Undead(ish)

After Nathan’s knife-twisting schemer of a wife out-maneuvered him via court settlement to hand over the better car, primary custody of their kids, the house he penned a large check for every month, and a significant chunk of his earnings as a urologist, it felt like a real kick in the pants to come to his senses shambling down Melrose as a flesh-eating zombie.
        Well this is a real, fine how-do-you-do, he thought with the better part of his brain still intact thanks in no small part to Mensa and the Friday crossword. One minute I’m in the neighbors' garage checking to see if they have any moving boxes left, the next thing I know their three-year-old gnashes a hole in my knee like some kind of rat dog. "God, what a little fucker," he grumbled as the sudden urge to consume gobs of stringy flesh grabbed him by the throat and walked him to the corner Bistro where well-heeled trophies jockeyed for sidewalk spots fully unaware that the local Viagra doctor yearned to unzip their soft bellies like Saint Laurent purses bursting with strands of gleaming entrails.
        "Hi Shirley," he exhaled a little shakily, "haven’t seen Teddy in a while."

        "Hey Doctor Nate," said Shirley, "You’re looking a little under-the-weather." 
        "Yeah, well, I think the neighbor’s preschooler turned me into a zombie," he offered with an unsure chuckle. "Plus, I've been dealing with a messy divorce." 
        "Wow, that’s adding insult to injury," she said. "Maybe Frites has something on the menu you can eat?" 
        "I guess I could check," he shrugged as he got a grip on his appetite and steadied his breathing in the perfect half-mast light of a dying Los Angeles Saturday. 
        "I hear the tartare is very good." 
        "Great," said Nate. "I guess I could get a few orders."
        "Would you like to sit? I don’t think Ted’s coming." 
        "Sure. So much for twelve solid years of veganism."

         Barely able to control his fork, Nathan tucked into the mounds of glistening raw beef made sophisticated with dijon and capers while Shirley nibbled on the little, round toasts like a bright-eyed squirrel. So much for so little to show in the end, he thought at the quaint outside table as the palm fronds waved their shadows around in the Santa Anas like frantic women vying for attention. So much for all those dicks I’ve cradled in my hands with a sympathetic wrinkle on my brow. So much for the organized office of brown leather and perfectly feathered files. So much for the wife’s little peach-fuzz mustache. For my beloved ex-Porsche in custom orange fleck, for the two-room dog house I built on weekends for my ex-beagle. 

         "So much for all of it. I’d eat it if I could. Stuff it right down my throat," he said as the bloodlust of hunger cleared a little from his eyes. He smiled with a head tilt, "Let’s toast to being undead," he said with a toss back of Vueve. Then he leaned in and bit Shirley’s ear. Too hard.

This is Not About the Apple Pan

I thought, given my trip to the Apple Pan, that I would be writing something I'll call hamburger porn, which is more drippy and muscular than your average food porn and what you might find in the pages of Esquire adjacent to a homo-eroticized torso selling cologne. I thought I would be disparaging the fussy little burgers from Umami and all the other burgers resting on beds of laurels organically grown from trend-setting gardens. I thought I would be extolling the tang of an Apple Pan burger, a tang derived from a dill relish and catsup sauce (hardly secret as sauces go). Figured I would describe how the Apple Pan’s inch-thick wedge of iceberg trumps, on any given day, the stingy helping of greens most fashionable burgers wilt on contact. Reckoned, in general, I would be focusing on how a good burger is one that knows how to make juicy what should be juicy, and how to keep dry that which should stay dry.

Then, of course, in the interest of countering myself, I figured I would have had to veer off to discuss my general problem with eating for nostalgia’s sake, which often chooses to overlook the inherent issues with a place and its food. For example, if I were to have been able to write a straightforward hamburger piece, I would have complained about the Apple Pan’s modes of delivery: The way the burger is half-wrapped in paper— with no accompanying utensils, and just the tiniest institutional napkins— means that you pretty much have to eat it all without setting it down. No savoring in that. But since I couldn’t write that, I also couldn’t complain about the perfunctory service, the stifling heat of the so-called quaint (read: un-air-conditioned) space, or the amount of trash the Apple Pan must produce given the cardboard trays that the fries and accompanying catsup are delivered on as well as the paper cone (cute or stupid?) from which I drank my Diet Coke. I simply won’t write about how the smell of an Apple Pan burger lingers for hours on your hands even after you wash them.

Nope. I can’t write any of that. Instead I have to write a human interest piece. Why? because I forgot that the Apple Pan is cash only, which is one more way that old-fashioned gives way to frustration. Luckily for the cash-poor diner there is a Bank of America right next door. Oh, but wait… I had forgotten my ATM card in my parenting backpack and I was carrying, instead, my teaching backpack. The morning had been frantic, with my son wailing about having to go to preschool and with me hustling to get a lesson plan together for my composition class, which I taught prior to burgertime. Not to mention that I had a lot on my mind: the reality that my son needs to be assessed for learning disabilities, for example, or the never-ending to-do list for our new home, or the large stack of papers that needed to be graded over the weekend. Why wasn’t I carrying cash? Because I wasn’t, so lay off. How could I stick my ATM card into the parenting backpack without replacing it in my wallet? Because my mind was trying to hold on to a million thoughts at once, so I can’t really write about the white, wrap-around counter, which is the only seating, or the metal behemoth of a cash register, which must be a relic from the Apple Pan’s founding in 1947. 

Above all, I have to write about Deke, a gentleman dressed in casual pinstriped broadcloth and khaki who sat down next to me and proceeded to tuck into his newspaper in a way that said closed for conversation. Of course, I felt bad interrupting his lunchtime reading with the question, meekly asked, Is the Apple Pan cash only? Yet I had to ask as a glimmer of memory made me panic three bites in to the burger (with all the snap and juice of lettuce and beef, the Tillamook added a smooth creaminess to the composition) I really can’t write about. His reply was something like, “I don’t know, but don’t worry about it. Enjoy your food first and talk to the man later.” I’m sure he saw the sheer dread in my eyes as I pawed through my backpack looking for my ATM card. I nervously dipped my golden, medium cut fries in the huge mound of Heinz hastily poured for me by the server as I imagined myself wearing a paper hat and peeling potatoes in the back while the rest of the restaurant workers made fun of me in Spanish. Gringa estúpida no tiene dinero.

When my check was delivered, so was Deke’s. He settled my tab as well with no prompting. Just a shrug and I’ll get this one, too to the man behind the counter. Deke must have had a good nose for desperation, which, I’m sure, was fairly leaking from my pores. We chatted then about USC and writing and real estate. I had a stack of student papers in front of me that I was trying to read and keep free of catsup smears. The point is, I can’t write about a burger joint, not when the number of texts devoted to hamburger porn grossly outnumber the burgers worth lusting for. Moreover, I especially can’t dedicate the words of this essay to the task of deconstructing the Apple Pan eating experience when what is really important is that a man I didn’t even know bought me lunch because I showed up at a cash-only restaurant with no cash. There are burgers and kindness out there that defy expectations. Thanks, Deke. I’ll do what I can to pay the karma forward.

Learning to Swim

The swim school is located in a questionable neighborhood of Burbank where safety notices are left on our car by the Burbank police department, and the neighborhood is populated with apartment buildings noted for their dilapidated tan stucco and names such as “The Sea Breeze” or the “Paradise Palms,” but the only part of the names that are accurate are the palms rising up from the parking medians, which serve to remind us that this is, after all, southern California. Yet you’ll find no sign of sea, breeze, or paradise here as summer tries to suffocate Burbank in its smoldering grip.

But once you walk in through the gate of the Lucile Cowle Swim School, all the oppression melts away. Fountains burble, and Canna Lilies bloom from planters. The smell of sun screen permeates the air. Phil Collins drifts out from speakers dotting the stone walls, and parents with cameras sit under large canvas umbrellas as instructors coax children of all ages to become just a little bit less human and a little bit more aquatic. We come every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, and the aquariums— a small pool for the babies and a larger pool for the big kids— are teeming with everything from the tiniest minnows to nearly full-grown fish. Some instructors have four-year-olds floating on their backs like otters. Other instructors are cheering on five-year-olds learning to tuck into a dive like penguins in goggles. I watch my son, just four-years-old, leap unafraid off the white diving board into the eight-foot deep water. It is a great and terrifying moment.

According to an article on Slate, Drowning is the number two cause of death in children under the age of fifteen, and the Instinctive Drowning Response doesn't look like drowning. It looks like a person pushing down against the surface of the water, unable to speak, and struggling to breathe. I have a close friend who knows a woman who lost a child to drowning. My brother was on a field trip in high school, and one of his classmates drowned in a pool they were all swimming in when it happened. I read a poem once about drowned twins: five-year-olds clasping hands at the bottom of a neighbor's pool. It's no wonder that some of us parents coach from the sides of the pool. 

My memories of swimming begin in my grandparent’s pool on Fremont Street, when all the neighborhood kids would come over on the hot days to play. I floated around in the kind of orange life-vest you wear on boats, but floating around wasn’t enough for my mother. My swimming lessons were held in the mornings, before summer camp, when the air was still cold. The pools were never heated, and my strongest memories of learning to swim are visceral: gripping a kick board, legs churning, teeth chattering. When the lessons were done, and I was dressed for the day and finally warmed up, I felt a little wrung out and rubbed down by the cold water.

Now I watch my son as he tries to learn how to push off the wall of the pool and glide to his instructor, who offers him the appropriate high-fives when he follows instructions. I watch him kick his legs wildly as his arms flail at the water when he forgets about “big arms and scooping hands.” Every time we visit the pools, he does a little bit better. But sometimes he pushes off the wall, and instead of gliding to his instructor, he goes under. His head is gone, just like that. But then he sputters, laughs, and once again tries to execute the glide, scoop, and kick that constitutes swimming. 

In the rippling oasis of Lucile Cowle’s swim school, I watch some kids sink as their instructors lift them back up to the surface. I watch tiny, blond girls in frilly swimsuits whose spastic movements look like ecstatic drowning, but really it's swimming without coordination, and it's a delightful thing to see. When my son is done with his lesson, I change him into dry clothes and he picks out a red lollipop, which glows in the sun on the way back to our car where a notice about carjacking is pinned under the wiper. 

Celebrity Stalking

The celebrities are at it again. They keep

stalking me for poetry. Just the other day

George Clooney tried to deliver my pizza

so I could sign his broadside, Meryl Streep

crouched in my back yard with a chapbook,

Julia Roberts broke into my bathroom

to ask about meter, and Charlie Sheen left

twenty-six messages asking for [sic] sexstinas

written in the colloquial language of porn,

but these movie stars think they know the real me

behind the poetry because they read tabloids

in line at the super market that detail

the lurid private lives of poets who take lovers,

get caught without make-up, carry small dogs,

enjoy gay trysts, drink absinthe and own

many-chambered homes with deep-pile

cream carpets, secret rooms, and libraries

the size of Luxembourg. They couldn’t know

that I’m allergic to even numbers and no longer

fluent in filthy words. I’m feeling dogged

with anxiety on this spring nocturnal 

in the City of Angels, a hundred watt moon 

on the rise and the song birds playing music 

well past prime time like neighbors 

with no children. What we sacrifice 

for our art. We didn’t ask for this.