When someone is talking about meeting a member of the opposite sex for the first time, they talk about what the first thing they thought of was. I don�t mean for you to get the wrong idea so I�m a little hesitant to recount this, but I thought he looked malnourished.
His skin was the sort of stretched too-pale grey color you see on precocious young boys, the kind who see ghosts. He was a little flabby�sort of soft, like he could bleed into the mud and the cold without too much trouble. I was amazed to have not seen him before. I guess my eyes are going. He was perched on a pile of wood chips under a tree that, with a little squinting, I thought might be a beech.
He smiled unassumingly. �Hi.�
I said hi.
He stood up, kind of unfurling himself. He was about six feet tall and I felt a mosquito bite somewhere in the vicinity of my back pocket. I didn�t do anything, didn�t move. This was supposed to be a magical silence moment, right?
He slapped his cheek viciously and smiled over through spreading red. I started to laugh. Why not?
It�s taken me a while to realize, but I know what he looked like right at that moment. He looked like the hot bitter come-on-in glare of an AV geek from a corner with headphones as you stare, embarrassed, from the doorway, just looking for someone to give your deposit to for your drama tape. In high school. In untight jeans and Chuck Taylors.
Clothes are the other things that people like to hear about. He was wearing brown pants, heavy canvas or corduroy and a grayish shirt. It was tight around the gut and broad shoulders. His mouth was sloppy and too pale, like worms hastily attached to a face.
He made me nervous--I told him to watch out for poison ivy and left. With me I brought my Sid Vicious t-shirt and my shame. Nothing had changed. I squished in mud and avoided poison ivy all the way back to my too-red car.
The next time I saw him was at the fruit stand down the street from me. Outside it was boxes of star fruit, des bananes, des ananas. A richly mysterious C�te d�Ivoire man sold them, and it was puresex predator when he bit into a pear and let the juice drip.
Inside was spicy and dark, hanging wires strung with knots of ginger root and withered mirasol peppers, cloudy jars of spiced olive oil and almond extract bearing careful witness to your every move.
Once I dated a scary sad boy who drew me pictures of fetuses in jars and jack o�lanterns. He had lust-thick blond hair and zits. The olive oil with its floating chilies and bobbing cloves reminded me of him and I shivered.
Right on the footsteps of that shiver, like I was calling him, I saw the boy from the wood chips. His fat noble face coming towards me, I almost was afraid.
He said, �What are you going to buy?�
I reached up, needing something as proof or explanation and came down with a dried husk of corn. Inside the seeds rattled, loosely. He grinned, dead black hair floppy down his neck. �You know, if it rattles, you�re supposed to be in love. Or rather, I�m in love. Did you hear it?�
He was wearing pale colors and it made him shine like a silkworm in the hot dark. The aisles were so narrow I almost breathed his exhales.
The corn comment made me think about ballet�Copp�lia, the beautiful doll and the girl whose boyfriend fell in love with it. They tried the corn, too, but only he could hear it.
The boy�s smell oozes through my memories. Not Copp�lia�s lovefag, but the soured real-life one who was in front of me, cramped in the tight dark nostril of the store. He was holding a jug of olive oil through the pinky like a moonshiner or cheap Portuguese elopee. In the other hand was an ear of the corn.
Felix, the C�te d�Ivoire man, entered just as the boy was baring small tight teeth at me and shaking the perfect corn in my ear. I saw him in the same glance that he sees me and the boy in: nervous and menacing in the aisle and I backed away and I was scared. I wanted Felix to protect me but he never blinked. The shining black velvet of his bald head making him an invisible beacon, I escaped. I paid for the corn and a bag of oranges and went home.
Home is mine. It�s comfortable and strewn with clothes and ivy. I have painted the walls white, black, grey; checkerboard and a long black shadow my friend Pete painted for me: my silhouette as I stood in the doorway.
Pete looks like a small dog: large eyes, stubble, wiry. He lives down the street with his curly hair and his accordion, making mac & cheese on a splattered stove. He is not an artist, but he was the only who was able to help when I announced that I�d be painting. We got creative with ladders and tape, the Who blaring through sunlight on my dusty speakers. That�s where the checkerboard came from, I guess.
I put the oranges down, threw the corn in my bottom cupboard, the one reserved for dirty root vegetables. From inside, two sprouted potatoes leered whitely. The corn seemed at home there.