The Music of What Happens, page 10
I pull out my supplies from the bottom drawer. I haven’t done this since ninth grade, when Mr. Zimmer saw my saguaro tree and used it as an example of what not to do. “Maybe you’re more of an athlete, Morrison,” he said, and I smiled as everyone laughed.
It’s a black, zipped container with about fifty pencils in various colors and various textures, from hard to soft, and a kneaded eraser that’s good not just for blotting out mistakes, but also pulling apart. I used to have a nervous habit of doing that, like I couldn’t go two seconds without rolling a ball of gray eraser around in my fingers and then pulling it apart and stuffing it back together.
I open my old notebook and flip through the pages. Sure enough, the last page is the saguaro tree. It looks pretty good to me, with about six arms of varying height, all with that prickly texture of the one in our front yard. The shade of green looks just right. I don’t know what Mr. Zimmer saw; maybe he was just trying to be funny. But yeah, it definitely stopped me from drawing. I dropped the class, even. But right now, I don’t care.
I look at the page and I see a pit, like one someone might dig. Then I imagine it from different angles. Am I at a side view? I find myself scrunching and pulling at the kneaded eraser as I think. I see a guy tangled in tree roots underground.
I settle into a side view. I take a small piece of charcoal and rub it across the page, creating a place for Jordan’s loneliness to be. I don’t know what’s above and below the ground; I just need to get rid of the blank paper. I remember that from when I used to draw all the time. It was like, getting rid of the blankness gave me permission to get started.
I rough out the side of Jordan’s face. He’s underground, confined. He’s partially digging, and partially pushing against the surface. Suddenly he has a hand clawing at the surface, his thumb on the outside, which means his arm is tucked at his side. I lose my breath seeing the outline of that skinny arm, confined. Then I add his left arm, pushing up at the surface. I create the sinews in his clawing right arm, the dirt falling on his face as he tries desperately to remove the earth.
I want the edge of his face to show, just his jawline, as if he’s turned away, avoiding the falling dirt. It’s all charcoal still, sketched on the page, erasable, which is good because so far it sucks.
A hack. I’m a hack. I have no idea how to —
I shut my brain off and trace some gnarly roots that run down into the ground, like from a tree above. The roots entwine his wrists like handcuffs, and again, I’m finding it hard to breathe, staring at this thing I’m creating.
I smear some charcoal along the roots to create a shadow quickly.
No. His body should be under the roots, under the tree.
I deepen his hands, the claw feature. Then I go into the claw hand with the eraser as it’s getting lost in there. And what’s going on above the earth? This is the hard part. Seeing what isn’t there.
I like the shovel in the poem, but in this picture I see a person above there, crouching down in the dirt, just as dirty, just as invested in the scene as Jordan.
Is it me? Am I above the ground, digging down?
I turn the page sideways and charcoal sketch a boy’s face staring down, right against the ground. His hair falls forward in the face.
Shit. The damn paper’s too small.
Too damn bad. I continue.
But first I look at what I have and my heart jumps. Two boys staring at each other but unable to see, the ground separating them. It’s intense, like very.
I sketch the boy on top’s hand against the dirt. His palm is inches from the other boy’s claw.
Damn. I am the boy on top. And I’m as close to the ground as I can be. And hopeless to help, which sucks the worst. I want to help, but I can’t. I’m waiting for Jordan to dig himself out.
I turn my attention back to Jordan’s face. It’s not what I intend. Jordan looks like Jordan but not like Jordan at all, and there’s no way to make him more Jordan. There’s no space for all that Jordan-ness to be added.
I add a knee to my aboveground boy, who doesn’t look like me but I am definitely him. The first knee I sketch with charcoal is too high, so I lower and shadow it, and then I give my character strong eyebrows and I see for a second the real me crouching there on the ground, and it’s scary.
Damn. Betts and Zay-Rod would not get this at all. I would never show them this.
I sharpen a dark black pencil, its shavings twirling out like a little mushroom head.
I place a piece of white paper below my right forearm and lean in to focus on the eye. I want a very specific emotion there, like, I’m not sure what but something. It could be panicked, but it’s almost like the person on the top knows more than the person on the bottom.
Like he’s been there before, underground.
I use white pencil to pop the top guy’s eye out a bit more.
Man. I didn’t know so much about this drawing would be the guy on top. I thought it was going to be a shovel but the shovel didn’t want to be there.
I turn the page upward so I can check the perspective. It looks about right. Sometimes when you draw flat, you can’t see how things will look right-side up.
The upper character has dirt under his nails that I create with more black pencil, and sweat on his face, which I don’t want to be perfect drops of dew but more just like black lines that add to the movement of the piece.
I add some white smudges to make him more three-dimensional.
Hmm. The boy has no clothes. No clothing line. Maybe shorts? I don’t know yet.
I stand up and move over to my bed. Sometimes I need to get away so I don’t lose perspective. When I come back, what I see is a mess that might turn into something.
I focus in on the tree. Maybe it’s an avoidance so I don’t have to deal with Jordan’s face yet. I switch to a different pencil to give the tree its own texture, different from the rest.
I realize I’m drawing a tree again and I smile, thinking about Mr. Zimmer’s comment. Well, maybe I am a jock. Maybe I can’t do this. But I like it, you know? I like trying.
I can’t find the guy on the bottom. I smear some color together, and focus in on the outline, and suddenly it’s like, There you are. He shows up and what’s so funny is the guy on the bottom is darker than the guy on top, which is opposite. But somehow it just works. I strengthen the jawline with more charcoal.
I wonder if Jordan would let me draw him. This isn’t him even if it stands in for him. It would help me get beyond skin texture and eye color. Man, I need to ask him. I wonder what he would say if I asked?
I sketch in his top eye. I won’t know the emotion for sure until the eye comes through. Then I’ll know if it’s right or not.
I flare his nostril more to make him more panicky.
I erase his ear. I do not like what happened there at all.
There’s a knock on my door and I respond with a fevered “What?” as if I’m jerking off.
“Never mind,” my mom says, and I hear the smirk in her voice. She thinks she’s caught me in the act.
“I’ll be right out,” I say, trying to sound more normal and less jerk-off-y. Of course that just makes me sound more guilty. Oh well.
Damn. Jordan looks a little like a fetus. That’s not great.
I use white pencil to show more of his eye, to invoke that sense of panic.
There’s not the right terror in Jordan’s face.
To fix the face, I fill in the blank space next to it because there’s no light down there. I look at it. It looks a little more right that way. I take the black pencil and re-sketch an ear. Then I look at what I have again.
The boy on bottom looks like he’s given up. Like he’s sort of clawing, expressionless. And I have this crazy, crazy thought:
Am I actually the boy on the bottom? Am I digging up and out of oxygen? Is Jordan digging down to save me?
On Monday, we try the food truck area on the north side of the Arizona State University campus. It’s a lunchtime gig, so suddenly we need to do something other than breakfast grilled cheese and cloud eggs.
We meet at my place at eight, which gives us three hours to shop, prep, arrive, and open. Not as much time as you might think. The sun is already fully up, which is what happens here in the summer because Arizona doesn’t do Daylight Savings Time. Because it’s so hot, we wind up on Pacific Standard Time in the summer and Mountain Standard Time in the winter.
“What about chicken and waffles?” I ask. We’re sitting in the living room.
Max winces. “I don’t know, dude. The heat from the fryer? That could get intense. Plus cleaning it.”
I nod. He’s right. “I keep going to chicken. But we had all that boring chicken stuff before and it didn’t sell. On the plus side, Coq Au Vinny would actually make sense if we did chicken.”
Max pulls out his phone and goes to YouTube, our trusty source for stealing good food truck ideas. He surfs around and finally motions me over.
“How about this?” He plays me one of those videos where the cooking is done in fast motion and what normally takes an hour plays in about a minute. I see lemon and sriracha, and I admit it makes me salivate. I like spicy and citrusy. A lot.
“Well we already have a lot of lemons,” I say.
“Exactly. Plus basically what we want to do is marinade chicken, grill it, and sauce it. Let’s come up with two or three combos and just do it.”
We decide on lemon-sriracha, mango-cayenne, and habanero-peach. I’ve never had any of them, and I tell Max that. He smiles.
“Me neither.”
“Well what could possibly go wrong?” I say, and then, because I see a slight bit of hurt register on his face, I say, “I trust you. Completely. If anyone can do this first time out, it’s you.”
He nods and his eyebrows relax.
We go to Safeway to get our ingredients. It’s awesome because we can afford it. When I told Mom how much we made Saturday and Sunday, she looked so proud and grateful, and she hugged me tight, which was great. And then she teared up again, and she started in about what a success I’ve become, and I don’t know. It was like I was receiving a lifetime achievement award and she was talking to an imaginary audience. It was … odd, and it made me all fidgety.
Then we go to Food City because they sell prickly pear fruit. I was on board to continue with the red food coloring, but Max said sooner or later someone would figure it out. I pick up ten with the green skin for four bucks. The fine folks at Food City have removed the thorns, and they look like a cross between a pear and a melon — pear-shaped and colored, but with hard melon skin. As we stand in line, I feel a bit like I’m in Mexico; I’m the only white person here.
“Mucho Latinx,” I say, and Max looks at me and says, “What?”
I repeat it, and he says, “Whatever the hell PC shit that is, is just — grammatically wrong, for one thing. If you mean there are lots of Latino people, you’d say, ‘Muchos Latinos.’ If you mean it’s very Latino, you’d say, ‘Muy Latino.’ As for the Latinx thing? I have never met any Mexican person who has ever said that, as far as I know.”
My face turns red. “Oh, okay,” I say, glancing around me to see if anyone else heard my stupidity. “Sorry. Microaggression.”
He rolls his eyes.
I say, “What?”
“I just — I’m not down with that. Microaggressions and shit. You didn’t know the right grammar, and the Latinx thing is new and some people use it, but not me. Who cares? People say shit and some of it is wrong and some of it is racist and it’s like, whatever. You can focus there, or you can live your life. IMO.”
I nod, even though I don’t really know if I agree with the last part of what he said. I mean, with friends is one thing, but I’d be horrified if in school some jock kid came up to me and was like, So what do gay people think about … ? I’d totally not be okay with that. Even if I didn’t say anything, which I probably wouldn’t, Kayla, Pam, and I would dissect that microaggression for days.
“Yeah, sure,” I say, and we unload our prickly pears on the conveyor belt. “Sorry.”
He stops and looks at me. “Are you actually apologizing for apologizing for a microaggression?”
“Sorry,” I say again, and he grins.
We arrive in this big parking lot where four food trucks — one grilled cheese, one Vietnamese, one burrito, and one hamburger — are already setting up. We take the far end and Max starts working on his marinades, which I guess is a lot of guesswork about proportions of heat to sweet. I get to work on my frozen lemonade. This time I start by cutting up the prickly pear. The first one I just about eviscerate, unaware of what I’m doing. But then I watch a YouTube video and find that if I cut just so, it comes out looking like a cucumber.
I take a taste of the fruit. It’s like an earthy watermelon, with hard seeds in it. I pull the seeds out of my mouth and wince. It does not taste very much like red food coloring at all, and I worry that it’s not exactly going to augment our world-famous frozen drink.
But when I blend some up with ice, lemon juice, and sugar, it tastes totally refreshing and delicious. I hand Max my cup, he takes a sip, and nods affirmatively.
“Serious business, dude. Nice.”
“Thanks, man,” I say, and I feel like I’m being a different person and I don’t entirely know what’s happening to me. Part of me is like, Bitch, please. When’s the last time you called someone “man”? Never. That’s when. Part of me likes it, even if I can’t imagine Max or any other “dude” ever hanging out in my bordello bedroom.
When Max has his chicken breasts marinated and ready for the grill and his sauces ready for slathering, and when I have my Vitamix ready for action, we turn to each other and smile.
“Ready?” I ask. It’s already so intensely hot in the truck that I cannot imagine how I’m going to withstand four hours of this. And yet I’m ready to try.
“Oh,” he says. “One sec.”
He goes over to his backpack in the back of the truck, fishes around in it, and takes out a notebook. He brings it over to me.
“So last night. I — you know how you showed me that poem?”
“Yeah,” I say, and I look away. My pulse quickens.
“Right. Well, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. And you don’t know this but I used to draw? So. Um. I drew something.”
“Oh,” I say, and my whole body goes numb. Of all the things he could have just said to me, this is perhaps the most surprising. Unless he had said, “At nighttime, I turn into a superhero and save the Phoenix suburbs from dragons,” his words could not be more unforeseen. And even that, in some ways, would have been less shocking.
His hand shakes as he turns the pages, and I am amazed that he’s actually nervous. Why? What in the world would make Max nervous? He has the whole world figured out.
“Here,” he says.
The black-and-white drawing, in charcoal and pencil, is of a boy underground. There’s a tree and roots heading down and the roots wrap around him, and he has his hands clawed like he’s trying to dig up. My chest buzzes and my jaw goes numb. It’s beautiful. On top of the earth, another boy lies, looking down, and what’s amazing is that the boys are basically lying on each other, with only the thin earth between them.
No. Nothing in the world has ever, ever been more surprising than this. I am lost for words. Just looking at Max’s drawing, my whole body goes erect. My eyes, my hair, my nipples, my cock, my toes.
“Oh,” I say, adjusting my stance. “Cool.”
He pulls the drawing slightly away, like it’s a living thing and it is offended by something I’ve said. What I want to do is cry, actually, but I cannot cry, because that’s not what a boy does when Superhero Max shows them a drawing. They say, “That’s good,” I guess, and not much else, because saying more would be the scariest, most out-there feeling possible, and I don’t know if I can do it.
“No,” I say, breathing into the deep part of my chest that is twisting and trying to make sure my erect soul does not overstep. “I mean, it’s really great, Max. I — I love it.”
“Oh,” he says, no expression on his face. “Oh. Okay.”
“Yeah.”
We don’t say anything more. I can’t breathe. I don’t know what he’s thinking. I truly, utterly have no idea and couldn’t possibly guess. Relief? Why would he care what I think, anyway? That’s the biggest mystery of all.
“You’re a really talented artist. How can you be talented at so many things?”
“Nah,” he says, but his face reddens slightly, and I recognize that actually he does care what I think. Which is crazy with a capital “C.”
I am so relieved when he puts the drawing away, because I feel as though I will lose consciousness if I stare at it any longer, if these foreign feelings course through my brain and body for even one second more.
My hand shakes as I write up our menu. Then we open the awning, and even though it’s summer, immediately all the trucks have long lines. Our lemon-sriracha chicken is quickly our biggest seller, and we do a brisk frozen lemonade business too.
“Where’s your local source for lemons?” a brash, red-haired woman in a sunflower dress asks. She looks graduate-school age. She’s chewing her first bite of lemon-sriracha chicken and she holds her lemonade in her left hand.
I swallow. “I have to protect our sources,” I say, a bit jittery.
She screws up her face at me. “It’s lemonade. Not journalism,” she says, and once she’s gone, I glance back at Max and lower my voice.
“Do lemons grow in the summer here?” I whisper back to him.
He shrugs. “I think of all citrus as winter, early spring, maybe?”
“This locally sourced thing is — what do they call it — problematic?”
“Maybe everything but the lemons are locally sourced?”
I turn back to our line and smile. “What can I get you?” I ask a very hippy-dippy-looking older guy in gray sandals and a faded orange tank top.
“Where do you get your chicken?” he asks.
I make sure not to move my eyes from his. Good liars are able to hold eye contact while fibbing. I am able to do it, which may mean that I am a bad person. I’m not sure.
