As much as I enjoy haikus, I sometimes write without syllable constraints. It’s like breaking out of a straightjacket every once in a while, just to remember what my arms look and feel like. The work I’ve done in the past few years includes interview profiles, short non-fiction essays, and a research paper exploring the media representations of hipsters.
###
I thought I knew what was new. When I moved to Boston from Delaware, I chose to live with two strangers I’d found on Craigslist, and willingly accepted an internship at a museum I’d been to only twice. But I never anticipated the bus system here, the people’s unflagging allegiance for Dunkin’ Donuts, and the radio stations that play Jack White and the new Roots album between the same commercial break. We’re talking new, new, and totally new. I’m astounded by how close the beach can be (25 minutes if you don’t mind a small shoreline and Massholes crowding your blanket) and by the number of New Yorkers read daily on the Red Line leaving Harvard Square.
This isn’t like Paris, where newness was marked by sips of tea from a bowl at breakfast, a homeless man living in a government-issued tent on my street corner, and a jaunt with my professor to the patisserie around the corner. Because everything was foreign to me – or because I was foreign to everything, take your pick – I accepted all these new markers pretty easily. Because that’s how they do it here, I’d repeat to myself, saying it word for word like a yogi’s mantra. No questions asked; I wanted to assimilate to French life quickly and seamlessly, and that meant leaving every American ritual and personal routine at the international border as if they were contraband I wouldn’t dare claim at customs…
###
Baka’s kitchen floated between the living room and the family room, an intermediate floor between the front door and the basement that one had to pass through in order to get anywhere in the house. It makes sense, thinking about it years later, that the kitchen in that house was unavoidable – it was so central to my grandparents’ split-level not one member of the family could find a way around it.
Baka spent hours in there, brown wood cabinets skimming the top of her gray hair. Something was always cooking, maybe simmering in a burnt orange casserole on the back burner, maybe baking on the lower level of the 1960s oven. On weekend visits, I’d stay in the front room and make up my own games. I dreaded meals, those moments in limbo between upstairs and downstairs when I had to swallow down whatever Baka had been working on. My parents and my brother were far better at it than I was. Their smiles were genuine, their sounds of enjoyment pure. I focused mostly on disappearing into the chair back, on enduring the majority of the meal in desperate silence. Often I’d cling to my mom’s hand under the table. I just wanted to remain out of sight.
We’d meet in the kitchen after afternoon naps, my brother coming in from the backyard with a baseball bat in hand and grass-stained-knees. We’d meet there and have apple pie, Baka’s apple pie. Baka, who wasn’t American, made apple pie the only way I’d ever known it: cut into small squares, the pastry from an Eastern European recipe. Normally I’d just eat the crust, the flaky bits covered in confectioner’s sugar. My brother called it Little Pie and ate the inside, too.
###
A Visit To The Birdhouse
Andy Zimmerman sat on his worn out leather chair, listening to the TV blaring the latest news. His huge hands fumbled to find the Cuban cigar that had sat in his pocket for over a month. He finally found it and took off the wrapper as ashes fell onto his work clothes. The football game started, and Andy focused his entire attention, just as Joan, his beloved wife for over forty years, called him. “Andy! Andy!” She screamed, “Get the birds.” Andy finally drew his attention off the screen and heaved his large bulk out of the well-used chair.
As the tropical birds squawked, Andy yelled at them, “Shush.” The birds quieted down, and Andy walked up the steps towards the living room. He walked into the porch and saw the magnificent birds. One bird was a green macaw, and the other one was a gray cockatiel. “Hello Beegi, hello Angel,” his gruff voice exclaimed lovingly. The birds knew him well and clawed at their cages, yearning to get on his shoulder. Joan yelled up to Andy, telling him to get ready for the visitors. Then Andy took out his cigar, now a cherished stub. He placed it in the sooty ashtray and then walked upstairs. Changing for the visitors, Andy slipped on a clean shirt. He pulled on his old slippers and walked back downstairs. Joan came into the living room, simultaneously with Andy. The birds were back out, one on Joan’s shoulder and the other on Andy’s.
Then the doorbell rang, and Joan rushed to answer it. A little girl and her mother stood at the door. “Maja, Laurie,” Joan exclaimed. “Come on in and see Grandpa’s bird’s.”
###
He Would Ride Around in a Limousine, but He Doesn’t Have the Money
Pittsburgh, Mid-October, Big Mama’s House of Soul. It’s a small takeout place, with just a kitchen, an outdoor grill, and a front room where customers place and wait for their orders. Small, but not unassuming: the façade is painted black and yellow, a hometown homage to the Steelers and their fans. The kitchen, which opens directly onto the sidewalk at 16th and Penn, sends a warm aroma wafting through the street. Red italic lettering on a front window reads “Soul Food,” but passersby do not need advertisements; they know what’s cooking. The front door stays ajar most of the day, resting on a floor mat so its faulty lock cannot trap Big Mama and her family of cooks inside. It has happened before. They were certainly well fed.
“Hey, Mr. George. I got an order here for you, bud.”
Rondell Bryan Franklin has one hand on the counter and another on his crackling walkie-talkie. He stands no taller than 5’8″, but the ceiling in this front room is black and low (the walls are, not surprisingly, yellow), so you fail to notice how short he really is. His hair sits close to his head, possibly worried that Rondell might run off one day, accidentally leaving it behind. Because, though he works the till and greets customers every day from 10 to 8, Rondell’s mind is often in another place — off in a world he has written on yellow legal pads and sheets of loose leaf, a world he has created from scratch. Here, the baking metaphor is appropriate; for even while writing down an idea, Rondell can take a customer’s order.
A fuzzy “Go ahead” radios in from the kitchen and Rondell gets to work.
“All right, Imma need two half slabs with mac and mashed potatoes, and a pulled pork sandwich with medium green beans,” he says, immediately checking in with the woman whose order he has just placed. “Green beans?” he asks her. She nods and he grins. “All right!” he says.
Rondell’s face rests on his smile, an easy grin that fades only when he has forgotten something mid-sentence and his brow furrows deeply. He laughs with machine gun quickness at every question you ask, but he is not mean-spirited; his days go from good to better the more he laughs. Only when his laugh is absent do you notice its power: A woman dressed in brown velour came in to get lunch, and Rondell kindly greeted her. She was a first-timer to Big Mama’s (you figure this because Rondell did not know her name) and clearly confused by the menu. She turned the laminated sheet, printed with food items on one side, over. “Oh, there’s no back to it,” she mused.
Rondell’s face was blank, and he responded slowly: “Let me know when you’re ready to order.” He laughs when you remind him later, balancing his chair on its back legs and shaking his head. “People look at me like I’m smoking something,” he says incredulously. And though you yourself were once a new customer, and you too turned the menu over to its blank side, you can see Rondell’s point: this is not rocket science.
It is 2:00 on a Tuesday afternoon; the lunch rush has ordered, eaten, and left. Speeding cars cross the 16th Street Bridge just outside, muffling Steve Wilkos, Jerry Springer’s former director of security, whose show is airing on the TV in the front room. Rondell moves the magazines and napkins cluttering a small card table, placing them on a nearby bench. He motions for you to take a seat and then sits across from you, leaning back and folding his arms loosely. “I’ll give you an exclusive,” he says.
The Mighty Mighty Heroes was Rondell’s first script, written when he was 14 about a family of superheroes fighting for good. It took him three or four tries to get that first script perfect. “You see, mines have real life problems,” he says, explaining the difference between his heroes and those in popular comics. Rondell talks about his scripts the way some five-year-olds talk about dinosaurs, excitedly and with eyes wider than a Rolex watch face. Five years later (he turns 19 in November), he is on page 22 of his seventh script, The Mighty Mighty League. The League is comprised of the Heroes’ grandchildren, over 100 characters Rondell has catalogued in his mind. “I have it to where you know who the villain is and who he’s related to,” Rondell gushes. “In my head, I can actually see it.”
John Talbot Heppenstahl, Rondell’s roommate, is a blue-blooded yinzer. He wears a varsity football jacket from Avonworth High School over his work clothes (a royal blue button-down and khakis) and sports diamond studs and a backward Dodgers hat. He is brawny, especially in contrast to Rondell’s boyishness, and hardly parts his teeth when speaking. In fact, whether he says “yinz” or not, you cannot be sure; much of what he says you need to have repeated. “He’s a funny dude,” John says, with a shrug in Rondell’s direction. “He’s funny, short – everybody says it – and he knows what he wants.”
“He actually wore on of my suits to work the other day,” John remembers suddenly. The image of Rondell – who is dressed in a loose Steelers tee, yellow, red, and blue madras shorts that fall below his knees, and black Converse sneakers with high white socks – wearing a too-large suit to take orders is enough to make you believe he sincerely could care less what people think of him. Similarly, the unlikelihood of his friendship with John, 21, who was born in Russia and works at Stat Courier “morning till night,” vanishes when you hear them talk about their apartment. “We just chill pretty much. Movies is good. We do the dishes, clean. No, no, it’s not like that” John stops, crisscrossing his thick hands in front of him so you get the right idea. “No, he finally got him a girlfriend and he better not fuck it up.”
“It’s the craziest thing,” Rondell explains. “This girl from LaRoche – she asked me to go with her. I’ve been 18 for a couple of years now, and she’s the first girl that’s done that.” Of all the subjects Rondell will opine on, the issue of girls is the only one that trips him up. “When I’m in relationships, I get writer’s block like it’s another world.” He smiles, of course, when he says this – but he also looks lost for the first time, his wide brown eyes falling out of focus. Unlike writing, which comes to him almost preternaturally, working relationships seem just beyond Rondell’s reach. For now, regarding Lonna, the girl from LaRoche, he is using a big question mark.
Instead, Big Mama is the constant female presence in Rondell’s life: as Big Mama’s first grandchild, Rondell is her best friend, the living heir to her budding soul food empire. When he was 13, Rondell lived with Big Mama in Maryland: “I was a king down there,” he says, recalling how his grandmother made him three sweet potato pies a day, one enough for each meal. “In fact, here’s a secret.” Rondell leans towards you, ready to divulge another exclusive. Given the certainty with which he launches into the next story, it is as if his finger were on your pulse. “I am the living, walking cookbook. I know all the secrets – all the old ingredients, and all the new ones – and I’m the only one.”
Whether Rondell knows Big Mama’s secrets or not – “It would take a planet running me over, and even then I wouldn’t tell you,” he boasts – he certainly has a claim to fame. Big Mama, or Brenda Franklin, has been a fixture of local and national news since her restaurant opened in April 2007. Rondell, whom she calls Nephew, now walks down Penn Avenue to the music of his own name. His jaunty stride and easy smile grow wider as he greets people on the street, his own Pittsburgh red carpet. “I’m just like my grandma, but I’m right below her,” Rondell says. “In a way, I got the package, the combo kit. I got the secrets, the look, the kindness.”
Rondell has no plans to go to college. In December, he may join Job Corps, a no-cost program run by the Department of Labor for education and job training, but he is not in any rush. “Right now, I’m valued here, if you know what I’m saying,” he says, indicating the register and the chairs of the room where he spends ten hours a day. There is no irony in what he says, only pride. “I can honestly say I’ve had a lot of opportunities,” Ronell admits, not sadly. “But I’ve put em on hold.” He knows a lot of numbers – “Dr. Harry, the founder of Kappa; board members of schools; this guy who works for Biden/Obama; public defenders” – numbers he could call to get writing work. But for now, he has his family, his roommate, his scripts, and maybe his girl. “I know I can do it, I know I can make something one million times better than Steven Spielberg,” he vows.
In the background, cars have slowed over the 16th Street Bridge. The TV still hums in the background and a bow-tied weatherman announces tomorrow’s forecast. Rondell returns to his place at the register, arranging his notes in front of him on the counter so he can get back to work.
A portly police officer walks in and orders a rib dinner. Rondell pats his shoulder and asks what sides he is hungry for: “Yams?” The cop nods and Rondell laughs. “All right, that’s cool, that’s cool, that’s cool.”
###
Aucun commentaire