds life. To the contrary, it isn’t through penance and retrogade that one finds death. Paradoxically, life finds death, or, syllogistically, acceptance finds death. Thats when the wheel stops admist its rotation, and the greatest of all realizations is achieved - you stop realizing.

I sit across the room from parents who, for approximately 55 minutes, will play detectives. Bemused by the labyrinthine plot of their new favorite mystery-in-syndication, they scratch their chins and occasionally comment on the suspicious behavior of the show’s characters. Its a redundant game of role-play; they’re pretending to be the detectives who are pretending to be detectives. After the conclusion of the show, just before the preview of next week’s episode, my father will say something along the lines of, “I knew that Latina Harlot was embezzling money from the business.” This astute observation was clear from the beginning of the show, when the aforementioned Latina was using the company credit card to make a cathartic shoe purchase. My mother, as if she has actually remained awake during the entire episode, will endearingly reply, “see, hun, you could have been a lawyer.”

The next day my mother and I are outside of a bridal store, where my grandmother and sister are inside for the final fitting of my sister’s debutante dress. Through a covert plot, one not unlike a subplot of the previous night’s show, my mother and I salvaged a cigarette break. “I think I left IT in my car,” my mother said as she fumbled desperately through her purse. Not ever explaining what “it” was, she rushed out to her car just before my grandmother could give her a suspicious look of disapproval. Envying my mother for getting her nicotine fix without me, I claimed that I “thought I heard my car running.” Now, this put me at a bit of a stalemate, as I’m a poor liar, but I risked my grandmother’s scrutiny and rushed outside.

Its no surprise to my grandmother that I smoke. Over Thanksgiving Break, upon leaving her home, she gave me a hug. Instead of kissing me on the cheek, her usual gesture of endearment, she buried her nose deep into my scarf. “I know you smoke,” she whispers in my ear. Next, she pulls away from our loving embrace, waves an acrylic nail in the air and gives a half-smirk that suggests shes “too wise” to play games. Fearful of her wily tactics, I’m still subverting bad habits.

“Your father and I are turning into old people,” my mother says as she takes a drag from her cigarette. Her eyes are fixed between the mannequin brides in the display window, making sure we’re not suspect. Ironically, her statement was followed by a look of achievement, as if she were saying something quite the opposite. “We have our favorite shows that we watch after dinner, and then we fall asleep before 10pm.”

We share the cigarette as if it were our last joint, and we had one day left of Bonaroo. She puts her cigarette out under her car tire. She gets up the curb and reaches in her handbag, this time with more deliberation. She opens a sterling silver cigarette case to reveal fancy mints, she pops one in her mouth and then reaches in her bag for a bottle of perfume. After spraying the perfume on her neck and wrists, she glides back into the bridal store. I can’t help but think that she’s found “it”.

I also remember seeing a blowdryer in her purse. She comes prepared for any beauty disaster that may come her way. In fact, she could be one of those femme fatale spies, the kind that excuse themselves to the ladies room and reemerge as a salacious blonde, deftly escaping the bar without notice.

I have taken after my mother’s symbiotic relationship with her handbag. My handbag, however, takes the form of a more urbane and socially acceptable “man-purse.” I never leave home without it; I can be seen walking the big urban streets with the security of it. “Why the hell do you carry that bag everywhere with you - it’s full of trash!?” My sister asks with a vindictive glare in her eyes. I don’t blame her for asking such a question, its almost appropriate. My bag is full of old receipts, expired gift certificates, crumpled sketches, gum wrappers, and empty cigarette boxes (false hope.)

Some people eat comfort food; they have emergency pints of chocolate swirl in their garage freezer. Some people have personified stuffed animals; my friend has a bipolar bear with its own friendster profile. The homeless on 4th street share needles, dripping with a serum that’s sure to pacify. People have funny ways of comforting themselves, and my way is no less… funny.

My attempts at comfort have always taken the form of emulations of my mother. As a child, I used to watch her sit in her vanity and dress herself. She’d glide lipstick with such precision, and match her outfits perfectly with her accessories. Each day, she would reveal a new ensemble, perhaps a new shade of lipstick, but one thing always remained the same: the wig on her head.

I remember seeing her in the kitchen, smoking and bald, pacing around and puffing away. She looked so exposed to me, like a turtle without its shell. When her wig was on her head, she was ‘okay’, and any notion of her cancer was dissolved. The image of a mother to a child is the most familiar thing they know, so when that image is alterated drastically, the child questions their own identity.

One afternoon, the sight of my mother’s new image was too much for me to bear. I remember running to my closet and sitting there, reentering some sort of womb. I reached into my bureau and draped a t-shirt over my head. Instantly, I felt a sort of release… the same sort of comfort I would find years later in my first drink of whiskey or the first puff of a cigarette. Just seeing the cotton in my periphery was a feeling of wellness.

I didn’t take the shirt off my head for approximately one month… there are pictures to attest to this embarassing fact. I wore it to the mall, the grocery store, school. What really stands out in the pictures is not the absurdity of my ornament… its the nonchalance on my mother’s face. A strange sense of normality. Her and her 5 year old, both wearing their wigs, both battling something, sharing eachother’s pain and existence.

Its strange that I have been living away from home for two years now. Each time I visit, I see a new development in my parents marriage and within themselves. Its like catching an episode of a show you used to watch religiously, and trying to bridge the story from what you are now seeing and what you know to be true. The strangest thing is staying home for an extended period of time, and actually intersecting their lives again.

“Your father and I are becoming old people,” my mother says, as she traces her index finger along the yellow painted curb. I see such comfort in this confession, a comfort paved by years of preceding drama and torment. With no car (left in LA) and no active agenda, I’m forced to watch my parent’s favorite new shows with them and then retire early. Its part of a routine that is, in fact, comforting. But I know that its only temporal, I’m not prepared for such comfort. I wriggle restlessly on my couch, itching for something more. Upon my arrival back to LA, I will find temporary ways of comforting myself. Some might gain me a few extra pounds. Some might result in more habits along the way. Some might cause me to withdraw from my bank account. But, despite each of these setbacks, I can hope for a time when comfort is something unsuggested and organic; I can hope for a time when I’m comforted by surprise.

“…life in Paradise was not like following a straight line to the unknown; it was not an adventure. It moved in a circle among known objects. Its monotony bred happiness, not boredom.”
-the unbearable lightness of being

“I can’t ever imagine living in Los Angeles and wanting to move back to Oklahoma,” she said as she drove the level-three clippers across my scalp, curls slowly plummeting to my lap.

It wasn’t as if I told her that I wanted to move back home. I just didn’t mind the idea of it- that’s all I said. With every glide of the razor against my head, I felt more and more betrayed by myself. Perhaps I was angry for even saying anything of significance to my hairdresser, a stranger at that, but I probably was frustrated because I couldn’t possibly finish my thought with sincereity.

“My husband and I are moving away once we graduate… I can’t wait to get out of here.”

I remember feeling that same, desperate impetus to leave my hometown. After graduating from highschool and coming to terms with my sexuality, I resigned the idea of ever being content in the Midwest. I felt empowered at that point to craft my own fate. Working ardently throughout my studies, I gained the test scores and the grades necessary to land a spot at the University of Pennsylvania, in Philadelphia. I figured in a larger city, I would find more caterings to my tastes (in both culture, music, and, of course, men.)

I suddenly thought of the people my mother refers to, affectionately, as “Fair People.” Fair People are the types that keep large, themed chain-restaurants in business (the sort of restaurants with Caribbean themes where the servers acclimate themselves as tour guides, and where nothing on the menu is without a ‘clever’ isle-inspired name.) Fair People loiter around Christian bookstores, while not at the Fair of course, and send mass right-wing conspiracy-theorist emails to everyone on their yahoo! mailing lists. The fashion of Fair People consists primarily of bargain clothing from, you guessed it, island-themed chain stores. I would say that, as a group, they are overwhelming surfer-chic, deranged and sidetracked from their exodus to the Beach.

I don’t know if I could coexist with Fair People.

Before my cut, I watched as the stylist trimmed the hair of the person before me. “People are making decisions for our future, their decisions for myfuture,” she said emphatically, as if I weren’t sitting in the waiting area. I felt bad for the man under the scissors, subject to the uneducated political rambling of the stylist. He seemed to concur with her cacophonous ideas, and seemed genuinely pleased by his completed trim. On his way out, he put a large tip in the jar. “You didn’t have to do that… I love you, Dad,” she said as she waved goodbye.

She waited for me to give her a reason as to why I would ever return to this god-forbidden state. I didn’t know whether to explain to her that life in the city isn’t all its cracked up to be, or to just stare dumbfounded at the mirror before me, as if I were clinically insane. I then worried that perhaps I was completely jaded, and that my disillusionment would tarnish her aspiration of becoming a stylist to the stars or a rockstar or something. I imagined myself saying something like, “when you’re working late shifts at the Hardrock Cafe in the Valley, and your boyfriend just lost his third job as a valet at the W Hotel, then we’ll talk.” Its awful, I know, but its all that I imagined for her.

But the thought of being complacent with the idea of moving back home, even after I finish architecture school, is terrifying. I always worried that some demon inside of me would trap myself, against my better judgement, into returning. But the more and more time I spend in cosmopolitan cities, whether it be New York, Philly, or Los Angeles, the less and less impressed I am by blatino tranny karoke bars that double as korean barbeque joints. I’ve come to the timely realization that every man comes to at some point: it doesn’t matter where you live, what matters is the people in your life.

There are certainly advantages to living in a large city. Your interests couldn’t possibly be marginalized, there’s something for everyone, non-stop excitement, thrills, and martini drinking alongside Drew Barrymore. I’ve actually come to love my neighborhood in LA, despite the infectuous transience oozing from around every corner. But amongst soaring rents, wretched traffic, and an absence of parking accomodations, I’m having trouble with the idea that its completely worth it all. And obnoxious Hollywood trollops in pink Manolos aren’t looking any more attractive than Fair People, these days. There’s something character building in Oklahoma, in an absence of thrills and hype. There are idiosyncrasies I could only find here, wonderful genuine people, and a family that inspires me endlessly.

“How does it look?” asks the stylist, as she hands me my glasses. My vision comes into focus, and revealed is the haircut I’ve gotten hundreds of times before. Its a haircut I’ve had in New York, and its a haircut I’ve had in LA.

“It looks fine,” I said as I hopped from the chair. As I walked outside, I felt a strange synergy bubbling below the surface. It wasn’t exactly inspiration, and it wasn’t excitement. What I felt was happiness, a happiness completely unaware of time and place. A happiness that I could have felt anywhere, and a happiness that I can carry anywhere. I felt missionless, unhindered, and, at that bizarre place, outside of the salon, I felt free.

Gaunt.

It was the first word that came to his mind that morning.

He always woke mouthing a single word, as if his subconscious was fighting to expel itself from his mind. The words were silent but harsh. Whoever lay next to him may notice the trembling of his lips, possibly a whisper of the word, but it would otherwise be an inconspicuous gesture.

To him, however, the words, powerful in their simplicity, cunning in their singularity, were like sirens. Although he was perhaps waken by the barren clang of the church bells, the words were what greeted him.

Not the sun crawling through the window blinds. Not the sound of grease crackling from a stovetop. Not the howl of an ambulance, raping the morning streets. Not the scent of lavendar from the woman who lay next to him, the woman who took a bath the night before. And not the bony, emaciated sound of the church bells… a harmony so aged and pathetically misplaced.

Gaunt.

The ceiling fan slowly turned, and as he fixed his eyes on the languid blades, he felt as if they were descending upon him. Each blade slowly cut away the veiny fingers of the word that buried itself inside of him, the word, the spore, now malignant.

Relieved from the weight of the word, he floated, as if summoned, punch drunk, to the table which bore yesterday’s paper and a cup of cold coffee from the night before. He found that drinking coffee an hour before sleeping made his dreams more vivid and lucid, and the caffeine had this reverse, placid effect on his demeanor - as if he were drinking opium tea.

He thumbed through the various sections of the paper - headliners, sports, home and garden, until he stumbled upon the classifieds. There was something desperate and capricious about the classifieds that reassured him; the words smothered and suffocated the page, words of hope, words of commerce, words trying to muster value.

Piano teacher, Hollywood vicinity, seeks beginner students for instruction. Pay per hour, at the home of the instructor.

Never disciplined enough to learn the idiosyncrasies and technicalities of the instrument, he never succeeded in piano instruction. As a child, he would boorishly press his fingers against the keys, feeling the disapproving glare of the piano teacher behind him, that piercing stream of heaviness he felt with just about everything he did in those days. “The keys seem so faraway, I feel so faraway,” he would tell his piano teacher. She looked at him, assuming he just wanted to end the lesson so that he could go outside and play, evading his confession. But he really did feel faraway, like he was being sucked through a funnel, being sifted into some ubiquitous place he didn’t understand, but a place so desirable and alluring.

He reached for the red pen next to his coffee mug and circled the advertisement. Imagining the intricacies of the notes and lines, he shuddered at the thought of returning to that wooden bench, to that faraway feeling.

Maybe she could teach me to play just one song, he thought. It would be the Trois Gymnopedies, Erik Satie, because it is the sound of the rain cascading on the other side of a window pane. It was the sound of the road in which he followed his father, furtively, as his father went to see a mistress. It was the sound of his mother smoking a cigarette again for the first time in thirteen years. It was the sound of his sister pressing her head against his shoulder, relieved the he stopped after his second glass of wine.

Could she teach him to play just one song? Would that be antithetical to the whole discipline of piano instruction? It would certainly be possible, but would she feel defeated and demeaned by jumping so hastily from one point to another?

But he had to able to play that one song. That most robust song. It would be a remedy, that melodic pressure under his fingers.

The thickness, the roundness, the voluptous sound that would bring him closer.

“So how is the salmon prepared?” my mother asks, with a quizzical look on her face - as if salmon were something as exotic and unfamiliar as calf’s-brain francobolli. After asking the question, she reclines on her dining chair and takes a sip of wine.

“The salmon is grilled and on top of a warm asparagus salad,” the waitress replies with a look of impatience on her face. Its a look so commonly worn by people in Los Angeles, a condescending glare that suggests no tolerance for a lapse of time not denoted by a paycheck or a promising gig.

My mother continues to ask how each of the specials are prepared, sipping wine and nibbling on bread as the waitress recites each ingredient and preparation method of the evening’s entrees. She acts as if she is at a dinner theatre, our server being the unimpassioned actor juggling words… trying not to confuse polenta with cornbread.

The server’s knowledge of the menu has become a new criterea for my mother in her judgement of a restaurant. Its almost as if my mother is a stand-in judge for a new reality television show, in search of America’s Next Top Service Industry Worker. But its not as if she actually listens to words the waitress says, the detailed description of how the short-ribs are slow cooked. Its more the tone of the server; the description of the meals must be a cathartic sonnet or a passionate soliloquy, banality is not left unnoticed. In fact the waitress described in great detail the preparation of the sea-bass, as if it were her senior culinary thesis. Two minutes later, my mother asks, “now tell me, how is that sea-bass prepared?”

Just as the waitress scrambles for her pen, assuming we’re ready to order, my mother lifts her head from her menu. “Now tell me, if you had to choose three entrees on the menu, what would you choose?” The waitress, obviously in a state of panic, peruses the notepad in her hand.

“I really like the prosciutto-wrapped rabbit and the buffalo tenderloin,” the waitress stated defensively, with a certain sense of entitlement over the menu items. Her favorites seemed a bit strange to me, as she just reeked of veganism… her small frame and frizzy hair in an irritating harmony with her soft, elusive voice. But she’s a carnivore, and I’m instantly suspicious.

I have had a strange bout of suspicion as of late. I don’t know where this sudden lack of trust has come from - its completely out of control. While dining at a similar establishment for lunch, I was instantly skeptical of a red-headed hostess who gave me a peculiar look as she seated our party. She kept looking over at our table with a scowl on her face. I remember thinking to myself, “I’ve never seen such an awful look before.” And just as I was observing her mysterious gesture, she whispered something in the ear of one of the servers. In between bites of my salad, I watched her every move, assuming that with every pass by our table she was plotting some sort of sinister scheme. Which is why I perked up in my chair, like a sleeping soldier startled by a rumble in the front, when she appeared at our table.

“I believe your waitress forgot to bring your coffee,” she says to my mother, as she placed the steaming coffee cup on the table in a very calculated manner. She slowly left us, giving me that same awful look I saw as I entered the restaurant.

“Don’t drink that coffee, mom,” I demanded. “I just, I just… have a really bad feeling about that coffee and that waitress.” Believing me for a few seconds, she stared green-eyed at the cup before her. Then she just sort of shrugged her shoulders and took a sip. I imagined her taking a sip, seeming normal for approximately three seconds, followed by her turning pale and grabbing her neck in anguish, flailing her poisioned self on the table as if she were a catfish being dragged onto shore by a fishing line, the hook caught in a gill. The suspect waitress would then be seen leaving the restaurant as a brunette, cryptically typing something in her Blackberry while cackling. Feeling defeated and anxious, I also took a sip of the coffee. If she was going down, I was going with her.

Still alive, while drinking her coffee, my mother once again told me the earliest memory of her grandmother. It was a story I’ve heard hundreds of times before, but always like to hear. “She never wore any underwear. (My sisters and I) used to lie on the floor and look up her skirt as she walked back and forth through the kitchen.” I laugh and my father gives a look of endearing disgust. “I was her favorite grandchild. Every Sunday morning, before church, she would put my hair in a bun in her pink-tiled bathroom. She would then serve me coffee milk in the fanciest cup I had ever seen.” Her eyes became a bit red, an emotional reaction I had never seen before in conclusion of the story. “Its funny that you can be aware of adoration at such a young age.”

* * *

“Okay, so now if you were to choose three appetizers that would complement the three entrees you mentioned, what would they be?” The waitress wears an exhausted look on her face, tired of solving menu riddles. The waitress looked at my mom as if she were a restaurant critic from Neptune. Each answer became less and less spirited, ultimately resulting in the waitress giving us more time to think about our order, despite the fact that my father and I had decided several minutes ago.

Perhaps the waitress would have remained spirited if she knew the joy my mother got from hearing the details of the menu. If the waitress considered the affect of grilled salmon semantics on my mother, she may have been a bit more inspired. But the server wasn’t paying attention to details and nuances, she was nervously tapping her pen against the pad, wearing a veil of sophistication.

After hearing about the preparation and ingredients for the desserts, my mother looked at her menu for a few more moments.

“I think we’ll have the donuts,” she said as if she had ordered the honey-braised pumpkin tart. “There’s nothing better than donuts.”