Wide Eyed (2 page)

“No, except that everyone there’s going to die,” said Heidi.

“Maybe all their fears combine and rub off on you,” Annie said.

That night I dreamt I was Sara Carter. I was dressed in raggedy clothes and holey leather shoes. The next day I tried to write a song about Echo Park, about how when I’m about to die I hope people will bring me back and bury me … but not under an old willow tree. Where then? In Echo Park Lake, under the lotus flowers littered with McDonald’s wrappers and devoured cobs of corn? Further down Alvarado Street in MacArthur Park, where so many dead bodies are dredged out of the lake? Would I be buried under the aptly named House of Spirits?
None of these places are worthy of my corpse,
I thought. Just as in the old ballads, I want to be buried by the seashore or under some significant tree.

We got evicted from the Ranch House when the bank bought it. Shortly before we got kicked out, our dog died, which was the first sign of things winding down. Then Myrna, our neighbor, declared bankruptcy and lost her house. The third sign was when our friend Melissa moved out of her house up the street because she kept hearing machine gun noises on the ground floor. She found out that her house had been a gangster hideout during the bootlegging era—lots of people died in it. My mom was hospitalized for hearing voices. A gardener chopped down our avocado tree.

I wanted to be buried under that tree, with the cremated Old Lady. It’s the only place that comes to mind when I think of drafting a will. I’d like to be charred in that very incinerator, but I don’t think the guy who lives there now would allow it. I’ve driven by and seen him on several occasions watering his lawn where our corn used to be.

The Carter Sisters are like ghosts, singing about the space between heaven and hell.
Do not disturb / My waking dream / The splendor of / That winding stream.
That land doesn’t seem to include Los Angeles, or anywhere west of the Mississippi. I worry that I come from a place with so few legends, or, to be more accurate, legends that are speculative. Big deal—old ladies, gangsters, tequila, banks taking houses away from people, people getting killed in front of donut shops. There’s no real way to know the other people who lived in these rented houses, apart from rummaging through what they left in basements then concocting harebrained ghost stories about them.

On the nights I lie awake wondering where to be buried, I sometimes recall staring up at the Ranch House’s stuccoed ceiling—the plaster sparkled with glitter. I’d wake up in the middle of the night imagining it to be the night sky. A burning candle made it twinkle even more. It was disco and country at the same time—glam-rural—a combo that makes me realize the irony of a band called Pavement singing about Range Life. I know I’ll be an old lady ghost because I lie in bed feeling young and old at the same time. Young in experience, but old because I wish to be part of some tradition. I crave a past but don’t want to live in it. Eras run into one ageless mess. Ghosts live in different times simultaneously. They yearn for what’s lost. I haven’t even lost anything but I still find myself yearning for it. Not knowing where you come from is dumber than never wanting to leave.

HUMMINGBIRD MOONSHINE

The Summer of Ailments sucked. Nerve pain extended from my ass down the length of my left leg. I walked heavily on my right leg, so that my right foot developed calluses. I bought a specially padded pair of sneakers but my feet got hot and unbearably smelly, and I had to throw them out. Hangnails plagued me. A sunburn turned into a skin cancer, and the doctor left laser scars on my chest when he removed it. My eyes were tired from reading too much. I had a broken rib from slipping on the edge of a pool at a barbecue. At the dog park, an Akita bit me—I got stitches that ran from the tip of my forefinger to the base of my thumb. The stitch-line got sunburned, which made it puffy with infection.

Friends told me that simultaneous injuries meant good luck because I’d used up all my bad luck at once.
How much worse can it get?
I wondered.
Am I cursed? Who would have cursed me?

I made a trip downtown to the Million Dollar Pharmacia, a botanica full of folk curatives, paraphernalia for casting spells, incense, candles, charms, and portraits of the saints. I’d been there many times before to buy votive candles with Buena Suerte prayers printed on them.
Fast Money Blessing, Law—Stay Away
!, and
The Omnipresence of God
were the most recent candles I’d burned. I also stocked up on La Chuparrosa stuff, anything with a hummingbird on it. “Song of the Chuparrosa” came printed on a box of hummingbird soap, here translated from Spanish:

Oh divine hummingbird!

You who sucks the nectar of the flowers!

You who gives life to women in love!

I rely on you—I am a sinner.

Your powerful fluids protect me and provide me

With the faculties to control myself as well as to experience enjoyment.

I keep you in my saint’s locket so I may walk with you,

My beautiful hummingbird.

Recite this prayer on Thursdays and Sundays,

with a lit candle, while imagining her.

After my boyfriend Matt saved a hummingbird’s life, I started collecting La Chuparrosa and reading scientific books like
Hummingbirds
by Crawford H. Greenewalt. The hummingbird flew into Matt’s loft then exhausted itself looking for a way out. When it fell to the floor, he picked it up and sprinkled a drop of water on the back of its neck, since he’d heard that could revive tired hummingbirds. As the bird came to in the palm of his hand, he took it outside and watched it fly away.

The pharmacy was especially busy, but the man behind the counter recognized me and asked what I needed. He spoke English, which helped because my Spanish was limited.

“I don’t know what I need, but I think I’ve been cursed,” I told him. “I’ve had bad luck this summer.”

“What kind of bad luck?” he asked.

“Physical, mostly. Pains all over. Bruises, sores, cuts. Do you think someone hates me? I try to be nice—”

“Perhaps someone is jealous of you,” he interrupted. “You have something someone else wants, and they’re bitter about it. Maybe a man.”

“A man is jealous of me?”

“No, another woman,” he said, leaning over the glass counter. “She has given you the Mal Ojo.”

The pharmacist walked me around the store, filling my basket with oddities such as a blue candle shaped like a penis, perfume whose bottle bore a picture of a hand, and a charm baggie containing a red ribbon, a doll’s eye, a fake lock of hair, and a tiny gold horseshoe. Finally, he gave me a talisman from behind the counter—a giant brown seed tied with red cord. “Ojo de venado,” he said. “Wear this around your neck at all times.”

Matt slept over after I showed him all the knickknacks I’d been given to protect myself from Mal Ojo. The deer’s eye necklace was gaudy but seemed more prescribed, and therefore more likely to help me than the hummingbird prayers, incense, books, and videos lying around. I burned the penis candle on the nightstand as we fell asleep, which I think worried him a little.

The following morning he asked, “How’d you sleep last night?”

“I dreamed I was sledding in the snow with hordes of baby penguins. They were so cute!”

“You’re cute,” he said.

Over coffee, I pulled a penguin book off the bookshelf. I read about the fossil remains of a five-foot penguin that weighed 250 pounds, and envisioned a penguin larger than myself. The chapter entitled “The Emperor’s Domestic Life” documented a battle between two female emperor penguins who were hot for the same male. I imagined slapping some girl with my black, rubbery flipper.
I’d do it,
I mumbled.
I’d knock her over if I had to.

“You’d do what?” Matt asked, as he sat down next to me on the couch.

“I’d slap any girl who tried to steal you, just like this penguin is doing here.” I showed him the picture.

He smiled and pointed to the bottom of the page, past the caption that noted how the
male ducks out of the way while the females glare at each other over his head.
There were two penguins—one tall, one short— touching bellies. The caption read:
The victorious female stands chest to chest with the hard-won prize and warbles the penguin love song.

“There’s us, after you knocked her out,” he said. “They’re kissing,” I said fondly, taking another gulp of coffee from my mug. “That is so insanely cute.” It was then I realized I’d called penguins cute twice already that morning.

After the cuteness of the penguins waned, hummingbirds were still on my mind, several of them in fact. My head was like a plastic raspberry-shaped nectar container; birds were poking their beaks at me from all directions, chipping away my skull to get the sweet gooey brain matter. I contemplated their mini machinery. I recalled that the
Calliphox amethystina,
one of the fastest, can beat its wings about eighty times per second! Hummingbirds are also the only birds that have a “reverse gear,” which is why they can fly backwards.
They’re like small power tools
, I thought.

After dinner that evening, we peeled the clothes off each other. But as we were getting into bed Matt said, “Take that weird seed necklace off.”

I laid it next to the half-burned penis candle. As we were having sex, I pulled a muscle in my back.

“These injuries have to stop,” I said, as he rubbed Tiger Balm on my shoulder blade. “There’s one more cure I haven’t tried yet.”

“What’s that?” he asked.

“First, you have to hold an egg over me. Then we hide the egg under the bed for a few days. If the egg has a spot when we crack it open, that proves the Evil Eye’s been absorbed into the egg.”

The egg failed. I spent the next couple of days mentally running down the list of every female I’d interacted with in the past several years, but I couldn’t remember pissing any of them off. My back was jacked. It was the climax of my pain, summer’s low point. No female would have wished this—it was like delivering a baby nonstop, but from my spine like some alien birth. I thought of the meat counter in the grocery store and wondered if the times I looked at the fish too long might have enraged some ladies. I spent most of the season either inside the house with my boyfriend or outside on the porch where my rocking chair sat beneath the line of feeders I’d hung for hummingbirds.

Then I thought of Adele. She wouldn’t have cursed me, though—she introduced me to my favorite beers, Humboldt Brewery’s Nectar Ales series. Each ale depicts a green hummingbird on the label that sucks differently colored penstemon blooms. Red Nectar has red flowers, Gold Nectar has yellow flowers, Hemp Ale has pink flowers, and the Pale Ale has blue flowers. On each label there’s a sunset behind the bird. One afternoon when we both lived up in the Redwoods she brought me a six-pack of Red Nectar, and told me how she skinny-dipped in the Eel River before she drank it because there was a river winding through the forest in the background on the label. She said the label was magic in an instructional, maplike sort of way—that you were supposed to interact with the environment according to what was on the label. So we went down to the river, found some flowers, and drank the beer at sunset. Hummingbirds buzzed around until it grew darker so bats could take over. At twilight, it was hard to distinguish bats from birds, but we noticed their flight patterns—the bats were clumsy and the hummingbirds darted around like geniuses.

So that’s why I have hummingbird feeders on my porch. If I’m drinking a bottle of Nectar, I can watch them sip sweet juice along with me. I feel like a hummingbird when I drink that beer. It’s not that I feel smarter, but rather sharp, pleasant, and relaxed. When I sit on the porch watching birds feast, I don’t care about anything else.

A few mornings later, while Matt was taking a shower, I walked out onto the porch to inspect the plants and saw that all of the hummingbird feeders were empty. Six drained feeders were swinging from the porch beam. Usually, I noticed when they were low and refilled them with my specially sweet hummingbird nectar—three parts sugar, one part water—so the birds wouldn’t go elsewhere to get juiced up. I’d had whole families raised on my feeders.

Two aggressive birds had been feuding over my feeders since spring—a male Rufous and a female Anna’s—but this morning they were battling between two trees that framed the yard. As I stood there, their beaks grazed my head, and the sound of them whizzing by was scarier than bumblebees buzzing. Ducking to avoid being hit, I watched the birds fight, not making the J-flight patterns of a mating pair but flying directly at each other at top speed. I snatched the feeders off their nails and went inside to make the mixture.

Full feeders replaced, beer in hand, I sat in my rocker to wait for stoked chuparrosas to arrive. The bird on my beer label was the ideal happy bird. I wanted my birds to have that same passion for suckling juice. Adele came to mind and I remembered when she told me about skinny-dipping. She sat in this relaxed way, and I could see her lacy blue bra because her blouse was hanging open. Maybe she was putting the moves on me but I didn’t react because I had a boyfriend. She was cute too—I always thought so. I don’t think I can be friends with a woman if I’m not attracted to her in some way.

The female Anna’s came first, her red-green feathers reflecting in the feeder’s glass. She sipped on the red bubble, then moved to the red strawberry, drinking for minutes straight. Then I swear she looked down and gave me a dirty look. She also twitched her beak like a person would flip her hair or curl her upper lip in disgust, Billy Idol–style. I’d heard that male Rufouses were the meanest, but this Anna’s was fierce. She looked drunk, as if my feeders had finally provided her with the several shots of bird alcohol she’d wanted during withdrawals. I felt bad that I’d neglected to give the birds fresh juice for a few days; it never occurred to me that they’d develop a physical dependency on my high-octane hummingbird moonshine.

“I think I know who gave me the Mal Ojo!” I yelled inside the house.