Excerpt 2: Mourning

"Mourning"

It’s been 3 years since she’d last seen Catherine. Cat. Cathers. Catty. Babe. Mami. Momma. Catherine Fritz. Catherine Fritz. For so long that name in the back of her head, loud at first, faded with time. She hadn’t felt anything romantic or soft or exaggerated for anyone in so long.

She ate and ate and ate biscuits with gravy, cheesecake, fried plantains, tortilla Española, white rice, and Reese’s peanut butter cups. She drank and drank and drank Mickey’s, Sparks, King Cobra, Long Islands, and rum with diet coke. Before she met Catherine and after. She doesn’t remember exactly when the unquenchable pain of missing Catherine subdued and then eventually subsided, but she remembers the rabid freedom she felt when it did.

Freedom from the loud thumping beating of those two syllables in the back of her head and how excruciating they were when they trickled down her spine into her stomach and tangled her guts into knots. Like Poe’s wronged heart pulsating in the floor, Catherine Fritz the thin half Jew with hazel blue green eyes and porcelain white skin turned into a sound of its own.

Since last seeing Catherine, her body had upsized. She’d exploded into a “curvaceous woman,” but continued to carry herself with sophistication and grace at The Short Stop Bar off of Sunset every evening after 9. It wasn’t a gay bar, but it had some of the prettiest young things in town. Most were straight dead eyed hipster girls who enjoyed some lezzie fun in the car after a couple of tequila shots and a Morrissey song. She, like the bar, was nothing too serious, just a good time.

It was a Wednesday night at 10:37 pm in the bar with the dance floor. People were showing up in spurts. The Short Stop was just getting started. Her tattered stilettos, scuffed at the tips and worn out at the soles, dangled from a stool. Masked by the dark lighting and the beautifying affects of Pabst Blue Ribbon beer, the stilettos’ little misgivings had gone unnoticed at this particular bar for the last two years.

She sipped from a black straw with her elbows poised on the bar. The pointer finger and middle finger of her left hand softly stroked the earring dangling from her ear lobe while the right hand, bent at the wrist, held the straw to her lips. Her pitch-black hair, wild with waves, brought out the golden brown in her Cuban skin. The red lighting masked two new pimples on her chin, riled up by one too many days of mixed drinks and not enough water. She looked dynamite and she knew it. Sitting at the bar, she let the liquor seep into her mind as a growing number of feminine voices and flower scents filled the room.

“Marta.” The aroma of curled locks dripping with sugar. That sound shot straight through her spine into her stomach and twisted it into knots of barbed wire. “I’ve gotten so fat,” she thought. She turned around in feigned surprise, “Cat. Whoa. Weird.” Catherine looked just as she remembered her: Extremely slim, brimming with an over-exaggerated gaiety, and clean in her every pore like a spotless glass table. Her giant nose walked the fine line between beguiling and obtrusive.

Physically, Catherine looked exactly the same as the last time Marta had seen her, but there was something missing. The grip in her stomach released its hold for a brief moment. Marta noticed that the sound known as Catherine Fritz had changed.

This person was not the Cat, Momma, Catty, Babe in her stomach, in her spine, the faded beating sound in her head. She was a girl at a bar with a drink in one hand and a man’s hand in the other. Smiling from ear to ear, Catherine swiftly skimmed her from head to toe. She lingered on Marta’s shoes for a second. “Shit. I should’ve worn those other fucking piece of shit fucking shoes,” Marta thought.

Catherine and Marta catch each other’s gaze for a second. Marta looks away, picks up her drink, and sips from the black straw. “Marta, this is Jack, my boyfriend.” Jack releases Catherine’s hand and shakes Marta’s hand. “Hi.” “Handsome,” Marta thinks.

“Cool to see you here, M. You here alone?”

“Just waiting on a couple of friends.”

“Cool . . . well, we’re gonna go dance. We’ll see you later.”

“Yeah, see ya later, Catherine.”

Catherine’s eyes were vacant. She’s moved on. Hand in hand, Catherine and Jack leave the bar where Marta sits. They walk out of sight into the dance room.

A large crowd, which includes many overly perfumed deadpan beauties, has formed before and around Marta joining the cutthroat race to get a drink at the bar. Marta turns around and sips the rest of the long island.

Catherine Fritz. Catherine Fritz. Catherine Fritz. Catherine Fritz. Catherine Fritz. Catherine Fritz rips at her lower abdomen. She turns around and vomits up the three McDonald’s double cheeseburgers she ate right before entering the bar. Regurgitations splatter on the floor, on people’s shoes, and on a pretty girl’s dress.

Tears streaming down her cheeks, Marta vomits into a dry heaving frenzy.

Covered in a foul smelling orange paste, she runs out of The Short Stop and gets in her car. Locks the doors. The pain in her stomach is gone.

Marta decides that she will never eat McDonald’s again. She decides that she will never show her face at The Short Stop, again. Meanwhile, Catherine Fritz becomes a new sound without Marta realizing it. The sound of silence.

Excerpt 1: Humiliation

"Humiliation"

In 24 years and some months, I’ve come to understand that memory is like bad weather. Completely out of our human control. It flares up when it pleases, how it pleases, and stays, especially during traffic, until it’s ready to go.

F*$@AS$%**! A beat up Toyota with silver chrome rims cuts in front. A wrinkled old skin-head glares through his rearview mirror, sticks his fist out of the driver’s seat window, and flips the bird.

That fat middle finger always takes us back:
When we first realized we needed our mothers in order to survive. When we first realized we truly loved her. When we realized that loving her and needing her were entirely separate moments. When we realized that we’d fallen in love with our best friend. When we realized we were neither the Natives nor the English colonialists of our history books, but we were somehow still Americans. When we realized that despite varying skin pigmentation and bone structure there was something familiar about all of us – there was something that was the same. When we realized what the concept of God was. When we doubted the way God had been preached to us.

Our first moment of empathy: The red balloon popped and trampled on by happy children at a Saturday birthday party. Our 2 favorite dolls. How each one of them felt against our cheeks in the morning . . .

In between all of those tidbits of nostalgia, however, boil raw humbling snapshots. The unbearable humanization we do not, although we dare try to, escape.

Age 4 – Humping the armchair of your grandmother’s plastic couch while she slept on it at the other end. Wearing wet clothes to school, reeking of sewer midday, and having your teacher so lovingly ask (without condescension) if you’d bathed that morning. Getting your heavy flow at lunchtime the one day you don’t wear your panties to school. Shopping for a nice dress with your new friends and paying for baggy boys pants because they were the only ones that fit you. Being called a “dumb Mexican” by a Chicano with a skateboard, darker and shorter than you, as his beautiful blue-eyed best friend chuckled in your direction.

Being drunk for years and years: The bad breath and the missed steps, slurred come-ons and sloppy kisses, failed attempts at romance with a stranger and successful one-nighters lost to the haze. The times you couldn’t cry by yourself, but balled like a madman in front of your employer.

Humiliating moments that – whether you’ve lived them or merely read them – make you want to crawl into a hole where butterflies go to die.

Undeniable, inescapable, memorable humiliation.

Follows you like your birthday. And like your birthday, you can either celebrate it or hide from it under the covers and plan your death.

I prefer to rest my throbbing forehead on the wheel and have a good laugh. That and the rest of my Bacardi.

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