Lily
Being brought up with a whore as your mama does you real funny sometimes.
See, you get these real nice guys that make your head think, I could do with that. You hear them talking long and foreign words to you, and you start to think you could live forever, just sharing the air they breathe, y‘know? Say, like those old couples in films who sit in a café without saying no words to each other at all, but they don’t have to. You start to think yeah, I could live with this. Just the guy mama would like.
But being brought up with a whore as a mama makes it get real hard to tell the difference between a guy who wants to hold your hand and a man who wants to hold you more friendly like. This guy’ll make you talk instead, and not very nice words either. I could do without that.
Anyway.
Here I am in a girl’s real small flat and this guy is leaning into my shoulder like his mama brought up a leech. I speak to him pretty nicely. Man, I had blood to my elbow last week ( Porto Rican belly dancers don’t take jokes too well sometimes, don’t ask) so I kinda need this blood, and also can he please put his lighter down? His answer is real rude though and I don’t feel comfortable sharing it with you.
Why would a guy hold a lighter when being friendly with someone? I can’t breathe so I think I should wait a bit to ask him this. Breathing is good for now.
Then that word given to not normal people stings my throat. “Pirate maniac”, my mama said. This guy really is that, burning people’s legs as they stalk past, then smiling his stale breath my way. He thinks I’m laughing too, and that is sort of creepy. Y’know, when a guy has fire in one hand and your palm in the other, and you're sort of wondering, well, hoping he doesn't think other things are funny either. Its just creepy is all I'm sayin'.
The music here isn’t much for me either. Not that real soft Elvis type, which my mama got us when she found us some scratchy records that you’ll probably know about from black and white films. My eyes try, but this uncivilish leech guy and drums and clashing and noise drown my head and now my eyes are watching mama. Clear as day. She is a lifeless doll, lying noiselessly across our battered couch with foam springs escaping through the real awful green couch cover, and I just choke. Wow. Mama, I tell her you look beautiful. Right there, drinking your music.
I am maybe seven and she is out cold on the couch, but still wearing something and I think, well, she isn’t working. At first I think, hmm, bad mistake with the makeup. Then I remember the tears. I don’t know if your mama told you but they sometimes come with that clear nail polish they usually drink. ‘Helps with the music, Lily.’ Mama slurred. ‘Kinda worked like onions, y’know? ‘Makes you cry an awful lot, Lily, but happy crying.’
She told me this, and I would smile and say I know. But it didn’t make no sense to me why you keep drinking stuff when you’re really happy. And the music, it wasn’t onions for me. There was only one time I cried.
I was 5 when I first saw mama underneath an awful leech man and it didn‘t look like the type of thing that a happy person did for a job. This was mama‘s job. I knew right then that mama never had happiness to lose it, so the onions came from somewhere else. Pretty clever for a kid, huh? I was just a kid.
So mama was scared, like me. Which is okay, or fairy fluff as she once said. Because she did say that once, she said it and I laughed real hard, which was always sad because then I got jealous that mama wanted nail polish to do her happy, and here I was all along, and I just did her sad.
I would never kill her though. That nail polish did get her one time and I felt her heart over and over because, well, I guess I thought I‘m no doctor and my heart was beating so fast that I kept thinking it was mama’s. But that was it. So I sang with my beautiful mama in my arms for some Elvis songs, and the onions did get me that time. You can understand.
Its hard to find a smart talking guy, so look out for that one. I think mama knew about that, even if she was a whore.
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