Memories at a Potluck

The guests sit against the walls. The room is not square when thirty people sit. It is a circle of faces cast in dim lights and one cannot help but watch: a dark-skinned man from Uganda talks about empire; a boyish Asian man with a beard sharpened to a point beneath his chin; faces beyond the walls fill plates from bowls; a white girl with a dreadlocked braid extending like a snake to the small of her back clasps tea; two brown-skinned children play in the candlelight. The faces are warm like freshly baked cake.

It is his second night at the co-opt house and the fourth night of his life that he does not have to account to anyone at all. Though it all blends together: hours bleed into days, faces into their surroundings and nothing is countable or separate. It is all one experience. It is supposed to be like this, he thought. When one leaves home for a while, one’s systems of order and chaos are left behind too; the brain yawns open like a wale and it sucks in all the floating specks of life. Everything is equal; dig everything. Memories drift and mix in his mind like plankton at sea.

Valencia Street. He has Mexican food in a small place with yellow ceilings. A young couple sits on stools in front of him. The boy wears a t-shirt striped with velvet purples. He has a terrible slouch but is nice-looking. The girl is blond. “I want to go and see a band or a night, but it’s tough, you know.” The boy nods. “I think sometimes that I’ve outgrown this city,” she says.

Max walks from the locker with his suitcase on his back. The boy from London with whom he had shared a room is leaving the hostel too.

“I didn’t recognize you with your sunglasses” he says in a British voice appropriate somehow.

“It’s my disguise.”

“Did you speak to the other two boys in the beds above ours?”

“Yes, they were assholes.”

“I tried to talk with them, but they didn’t want a chat. I came in late night late. I couldn’t sleep at all. At three in the morning I hear a zipping sound from the bunk above yours, and then the bed starts to shake like this,” he says moving his arms. Both boys have no doubts in their smiles. “Then at seven in the morning he does it again. I hear the zipping and I cleared my throat and it stopped right instantly.”

“Wanking – that’s the word for it in London, right?”

At the end of the city block there is a statue of a man pointing to the sky. Beneath the statue a poor man in grey clothes sleeps in the sunlight.

The girl he is staying with invites him to the City. She is beautiful and the conversation is easy. She has brought her friend. They three meet on Velencia at a bar where they are asked at the door for identification. The Boy might not pass for seventeen.

“I forgot my I.D.”

“That’s too bad. You look pretty young.”

“Yeah, bad genes or something”

Max smiles and the three of them leave. At the next bar, the girls are carded again but Max slips in. “Look at this!” he grins and pulls his shirtsleeve up. His arm is thin like a used role of paper towels, “You would be a fool or a suicidal to mess with someone with these!”

Next to the garden is the concrete patio. The sun is high and the concrete is yellow; the garden is filled with weeds. Max is worried about the party – they are too hip, too young (though they are ten years older than he), they wear tight black jeans, tight and vivid t-shirts, large black sunglasses; wholly they are good-looking, assured, their movements are fierce. Heat rises from the yellow concrete courtyard and kabobs hiss on the barbecue. “My sister is much cooler than I can ever hope to be,” she says.

The kids have airy gazes in their eyes. You know that Middle Class America frowns on them and anything that does not quickly turn a profit. But if our civilization falls, what remains? The group sits in plastic chairs in the shade or against the concrete wall. Is it our bank accounts or does it all come down to personal style? They have style. Which is not to say they are artist (who here could write a poem worth reading?), but that their values are stronger than most. Values born from that place in which these hipsters hide, from that crease between past and future, not knowing where you’ll be tomorrow and not caring: to live outside the law, you must be honest.

On the first floor of the bar, brown is salient – the walls, the tables, leather jackets. The people are packed in as if they are in a subway car. This is Max’s subway car through time: he is twenty-one. He wants a drink, but is too embarrassed because he does not know how to order. On the second floor they play a game of bad pool. Men watch around the table. There are games too important to be treated as games. So they dance. The music – Soul Music – is from a place too far away for anyone to know the songs well. The floor is almost empty, but the songs are good and at times they are very good. One notices that there are single moments when one’s heart begins to beat in time with the pound of the speakers. Everyone’s ears curl to the high notes from the jazzy voice out of the dj box: " I said my baby's coming home tomorrow." For a single moment the whole earth becomes the room, this dark, malicious room that moves to the voice that wails: "Ain't that good news. Yeah, ain't that news."

At the potluck a woman from Chile speak in a steady accent. She is a practitioner of holistic medicine. In time, her husband, Peruvian, picks up his guitar. He is a professional musician, a child of four hundred years of blood and fire, the story he plays with his fingers. The room is still warm and the candle continues to flicker off the wall.

Max mingles, but he is exhausted and looks to leave this world to which he does not belong and doesn't fit in. He enters the girl's room; he falls to the ground and looks at the ceiling. It is tiring being around people you do not know. She is in the room and so are the two neighborhood children. He looks into the eyes of the doll besides him and wonders to whom it belongs, though he knows the answer already: it belongs to him; he is so young. Outside of the door, the sounds and faces steam the windows, spin like wheals, sound like the street, like laughter, like silverware falling to the ground. Inside the door little children toss around the doll with black beady eyes.