The Birthday Gift

Jeffery the cat left another little present on the porch last night. It turned out to be a pretty good photo; the mouse's fur against the old weathered tongue and groove flooring in the late morning sun and shadow. The image was gray on gray and you could still see the slick remains of the feline's saliva; the matted hair in swirls upon the victim's neck. I washed my hands urgently after clicking off a few as I had arranged the scene slightly for the take, requiring that I pick the thing up gingerly by its tail.

 

Jeri had stopped by and brought me a pack of cigarettes she got on credit at Angel Eyes. I had resorted to coffee without smoke this morning and when she arrived I was just sitting there; my hair still wild and my mouth full of thick scum. I had not yet even evacuated my bowels and the condition was beginning to make itself known. I was just sitting there on the porch in the sun thinking about how cold it had been last night

 

I said, "Hey... Oh... baby thank you. You are indeed the sweetest thing."

 

This is really how we talk to each other and it's comforting. She is black and from Mississippi and I am of white Southern lineage via Oklahoma. Still, there is some faintly shared dialect and a deep understanding of something, including the fact that we are still, basically, both California Air Force brats. We are both in our 50's and beginning to tire a little, especially with times being as they are... but this morning we sat and smoked together there on the porch in the sunlight and I realized that I loved that girl more than anything.

 

I can't see myself being with any other girl. We don't live together and that's fine but she's my Jeri and she gifts me with some small sense of safety; some shelter from my dark past. She says I do the same for her and I sincerely hope that's the case. She knows I love her and sometimes that just has to do.

 

We have both seen our share of trouble over the last four years. It hasn't always been easy between us. She's been known to slice me up with that tongue of hers from time to time and she can hole up with her anger and her tears for days in that old California bungalow- duplex which has become her private world. She waits for the sun to shine on us again like it was on this particular morning, on this old, run-down porch on the corner of Third and Mulberry Streets.

 

"Please do NOT tell me you forgot to lock your bicycle up last night," Jeri said, her head jerking slightly to the left, doing that cocky little side to side thing I've learned to love. She narrowed her eyes and glared at my ear. I didn't turn my head. I didn't look toward the bicycle. I remembered immediately that I had forgotten. The bike was in my peripheral vision but I refused to look directly at it. I felt instantly simple and stupid.

 

I had almost lost that bike this week. I heard something outside and, when I went out, the kid was just lifting the bike over the squat, ship-lap enclosure of the porch. I ran toward  the kid and yelled, "F****r!" managing to get my leg halfway over as the front wheel of my bike was just clearing the wall. I had even brushed the guy's coat with my fingertips as he forcefully threw the bike to the ground, bolted for the chain link fence and made his escape. I remember thinking, after the event had past and my heart had recovered from the shock, that if I had been only a few years younger he would never have made it over that fence. I had images of me apprehending him and knocking him soundly on the jaw. Later, when I had recounted the attempted theft to a friend, he asked me, innocently enough I suppose, if the perpetrator had been black. I gently scolded him and told him, no. Rather, the would-be thief had been a white-punk skater kid and he didn't even look all that scruffy. His faux rag-tag attire, including the low slung britches, looked as if they might have cost a considerable sum; money which his parents, no doubt, had probably doled out woefully.

 

"I forgot," I said, referring to the bike.

 

"You will NOT forget my fist flyin' at your eye," she said.

 

"I've been kinda out of it."

 

"You are gonna be WAY out of it when my fist makes contact with your eye," she says and there is that endearing head wag again.

 

I remind her that she has made this threat repeatedly over the last four years without ever following through. She is always threatening to do something horrible to my eye. I remind her that my eye remains intact and that I am starting not to believe her... but I hope she never quits threatening me. I don't know what I would do if she ever stopped admonishing me with that adorable, mock-indignation. It lets me know she is not vexed with me after all.

 

"No, I mean it. I HAVE been really out of it. I forgot till this morning that tomorrow was my birthday."

 

"Now that was just a shameless plug wasn't it? I'm gonna "mean it" when I dot your eye Mr. Mister."

 

That is what she calls me sometimes. She calls me Mr. Mister.

 

"It really is tomorrow though isn't it? I just remembered too. See you're not the only one who forgot so don't feel bad."

 

"I don't," I said chuckling a little. It had been a shameless plug after all and, as usual, I had been abruptly and deservedly arrested.

 

"Anyway, those cigarettes are your birthday present, so don't say I never gave you nuthin'."

 

I said, "Thanks kiddo. You made my day… really. Do you have to drive today?"

 

Jeri drove; sometimes all day. She drove brain damaged children and their mothers to Irvine. She drove white collars to the LAX and days later picked them up and took them home. She drove frantic working women to their jobs and back. She drove to San Diego. She drove to El Monte and Ontario. She drove. She drove, receiving little recompense for driving. She barely met the cost of gas. She drove but I rarely rode with her, nor did bother her when she returned. I knew it tired her and she was locked into a game of diminishing returns which made her irritable. Still, she drove. Bereft of any other choice… she drove.

 

"I have to pick that lady up at one," she said. "Then I have to go to Ontario; to the airport."

 

"Will I see you when you get back?"

 

"Yeah, I'll try to get by here but it won't be till after five or so."

 

"Okay," I said.

 

"In fact, I better get going now. I have to get the battery off the charger and put it back in the Jeep. I gotta get a new battery baby. This routine is killin' me. I'm not makin' enough to pay Glen off. He's gonna own that Jeep if I can't come up with something else."

 

I touched her knee. She knows what I mean by this.

 

I said, "Now, if I were to say that, you would threaten to black my eye sweety and you know it. You wouldn't let me get away with saying it's gonna be bad one way or another. You won't stand for it when I put things like that."

 

"Yeah, well sometimes it really is like that," she said. "Sometimes it just is what it is."'

 

"I know baby," I said, keeping my hand on her knee and trying to sound comforting.

 

"I know," I repeated and I really did know. I wasn't trying to offer any platitudes here.

 

* * *

 

Jeri started out as a neighbor; a neighbor among the few I had met after moving into that little duplex over on Ninth and Locust. She was married at the time. I met her through this guy named Mark who had scored some weed for me once. He still owes me fifteen dollars to this day and reminds me every time I see him. The three of us smoked together a few times over her chain link fence; always in the dark of night; usually after ten. I thought she was beautiful even then, but I was wounded at the time. There was also the matter of her nuptial vows. Still, I look back and wonder if there wasn't some subtle, biological flirtation going on even then. I know I wasn't seeking a partner. The last one had nearly cleaned me out both financially and emotionally. I simply saw the possibility of a friend. I had no sense of it ever becoming anything else.  She did turn out to be an exceptionally nice neighbor and I enjoyed speaking to her in passing, but we didn't become fast friends until after I made her underwear dance.

 

One might be tempted to jump to conclusions upon hearing this and I know where your mind must be going right now, but I didn't actually "get into" those dainty articles in the way you must be imagining until much later and I must say that I thoroughly enjoyed that. No, we got to know each other when I made them dance; I mean the actual underwear sans Jeri. It was the lingerie itself which kicked things off in the beginning. It was those private particulars of cloth and color.

 

The first time entered Jeri's house I had gone over to share a joint I somehow managed to procure. I remember it was moderately dark; probably some dim buffer against the encroaching heat of summer. I remember how I sat there and took it all in. Central to things was her computer, which sat atop a small wooden corner desk. She was sitting in a high-backed office chair in front of this arrangement. The wall angling against the right-hand side of the desk was covered with objects which turned out to be masks; every one a harlequin in the traditional mardi gras style; shiny porcelain faces of black and white adorned with radiant, chromatic feathers. There was also a bookshelf full of books which, for the most part, related to computing; scripting manuals, maintenance texts and such. And then there, on the uppermost shelf , rested an assortment of radio controlled robotic toys, including what appeared to be an actual small robot (I have not to this day seen any one of these in operational mode). On the other side of the desk there was a window, blinded and draped, under which I noticed an old steamer trunk. I casually asked her what it contained.

 

"Just things," she giggled and demurely bowed her head. She smiled coyly. "Just girlie things."

 

"What kind of girlie things," I asked, sticking my head out slightly and offering a sly grin.

 

"You wanna see?"

 

"Suuure, I like girlie things," I replied boyishly, which I actually did.

 

She cleared a few odds and ends off the top of that old trunk and slowly opened the lid. The resulting sight struck me and I knew then that this was a magic trunk. It was brimming to the very top with feminine dainties of every conceivable color. It was a soft and convoluted rainbow of assorted briefs and bras, all of them swimming together; frolicking and cavorting in wonderful confusion.  They beckoned my eye to go further. They positively drew me in. There were fuscias and bright yellows; violets and purples. There were bright blues. There were aquas and electric greens. I can't begin to tell you all the colors. They seemed endless. It effected me and I gasped. Something formed in my mind and it made me smile. It was all happening so fast.  

 

"Hey… Wouldn't it be cool," I said," to make them dance?"

 

I pictured all those underwear twirling in space; mingling and swirling to some slow and sensual rhythm. I was trying my hand at animation at the time and this could be the perfect subject for a short clip; just the kind of thing to kick up interest and get me back into the game on different footings.

 

"You know," she said, "I've often thought exactly the same thing."

 

Two days later she showed up at my back porch carrying a garbage bag nearly bursting with undies. We laid each article out carefully on my living room floor and I photographed each piece separately. We were like two kids playing in a paint box. We laughed as we worked and she gave me the story on each one; where she bought it and what it meant to her. I probably took more than a hundred shots that day and that evening I inserted them into various time lines. I stayed up all night with those undulating undies and by morning I had constructed the beginnings of a ballet. I had succeeded in making those delicious skivvies waltz, just as I had imagined. When I shared the result with Jeri, she was elated… which fairly made me swoon.

 

Later, when I knew her better, she conceded to allow my hungry eyes to look as she changed into some of those sumptuously scintillating smallclothes. I remember thinking that she was probably the most beautiful woman I had ever seen and I still feel that way. She let me take some pictures too that night. She also let me kiss her.

  

* * *

 

On the afternoon of the day I photographed the dead mouse I had my usual day-before-my-birthday dinner with my father and his wife Carol. It was nice and lasted just long enough. We had seafood and we talked mostly about food but we also managed to talk about the washing machine they had recently purchased. It seems they had a lot of complaints about the new device which mostly had to do with the energy saving features. That fact alone should tell you something about my father. He still thinks the energy crisis is a myth and that there is enough oil for countless bored generations to endure. He also thinks we can find that oil here in America. He is very emphatic about this. In any case, I think he did get something right about the washing machine.

"Here's how they getcha'," he said slightly scowling. "It's got a smaller motor, see, so it runs fewer watts per hour but I'll be damned if the thing doesn't run twice as long. So, you tell me; how does that help a single solitary anything?" He looked pretty serious as he said this; his snow-white brows gathering like clouds above those green eyes and that Cherokee hook of a nose. There was no argument available. His logic was impeccable.

I love my father, and despite years of friction between us, there is nothing really left to iron out. We have differed widely in our views over the years, but hell, the guy is eighty-two years old and he is still alive. He also still manages to let me know he thinks about me sometimes and I try to do the same. I think that counts for something. We are father and son but we are also brothers. There is something subtle which is understood; a stand-offishness which is hard to describe or define. We can laugh and talk about the most mundane technical trivia. We can go on and on about something as simple as the quality of drywall. We earnestly contemplate the hard facts of things. We share anecdotes about material and the handling of material. We have important tales to tell of production and politics. We whisper and confide about the wonders of mechanics and electricity. My father has taught me many things. He has instructed me wisely in many matters and so I listen. I listen to him about the washing machine and so many other seemingly insignificant things.

 

After the meal, Dad and Carol drove me home. We pulled up in front of the house with the American flag flying there, mounted on the stately columns of the porch.  I slid over in the seat and reached for the door and as I did this, I saw through the lightly tinted glass, the figure of a man. He was standing there on the sidewalk holding the handle of a shopping cart filled half-way with crumpled plastic trash-bags.

 

"I wonder what he wants," Carol said, her voice indicating a sneer.

 

"I guess we'll see," I said cheerfully and in deference to her mildly snide manner. "Say… thank you guys for dinner. I had a real nice time."

 

"We did too, son," Dad said. He often speaks for both of them. Carol frequently does the same thing. I find this only mildly endearing.

 

Beside me on the seat was a bag filled with the remains of my day-before-my-birthday dinner. I had ordered the Deep-Fried-Denizons-of-The-Deep Platter and inside the brown paper poke there were clam strips, a few scallops and a piece of breaded haddock. There was also half a slice of exceptionally sacchariferous key lime pie. I grabbed the doggy-bag, opened the door of the big pearlescent Chrysler and stepped out onto the curb. I bent over and gave a small wave through the passenger window.  In the dark interior of the car I could see Carol smiling and gesturing back and when I turned around, I saw the man with the cart was still standing there; only a few feet from me now. Dad idled at the curb for a moment, waiting to see if anything would happen. He is a cautious man, my father. I looked the man over and saw that he was very young; probably in his early twenties.  He also appeared to be substantially begrimed and bedraggled, even in the dark. He was looking skyward with his mouth hanging wide open, which I found a little odd, but he didn't seem particularly threatening in any way. The situation, quickly assessed, didn't seem to indicate any immediate danger, so I flashed Dad a hand sign and they slowly pulled away. The man was standing in my way and so I spoke to him.

 

"Hey dude. Wassup?"

 

"Well… alcohol withdrawal for one thing," he said and I could detect the volatility of potent aromatics on his breath from my position only three feet away.

 

"But you've been drinking, right?"

 

"Yeah," he replied and his eyes were suddenly cast from on-high and onto the sidewalk. The tone of his voice offered some vague hint of impromptu contrition.

 

"What's your name," I asked.

 

"Bob."

 

I reached to shake his hand and he returned the gesture. His palm was cool and moist; his grip somewhat anemic.

 

"Where ya headed?"

 

"I'm tryin' to get to the church."

 

"Which one?"

 

"I dunno."

 

"Is it the one with the really tall steeple?" I asked. I knew that folks often slept there in the sheltered breezeway. I had also attended there for a time. It was a church which offered unusual kindness toward the homeless.

 

"Yeah, that's the one," he said and he looked up at the sky again, binding his gaze toward heaven as he continued to speak. "I'm just prayin' man. I'm prayin' real hard."

 

"Well that's good," I said. "That's good and I know that church. It's a good church and it's right around that corner over there; just about three blocks. I even know the pastor. You can tell her I sent ya. You hungry?"

 

"Yeah."

 

"Well then come with me," I said. "Let's see what we've got."

 

I had a lot of ramen on hand; some fruit and a little cheese. Ramen is a little tricky when you're homeless; much better with hot water and a bowl but passable with cold if one is truly hungry and can manage to find some sort of dish. I motioned for the young man to follow me and then I remembered the bag that I was presently holding in my hand. I stopped and turned to my new friend.

 

"Hey, do you like key lime pie?" I asked.

 

"I like pie."

 

"Here then… you take this. It's probably the best pie you've ever tasted and I hope you like fish."

 

"I like fish," he said and he was looking at me now. For the first time, I could actually see his eyes. They seemed too tired to be set in such a young face and now they were straining to follow the corners his mouth in an effort to bestow some hint of a smile; some momentary gift of gratitude, picked out carefully from the litter of his disparagement.

 

"Thanks man. I mean really… thanks a lot."

 

"No worries," I said."

 

And then, as I implored my newfound friend to take care, I was already turning back to the door of my room and away from him. Once inside and locked safely within my modest garrison of the solitary heart, I stripped off my jacket, reclined upon my single piece of furniture and called Jeri.

 

* * *

 

"Hey baby. What's up?"

 

"Nuthin', just sittin' here."

 

"Yeah, me too. I just walked in the door… you wanna' come over?"

 

"Oh baby, I'm pretty tired. I'd just get over there and fall asleep… probly for hours.. All this drivin' is  wearin' me down hard."

 

"I know," I said and I did know.

 

"I'd rather do it when we're both awake. I don't have to drive anywhere tomorrow; at least I don't think I do. Tomorrow's your birthday. Let's hook up then."

 

"Well then you're gonna miss it," I said.

 

"Miss what?"

 

"You're gonna miss what is going on in the street out in front of my house. There's probably five hundred people out here all dancin' and havin' a real fine time."

 

"Your not gonna miss it when I put my fist in your eye," she said.

 

"No, I'm not kidding. They are all out here and you guessed it… they are all doin' the 'Krump'."

 

I had mispronounced the dance term some time ago and she had snickered and then corrected me, saying, "It's Krunk you idiot." I pretended indignation and told her it was a new dance that I had come up with myself. I told her it was raging and everyone was doing it. It had been a standing joke ever since.

 

"Oh no, you are NOT gonna get started on that damned Krump. I told you I wasn't goin' for that s**t." she said, feigning mild irritation. "I will Krump your damned eye and you know it."

 

 "Okay then we'll all have fun without you and you can just go to Yahoo and see what's trending. I promise you, it will say Krump… not Krunk… Krump, and it will tell you who started it; namely me … now wait a minute… you're not gonna believe this… the nightly news is pullin' up right now… they're getting out of the television van and … wait a minute… now they're doin' the Krump. The whole damn town is down here Jeri, even the mayor and dey all be Krumpin'. It's a shame you can't be here to see it. "

 

"I'm gonna shame that eye," she says.

 

"Okay baby, I'll call you tomorrow morning."

 

"Okay baby."

 

We really talk to each other this way.

Reviews

[RainQueen]

This is going to be a masterpiece. The story of love that pours out - So real, so much more stirring than Harlequin hearts and flowers - against the gritty backdrop...The reader wants to be in your private world. The window you provide...Awe and envy.

"I stayed up all night with those undulating undies and by morning I had constructed the beginnings of a ballet. I had succeeded in making those delicious skivvies waltz, just as I had imagined. When I shared the result with Jeri, she was elated… which fairly made me swoon. "

This may be the most perfect blend of sexy and sweet I've ever imagined. Reading this...Sublime.