Yellow Cigarette

The pale jeans, the dry, curly hair and all the hands–sifting, grabbing, pressing. The kissing passionate and pink. The boobs likewise–under bathwater, under velvet. Women in bathrooms, so soft against tile and mirror.

It was a rolodex of a friend group. Nan Goldin was showing New York her family album from 1985. No one had wrinkles or age spots or fat. The long blonde and the woman with a pixie made me think of my Mom. Whose hair is slick black. She wore it every way–in the early 80s it was all off and her neck looked beautiful from behind, arching into small shoulders.

The cigarettes. Like nothing, I thought. No decoration so grand, so artsy, so gray, so weightless. Between women’s fingers. I thought of my mom’s hands bringing a cigarette down from her face. Her hands weren’t better then. Cuz she was doing metalsmithing late into the night in the fashion district with all the men, she always said. It wasn’t a woman’s job even though it was jewelry.

***

The guy who kept showing up, slide after slide. Sitting on the toilet, wearing a white cotton shirt. Never smiling.

Oh wait–smiling once. Teeth without calcium. Gray between them, rotting.

But his hair had the texture of my Dad’s. Back in what Aunt Susan calls his “androgynous stage when he looked like Abby.” Brown and golden. I can feel the airiness when I look at the photographs. No one has that hair anymore. Maybe in the 90s. Maybe my Dad was the last of them.

When the needles appear I think how he was too square for this–too disinterested. But with my Mom?

He said once that before they married, when they were still living in a closet with one window that faced a brick wall, her moods would change like they do now. At a bar she flirted with other guys. Small smile and purple eyeshadow and dark–dark beyond any measure– hair. Like a color meant only for her. Especially for her. Because she had a blonde baby.

There’s a photograph I have framed from 2000 of my Mom and me in downtown LA. In the courtyard outside the Dorothy Chandler where there used to be concrete fountains and black plastic lawn chairs. In the background is an expanse of concrete and dark green trees so green they make a verdant haze above our heads. My Mom with bangs and long hair blending into her black suit jacket, matching the glint in her black pearl earring. She’s holding me, both of our noses touching, hers is still straight, sweet, not coked yet. Her eyes are closed, black eyelashes under a charcoal brow and her lips open a little in a smile, reaching to kiss mine.

I am a light mirror of her. My lashes touching below light brown eyebrows below white-blonde bangs kicked up in the air. In a white knit sweater with a single, small pink flower on its side. My beachy hair hangs down and around me at my elbow is my Mom’s hand, her wedding ring hardly visible, and her black sleeve wrapping around my white torso. Our kiss happens after my Dad clicks the button.

***

This is the New York my Mom misses. The one she saw when I called her alone in my room freshman year.

The cabs were a different yellow.

Maybe I think of LA the way she thinks of New York. Probably not. Mine is sunny, defective, driving through Griffith Park alone at night, Lana Del Rey, blue. Hers is green eyeshadow, Joni Mitchell, cocaine, the Diamond Twins (perpetually painting, perpetually depressed Carol and Cathy).

Before the bridge of her nose collapsed and Dad stopped writing.

Bruised women. Dark purple and an eye swimming in blood.

The last man she had sex with before my Dad lives here, I thought. She thinks she still lives here.

Malibu she liked though. Dark wood floors and the scent of yoga by the lap-pool. Mostly because she’s a wealthy woman who draws anxious 6” by 10” pieces in ink. I wonder if she missed paint when she was there.

She learned how to play the bongo. She called me when she ordered it off Amazon. And then later that night, when she’d forgotten we’d already talked and spewed words at me, expecting responses. I told her I got Susan and Bill to watch Poldark.

I said, “That’s good. That’s so good, Ma.”

My heart slipping around inside me, trying not to cry on my aunt’s carpeted stairs outside the TV room.

I saw the bongo at Thanksgiving. Came up to the middle of my calf. Wrapped with a yellow, orange, and black pattern. Dad played it after we washed the dishes. He was really good, keeping up with a Bonobo track from “Black Sands.”  I have yet to see her play it.

When I was fifteen she had a yellow craze. Tiny canvasses filled with blocks of thick, yellow paints. Carol said they looked like color studies. My mom did not appreciate this.

The paintings went on for a year and a half like that–cream yellow, lemon zest, egg, filigree gold. I realized: yellow is the saddest color.

***

No one’s on a phone. Which makes sense, but it means the idea of irl is not just an idea but a surreal imagining.

A photo of a woman in a tulle skirt, hitched up over thighs and slender fingers covering her vagina–hair on each side of her hand.

After I talk to my mom on the phone I masturbate or jog. On Season 1 of The Affair, an old lady in a shop answers Noah Solloway’s inquiry about a yoga class by saying everyone doing yoga or wanting to do yoga should just do what they actually want–sex. I think about that a lot.

I close my eyes and touch myself with my thong still on and I’m a different person in an unrecognizable, usually carpeted, landscape.

My Mom called and told me about her therapy session that Monday. How she discussed the first time her dad saw her work and wasn’t impressed or didn’t compliment it and she felt like she fell right through the wood floor. This was at least thirty years ago. How she can let the past stay there–the present is something new but Janet really understood her today because her Dad didn’t like her paintings when he saw them. A Czechoslovakian immigrant who never finished high-school, owned a hardware store, and married a busty, blue-eyed, black-haired Dolores. He didn’t show support.

It becomes twenty-five minutes in 1985. Like Nan Goldin’s but with oil.

Then she finally asks me a question. How is he? How’s the relationship?

She says the same thing before goodbye every time–even when she’s stoned. She misses me, wishes I was there, thinks of me. I repeat it back, wanting to say more–to say I don’t know what New York is but I know what LA means. I don’t think about Zach now. I draw naked women a lot. But she’s put her cigarette out on the front patio and has opened the French doors and says, “Bye bye.”

***

My Dad started painting after he stopped writing. From 2004 to Obama’s election, he did geometric paintings in acrylic, using blue tape he applied directly to the canvas. Creating sharp edges. Now he does figural work. Usually trios–two droopy, skin and bones women and one man with his dick out and limp and his limbs short.

I’ve only seen three things he’s written (besides my usual rhymey birthday cards). The second piece he actually handed to me. In a magazine that looked like erotica from the 80s. A woman’s face on the cover with horribly formatted red font that said “Secrets from the Heart.” In it a short story he wrote about his big brother, Bill. A suspense-thriller in which Bill, who is good with numbers and a little antisocial (Susan calls him Rainman), figures out who is stealing from his Autobody Jobbers Warehouse by snooping around and ultimately getting shot.

Number three I still haven’t seen but it’s on Netflix and it’s a German movie with a blonde actress who has sensually drooping eyes. I came downstairs one night, senior year of high-school and said, “What’re you watching?”

A game we played with each other. I’d watch in the TV room upstairs and he’d come in around ten and say, “What’re you watching?” and I’d say and he’d sit on the couch and watch for a while.

“Just finished. A movie I wrote. Really wasn’t bad.” I asked lots of excited questions but all I got was what I already knew–he wrote it with Donny, his screen partner who I ran into at Silver Lake Coffee my first summer of college. He and Donny had lived in Manhattan together, mattresses on the floor. They all smoked a lot of pot at Bill’s with my Dad’s middle brother, Tom, and their various, rotating girlfriends.

Now when I call my Dad, he complains of melting oil bars. How the colors are more vibrant than acrylics or gouache but get underneath his fingernails. And he has to let the canvases sit and dry for a while before he puts them in the shower of his studio, along with all the others. Just stacked there, with the cloudy glass door propped open and all his naked women inside, on the white tiled floor.

***

Photographs of just the guys. With guns and cars.

Over winter break I lost the car in a twelve story parking garage. My mom technically lost it too but she doesn’t drive anymore so it was really my fault.

We missed the Senigram’s Chanukah party. I only answered Elianna’s calls to say I’d tell her the story on our movie date but right now I’m in hell with God.

We looked on 4, 5, and 6. I told everyone to go fuck themselves. Yelled out at the LA skyline that I didn’t want to be home, that I would have happily stayed in Manhattan with the guy who should be gay but isn’t. That I would never move back to LA, to a world dominated by blonde cars.

Mom’s emphysema and her total lack of authority made her very tired after fifty-five minutes. I pressed the button below the blue light on 5A and a black lady in a golf cart picked us up minutes later.

I was in shame and self-loathing. She took me out of that place–said she was off at 7:30 and no matter what she was gonna find us our car before then.

I called her God.

We went up to 6B and it wasn’t there. Back down to 5 then back up past 6 and on our way to 7 the ramp got steeper, the cart suddenly stopped, the battery died, we started rolling back into the car behind us. My mom got out of the doorless side and I ran out in back and pushed. My brown suede oxfords dug into the pavement and my purse slapped against the thin bumper. I held the cart as God pressed on the break and people beeped behind us. My breath got heavy. The Camry behind us honked again and a car swerved to go up the wrong side of the ramp, stopped to take a picture and drove off, tires screeching.

I turned around, whipped my hair out of my face and screamed, “Fuck you, you fucking asshole. Get out of your fucking car and help us.”

The fat woman in the passenger side pointed at the handicapped sign hanging above the dashboard.

I said I was sorry.

Another minute passed. All I saw was white plastic and concrete. My favorite word used to be “interdependence,” from when I took AP Human Geography in eleventh grade.

I told God to hold the cart and ran down past the Camry, knocked on a window, yelled at a handsome Asian man who sprinted up the ramp and pushed the cart up to 7 in four and a half seconds.

My mom and I sat in the dead golf cart, laughing. Her lipstick was still on. She held our Nordstrom’s bags during all of it.

When God came to pick us up in a new golf cart, we found the car immediately. We kissed her goodbye.

And then we drove to Farfalla and had our most successful dinner to date. Mom brought up The Jinx and Making a Murderer reminded me of all the details I had forgotten. I explained the blood splatter analysis of two episodes of The Staircase.

I also told her about the new guy. How he seemed a meeting point of Zach’s charisma and Kevin’s sweetness. I told her I think about Zach every day but it is different now. Even on a dark street in the Valley at night, near his house with its red front door, I don’t feel the rawness. Only a dull pang and it fades and I wander back to Manhattan.

When I parked the car in front of the house she said, “Oh my God.”

And I laughed.

***

I felt like I was looking into my parents’ private world. Brought up on screen years later, when it was alright to talk about in color.

Sammy and I walked to the subway and New York felt calmer. It was dark, but not the way LA gets dark with blue-black freeways.

That’s how they were in this place, I thought. Kinda. Closer to anything I could have imagined.

I didn’t call or text them that night because they weren’t really home. Maybe they were somewhere in the city. My mom with a cigarette in her mouth, gloves on her hands, welding. My dad with Donny or Johnny structuring scripts, without a watch, hands smoothing out his jeans.

I live my own secret life. On my quiet journeys on the D or the A to Broadway Lafayette. To crawl into his bed, sweat in his sheets with his hand on my ass, and wake up to look at myself in his mirror.

A couple weeks ago, Susan brought out the family albums–and they were there, looking too sober for a Nan Goldin portrait, leaning against one another on a pink carpeted floor. My mom’s hair grown out to a bob with split bangs curving to reach each other. My dad in a striped shirt and jacket, his hair dry and curly and weightless. Both smiling calmly.