The Okra Intercession

The other day one of my housemates boiled some okra. My other two housemates are teachers in the public school system, and were out for the summer. It was my housemate, the okra, and I. He was boiling the okra in a sauce pan, stirring it blandly with a wooden spoon. It boiled for about twenty minutes before he turned the gas out from under it.

"Try one," he said, "it's okra... it's good..."


He tried to feed it to me from the wooden spoon. I took the okra with my fingers and put it in my mouth. I chewed it, using the tongue to explore the flavor. The little green piece of vegetable released some of its familiar flavor, then it proceeded to fill my mouth with slime. It wasn't natural.

I spit it out onto a napkin. It was disgusting. I researched the subject in the internet. Many warned about the slime released in boiling okra. I came to find out a posteriori, of course. As I was about to inform my housemate about what I had just experienced and learned, he took the wooden spoon with two or three pieces of okra and put it in his mouth.

The look in my face must have been half awed and half disgusted. He chewed and swallowed, all the while staring calmly with a smirk on his face from his place in front of the gas stove. "I actually like the way it tastes..." he mumbled. 

It hit me at once why I liked it and he didn't:


He was gay and I wasn't.

There is something not quite right with Mr. Ken. He smiles alot, but at all the wrong things. His taste in music is slightly off the mainstream or esoteric circles. His breakfast consists of a raw egg, orange juice and milk, in the same cup at once. I believe I once witnessed him feasting off raw liver. He reads books about people other people consider dangerous. He steals bicycles from amongst the donated items supporting local thrift stores. He cleans them and resells on the interweb. He does not enjoy being in the midst of multitudes. His breathing increases dramatically, his eyes roll in his face, and he tells you he needs to leave. Certain lights make his migraines act up. He picks up every penny he sees on the street however scratched it may be. He prefers to wash dishes than make a side for pot lucks, even when there is an electric dishwasher present. I'm not certain he finds the sea a peaceful body. The moon looks the other way on the nights he strays. His skin becomes translucent, his organs begin to show in places. After one hour of moonlight collection, he closes his eyes, draws in a deep breath, and almost immediately his body emits light. It is a dim, yellowish light, not quite amber. Light like the light from a fixture where insects have perished and dust has settled thickly. He has many pen pals which he writes and which write to him. They all discuss dreams they've dreamt in the hot nights of Summer. Once he sweat over a post card, and the sweat made some of the ink bleed to the point of incomprehension. He mailed it anyway. I never knew how to judge him: he could be highly practical or careless. Perhaps he was both.

Shadow

There is a man I see when I wander town. He's there so often it seems to me he follows. At the supermarket, I see him. I see him walking on my side of the sidewalk. I see him at the Latin store the one time of the year I walk in there. He often wears sunglasses, I seldom see his eyes. His face is thick like leather, his cheeks fallen slightly off to the sides. He reminds me of a minotaur that resembles a man. He often wears the blue suit of a mechanic. I sometimes wonder what he does. His mustache is thick under his thick nose. His hair is short and curly. His sideburns thick like mud. His skin is always darker hued, and even in the crevasses formed by the wrinkles on the surface of his skin. He reminds me of the awful, patriarchal men that hang out in hotel lobbies, smoking cigars, discussing with others about their money and their lovers. He reminds of the kind of man that would seduce our mother's heart and crush it, then leave it out to dry. That's why I've never crossed words with him, if today merely a gentle smile, one to acknowledge his presence. Neither has he stopped me to talk. He's older, and therefore I would think wiser, so it is not up to me to seek out his conversation. I do not know what he'd have to say, or if he says much. He reminds me in some ways of the myths about the devil that are so common emerging for old Honduran ladies' tongues. He seems he works hard, but so does the devil.

Jose #1: Part 2

The coyote had sent him and two others in a different bus, as the minivan where the original group was travelling was packed to the brim. This is problematic, because as the immigrants make their way across Mexico the coyotes must pay a tax to allow for the passage of individuals further north. The head of this operation, unnamed, is one who knows each coyote by name and face.

This was Jose's first time travelling north, and as such there was no way he could know what to expect, unless by chance he ran across others in his youth who could relate with truth and accuracy the hardships of the ever changing terrain.

It was in Reynosa where several armed men stopped the bus he and the two paisanos were riding. They began asking for credentials: passports, visas, IDs. Jose and his company, coming from a small village in Honduras, knowing they were embarking in an essentially clandestine course, failed to carry any form of identification on their persons. They were asked to get off the bus. One of the two paisanos, extremely afraid, broke off running. He was soon chased down and beaten with the butt of the gun, hauled back bruised and bleeding, to be carried off with Jose and the other man in a Toyota truck to some unknown location.

------------------------------------------------

Jose 1:

Jose (#1, as anonymously each male will be called Jose and each female Maria) grew up in a small village of Intibuca called Pueblo Nuevo. He is a young, brown skinned man in his early twenties, voicing a shrill laughter of E's naughty jokes. He appears to have arrived to Virginia from the Garden of Eden, knowing nothing of sex or nudity and calling marriage 'accompaniment' or 'finding company'. I see his childhood in an isolated cerro, full of God's Word (Logos) dripping from his mother's lips from the time milk dripped into his lips from his mother's breasts.

"How do people get over here?" I asked.

"They take out loans from different people. People that have come to the US and have gone back to Intibuca with money will provide loans, but with interest."
"What if you come here and you can't find a job?"
"The interest adds up and you have to pay more. Sometimes the people that lend you money ask to hold a title to your land before they let you borrow from them. If you fail to pay the loan, they keep your land as a collateral."

"How much does it cost to come here?"
"It costs about $10,000, or 200,000 Lempiras. My family was able to borrow L. 60,000 from a gentleman, and L.50,000 from a lady that had worked here in the US and gone back."

The conversation went on to describe the sacrifice, the effort, the dangers of the road to the Dream. "It's gotten a lot harder to make the trip." he said, "Bandits in Mexico stop the buses and ask for credentials and will take out anyone who lacks credentials. It has made the trip more expensive..."

The young man talked openly, as if it had been a breeze. But before he told me the story, little did I know that he, like many others, had to grip onto his life with the fiercest claws of faith his soul could conjure.

The Full Story of Mimmo the Black Cat, or How I Almost Possibly Became Homeless for a Brief Period of Time"

by Virgilio Nebel on Wednesday, March 30, 2011 at 7:27pm

The last time I saw Mimmo the black cat was Thursday. When I left Friday morning, the cat had already left to wander the Fan, and I did not return home until 1 a.m. A friend claims to have seen him prance across his path near the Visual Arts Center.

A black cat at night- an omen for some. Another friend claims to have seen him very early on Saturday, apathetic at the morning cold, staring as the doors swung open and closed. He sat on his cushion on the porch. Later, my housemate would say that he ate enough on Friday as to keep him for a week. Perhaps that's why he would simply stare as my friend exit the house. I left early to volunteering doing people's taxes, feeling a little sick from the piña coladas and the screaming the night before.

The cat, at that point, was no longer on the porch. Thursday evening was the last time I saw him. Saturday came and went, swimming and tea, verbs and nouns, and Sunday, with its VCU game, arrived still excited about Friday and more excited about itself yet. Sunday morning: No black cat on the porch, no black cat out back. No cat at all. Sunday brought a multitude of eyes and sounds, a massive pool of positive energy amassed on Broad St after the consecutive victories.

A smoke bomb went off near a broadcasting van, the several revellers quickly scattered. The ecstatic wave swept onto Monroe Park grounds. All this away from the roaming grounds of the cat. By Sunday I thought: "Strange.. the cat hasn't come back." I noticed as the day drew to a close that something had tipped the recycling bin, something had torn into an old box of cat treats. I didn't think much of it. I turned it right side up and disappeared in the house.

That afternoon caught me meditating in Quadrangle Park over the fact of the cat. Had it been run over? Had the Chinese Restaurant on the corner had such bad business that they had neglected buying chicken and started harvesting feral cats? This was not to depict them in a bad light; but rather, in somewhat of a blue light, sad at the fact that I had once read a news that had a picture describing its content and that picture showed a crate with many cats cramped inside, all meowing in unison, grateful at being saved from their fate in someone's fried rice... In all this, a friend baked several pizzas at my place and took them, ready to eat, to his place, where I have no doubt they were devoured with humility and gusto.

I walked home to get the bike, and rode to eat pizza at another friend's house, a ritual at this point. The anchovie pizza was as salty and tasty as always, nevertheless the thought of the tiny slivers of the fish halves reminded of the image on my friend's cat's collar, which made me always want to name it Fishbone. The thought of this cat eventually would carry me to the thought of Mimmo, and the thought of the several fates that cat can suffer in its instinctual nocturnal pursuits.

That night caught me peeking into my neighbor's trash bin as my neighbor walked out the back door for a cigarette. I feigned a wandering medidation with improvised whistle and the cat call "Mimmo..mimmooo..mimmooooooo". Riiiight.. a definite blurring of the line between voyeurism and honest concern, as it might occur in the neighbor's perception. Regardless it was late and cold and no meow emerged from the prevailing darkness. The cat was blacker than ever. It had been absorbed by that ephemeral generalized shadow we know as night... the night had even swallowed the meows.

Monday carried in its breast the return of the housemate and the rehearsals of the delivery of the tragic news. I had had to deliver this news once before, to another roommate, but that time involving the thought that the cat was then somewhere within the empty spaces of the washer. But that's a different story.

Monday morning I realized what the torn cat treat bag meant. It hit me: Maybe the cat was starving out in the wild, and maybe it wanted to come in but it was unable to because it never saw me when I opened the doors and I never saw it when the doors were open. So I left it's little red bowl full of treats for it, just in case it decided to stop by once again. I was hoping that that would give it the energy to return to the back door, where he could be observed from the kitchen scratching the back door screen as if knocking to let him in. But he never came.

The evening came so fast, with the need to deliver the bad news. I called the housemate three times. It was around eight in the evening, as I stood telling my parents about vague cyclical thoughts regarding joining the air force, that the phone vibrated in my left pocket, and his name came up in the neon acqua of the screen- "Veer G lio, I soh you cohlled me three times, how ahr you?" and I said, "I'm ok.. well, maybe not, I... I have some news concerning Mimmo, he.. he kinda disappeared. I haven't seen him since Friday.. Or in fact.. I haven't seen him since Thursday, and he didn't return all weekend... but I left food out and something ate it, but I wasn't sure if it was Mimmo"

"Oh my Gohd..." He talked about how the news would break someone else's fault and how he would try to cohll him and look out for him. I said sorry, hung up, and got ready to leave. I drove home thinking about the smell of dead animals, and with that, about how ephemeral we actually are, and how little glory there is left in the decaying bodies of the once living. I thought of walking into the night and hoping to track the smallest hint of decay, and following it like a hound to its source, where I expected to find a small, bony lump of black fur half torn by crows or grackles, like so many mangled mice he had brought home as gifts of appreciation, which I had to gracelessly pick up in bags and tote to the trash bin out back.

I noticed the neighbor's bin was missing, and thought that maybe where the bin was was the cat. Maybe his little red toyota had trampled the dear Mimmo, and in his silent type silence he would conceal the tragedy until the day he died.

I went to sleep that night feeling terrible. In a way, this cat had disappeared under my watch. I went out again, this time less motivated, to call him. When I came back I went straight to the freezer, pulled out the ice cream, slapped two scoops in a bowl and made it disappear. I could feel the weight of anguish in the whole two floors and basement of the house.

Mimmo's archenemy -Eeor- sits on the cushion on the front porch where Mimmo was last seen. His cold eyes judge the tenants that neglected to care of his kind. Later, he creeps out from under the stair case where he so often harassed Mimmo, and arrogantly wanders off.

Tuesday morning, no cat. The housemate goes out early, calls out to him, without response. He has resigned to the fate of the cat, but mutters once again that that person whose heart shall be broken at the news shall not hear the news until it is requested. In my mind, my lease will end as soon as enough time has elapsed to prove the cat gone forever, for part of the cheap rent is caring for the cat in the housemate's absence.

I come home for lunch, hoping to find him in the old spot, but he lacks. I walk in, hoping the housemate has already once entered the empty rooms of a work day afternoon, but he hasn't. I bang as many pans as I can this one time, as that once has brought him to the back door screen, which he pulls with his tiny claws. But regardless of the banging of pans, the screen remains tense.

The work day goes by. I get signatures for a food stamp application, drive back home. I plan to scout the entire neighborhood for a five block radius. If that fails, I will stick several pictures of the cat on a Word document (to save money) and print several copies, then clip them and staple them to every post with a tiny birdhouse.

Ironically, it was less than two weeks ago when i asked my housemate, "You love letting the cat out... what would happen if he goes out and never comes back?" To which he answered an equivalent of 'that is always the risk.' Well now it was a reality, and he was afraid to break the cat lover's heart.

So I began scouting Main Street, concealing my concern behind my harmonica and my sun glasses, mind you the sun was sinking, and walked across the street to where a trash can exposed a black figure. I was relieved at finding out it was a plastic bag and disappointed at not providing closure to the mystery, but again relieved at the fact. I kept on walking and playing and saw this sketchy path between the Visual Arts Center and its left neighbor. I walked through it fearing to sniff decay and looking for black furry lumps amongst the weeds.

At the end of the alley: A dog's ass. By the look of it, a boxer. I kept moving forward, systematically blowing into the harmonica to produce... blues. And the blues went on as I went on as the boxer became clearer and gave way to a leash, and as the leash became clearer gave way to a crouching body, and the crouching body to a smiling face of a cut girl stretching her back Korean style in the midst of walking her dog.

I said 'hello' and kept playing and walking- That's what shy people concerned with finding their cats do. I kept walking and walked into the back of the Art Center parking lot, where this house has this patch of green grass, where I doubted the grass was greener on the other side.

They must have sold their soul to the devil to grow grass this green, I thought. But then I noticed the sweet lamp they had against the fence to the right. I kept walking, lest I digress from the mission at hand. I saw a different alleyway than the one the trash trucks use to retrieve our trash and the same one I use to park. This is a smaller path passing, no doubt, next to the house of the uber-proud parents of a Afghan/Iraqi killing machine, their delusions pronounced in the hundred bumper stickers that fill the back surface of their Jeep Patriot. At this time, my cat is more important than their veteran son, and if it were their cat, perhaps, for at least a couple of minutes, it'd be more important than their veteran son to them as well. T'is the nature of humans, ain't it?

I turned left at the end of the alley towards the corner of Floyd and Allen. I mumbled the little cat call, expecting it not to work. But what the effing hell, to my left appeared a little black nose, with a little black paw, and a little gray eye, then two gray eyes, then the other black paw, as it squeezed under the fence of that corner house that had kept him for the last three days!

It jumped into my arm, or I snatched it, I don't know. But I swear- that cat squeezing under that fence was in some degrees as glorious as a baby squeezing out of its mother at birth:

In a way they both symbolized life.

The Immortal

Today was Sam Stookey's two hundred seventy third birthday, and many swore he looked in his early fortys. In fact, for the last two hundred thirty six years, he's been thirty seven years old. Except he doesn't know exactly how old he is. He noticed something was wrong when he turned fifty nine, and then sixty five, then seventy eight, and he looked the same as those pictures from back in the day.

Sam Stookey was, short of words, immortal. He had something of an idea as to his age, having spent summers and winters thinking back in his life to what event had caused it. After he turned a year older than Jeanne Calment, who croaked back in '97, scientist hooked on to him like lampreys, assuming it had some genetic cause.

So they took a sample of his blood, sperm, hair, bone, nail, poop, skin, and whatever else science and the balck market could get their hands on. Some people went to strange and awful extremes in their pursuit... Someone, for example, caught his breath in a jar to sell on ebay for about less than the jar cost at the thrift store for no one believed it was actually Stookey's breath.

Someone faked a nurse outfit and managed to get a clip of one of his daughter's umbilical cord. Another nurse took the placenta home like someone takes the leftover cake at an office birthday celebration.

A dentist removed a tooth that had nothing wrong with it and kept some plaque in a vial. However, despite all the efforts at finding a biological reason for his immortality, they found as much reason to believe in that as one would in, say, Weapons of Mass Destruction in the Middle East.

It all became clear as he saw his first and second wives wither away in age, followed by his children and grandchildren. Sperm Banks stopped sending bottles with checks for six digit amounts including within the day his second grandson Jules Verne Stookey passed at age 64.

If you only knew, they wrote him so many checks for so long to sell for tons to so many surrogate mothers curious to give birth to the next Immortal. All of them and their little Stookey's eventually croaked with their hopes still hanging like socks set to dry on the rope of Destiny.

Some way the sperm banks found out much earlier than the consumers how short-lived the Stookey progeny would be. However, they were making so much money from the demand that they kept on mailing Sam the vials, the checks for tons of money, and the newest and most popular adult videos. 

When the supply notably failed to provide what it promised- i.e. immortality- the fathers, mothers, children and their grand children, all  who had invested in the concept of mocking death and who were now bound to die, while still living, sued the sperm banks to such depths that no vial holding the right-handed (sometimes left-handed) effort of sultry afternoons ever made its way back to the banks because no vial nor check ever arrived in the hands of some chipper postal worker. 

Despite the ability and capacity to, as Sicilians would say, spread the seed, Sam Stookey decided to stop fool around with love about seventy five years ago. It's not that he didn't enjoy the act of making children or the curling up on the couch to watch movies or the shedding of tears together at some nostalgic point in life.

It's that he carried the weight of burial in his eyes, hands, and memory. He had planted to many kisses faded on lips that dried in coffins. He had replaced too many dry wreathes on the family plot. It's that underneath the smile in the pictures was the fleeting memory of time, the eyes like cups once full of life now empty shot glasses in a bar where Death is that one customer that never leaves.

In all those years that fate granted him he sought to answer this mystery that only he had ever faced. What is life when living is all you've left to do? He gained appreciation for the dying. "Laudato si, mi Signore, per sora nostra Morte corporale" (Bless'd thou, my Lord, for our sister physical Death) he pondered under his breath, mimicking St. Francis humble words, one of the earliest poems in Italian.

And as he saw the fear, respect, and envy pooling in the eyes of those around him, in the shallow smiles formed by toothless gums in his great great great great grand children, he realized that, like Bilbo Baggins in a book he read a long ass time ago, he must flee to the ever more populated mountains, or to the depths of the sea.

The morning after he turned 273 years old, looking in his early forties, as planned, he boarded his favorite plane, a tiny Grumman hydroplane he called Grace after his eighth wife, who left him for a half-French half-Peruvian and sixteenth Cherokee named Jean Pedro Almand-Gutierrez.

He flew it down to what had once been the Amazon rainforest, but had, in the first century of the second western millenia, been turned into soy bean fields, and which was now, in the year 2211 ce of the Former Gregorian Calendar and Chinese Year of the Pig, one big-ass favela stretching all the way up to New Orleans.

Needless to say, as the sun rose in the velvet East, and as the universe gravitates towards cliches, Buddy Holly's "Not Fade Away" played on the tape deck of the plane as it faded into the horizon heading South beyond the sharp line of the Sierra Madre...