I thought of you the other day, I remember you told me how you grew up. The little things they stick with me, now. The chink in your amour was the day we visited your mother and she said, “Do you want a beer? No sweat.”
“No sweat?!” I mean of all the phrases in the English language, your mother, who I thought knew not a word of English, had the phraseology to use “no sweat”? It was a lightning bolt moment. Your mother was truly a prostitute in a port town in Taiwan and you grew up amongst that. It blew my mind into next year – in fact, the next decade or more ‘cause I’m still pondering it. Talk about baggage. You must have been carrying more shit around than an airline, all the same you were polished, broken and glazed over maybe, but polished. It was something to admire and respect. Cast in the furnace of survival.
We grappled – two people who inhabited unknowable worlds. If women are from Venus and men are from Mars, you were from Alpha Centauri and I from the other side of the wormhole. Yet, we connected. We had heat. It was a kind of love – not born of commonality but certainly purpose. We wanted to know each other, and liked that in ourselves. We were hardy and fearless, especially you. No dictates. I admired that, too. “A lady in the lounge and a whore in the bedroom,” you said was the best piece of advice your mother had given you. No argument here. And the worst? “Push in!” You hated that. You hated the thick-face it takes to be an arsehole in a crowd. It burned you. I agree, but you also knew it was your mother just echoing the world that you disdained. You knew it was circumstances that pushed that ugliness past her lips so you dedicated yourself to being purposeful. I rode your coat-tails for a while. It was a trip. It took me to the very edge of my thinking which was just the fulcrum of my thought and tipped me gently over to the other side. Your world. You gave me perspective.
What about the third act? Inquiring minds want to know.
That’s a very long story.
That girl had just disappeared from my life, and a while back I had a hankering. I don’t know what other word there is to describe it, but I wanted to know what happened to her. I guess I knew she had hooked up with a man from the French Diplomatic Security but not much else. I searched for nearly a year on and off, but I was brain dead to the possibility she’d change her family name. That doesn’t happen amoung the Chinese. Well, not so. I eventually put two and two together and discovered through that process, she had died. She was a very very very lovely person – in fact time has taught me, a great person.
Nice is not the word to describe how nice to see you write again, because your writing is not nice, and neither am I.
Forged on an anvil, tempered in the blood of beasts and men is the poetry of fox.
Before the polish and glaze.
Thanks Charlie. It was watching the Joe Rogan Experience, a pod cast from California, that got me going. If you don’t watch him already, tune in. He just does interviews, not his comedy, but it’s always interesting.