Wednesday, September 30, 2009

pa sonny and some other issues

my grandpa on my mom’s side is named Jerome. actually he's my step-grandpa, as he's my mom's step-dad. but yes, his name's Jerome. he used to be a fireman, and on an unrelated note, is still an asshole. his nickname is “sonny”, or as we kids used to call him before we understood that nicknames sort of imply a generally pleasant rapport with someone (especially compound nicknames): “pa sonny.” I'm pretty sure that was his idea. how you go from “Jerome” to “sonny” is an equation I don't exactly follow, but then again, I've never been good at math. I'm sure the nickname had its origins in his fireman's background. he had a large belly, shaved his legs and slicked his hair back on the sides with some sort of old man pomade. I don’t know why I’m using the past tense since he hasn’t died yet. i like that “yet” part. a reminder that he will die, eventually. anyhoo, he used to be an alcoholic (unfortunate years during my mother’s formative years that I’m sure she recalls with nothing but fondness), but has since made the switch to the pepsi nation. there were cans of pepsi strewn all over the house. full of tobacco spit. I seem to recall him offering us some “chew” every time we visited. pretty sure i've written about this before. and he was married to nina. sonny and nina. she’s also a cunt. she wears a wig. I have a vague recollection of seeing her without her wig, and I’m sure I intended to block it from the long-term memory but, unfortunately, failed. boris karloff comes to mind. or any other image of something cadaverous and terrifying.

nina and sonny always had a garage, wherever they lived, and boxers. the dogs. they had a weird predilection for this particular breed. anyhoo, their garage had a distinct smell of tires (rubber) and dogs. I guess it smelled the way a garage would naturally smell if those two elements were the constants.

I bought a bike 2 days ago. from the century mart. it has a basket. my taint hurts already from two days of exertion. that sounds gross. I don’t care. more to the point (yes, there is one): every time I walk down the hall of my new apartment, where said shiny new bike is located, heading to my bathroom, it smells like pa sonny and nina’s garage. I guess the dog smell comes from the fact that it’s been raining heaps. but mostly that new tire rubber smell. and I don’t recall it with any rancor; it’s actually a neutral reminder that there are still these two people on the planet who, oddly enough, have some relationship with me (no one’s choice in the matter), who I absolutely loathe. and I don’t think it’s funny or horrible, I just think it’s interesting in a “who’d’ve thunk”, head scratching way.

yup, all that back story to segue into the fact that I bought a bike. and that was a happy day. the last time I owned a bike was back home in Columbia, mo. biking from stewart road to the asian affairs center. a fine ride if you were going to, but coming back was all uphill, and usually under the influence of the shakespeare’s bar. during the drunk rides home, it always seemed like the road was getting narrower and the curbs were designed specifically to throw me off my bike when I’d made the bad decision to wear a dress. those grass stains were hard to get out. too bad you can’t just will them away. you know what works far better than will? detergent.

the last time I road a bike was over a year ago on cat ba island during my trip to halong bay in ‘nam. a hot rock climber dude pedaled me around on his bike and then let me ride it alone. I’m 30 years old and I just used “hot” and “dude” in the same sentence. the secret to staying young, ladies. I’m going to take this opportunity to wax nostalgic about that day, even though I already did about a year ago when I wrote about it originally. after the bar and the happy water and the karaoke and the bike and the rats scurrying on the roof of the hotel, went skinny dipping in the bay. and it was on par with the first time I experienced any large body of water (fully clothed, I might add) in Viareggio, italy.

other things. I have made the move to Hangzhou and started working at the ef here. so far, I’m extremely happy with my choice. the decision to leave jiaxing was a good one, I think, and my options ultimately boiled down to three: go to Chongqing with jules and rory, go to shanghai to be a dos, come to Hangzhou with no title and just work on becoming a better teacher. so I chose the latter.

my apartment here is fucking amazing, by virtue of it being mine, even if the hot water in the bathroom doesn’t seem to last for more than 5 minutes. that might be a generous figure, too. there’s just space. and lots of it. a big bedroom, an office, a living room, a dining “nook”, kitchen, storage room, bona fide hallway and bathroom. there’s an elementary school directly behind my apartment (I can see munchkins through the fence). but this is funny because once an hour they play kids’ music or marching band music over the loudspeakers to signify recess or a class change or lunch. there also seems to be a lot of whistling going on. wind sprints, probably.

it is difficult living alone though. the terror of going to sleep in an empty, dark space. or entering my apartment alone after it’s gotten dark. of course I’ve slept in/entered hotels and things since “the incident”, but always with the knowledge that there were people close by me should anything bad happen there in the blackness. in the past week I’ve just found it really hard to turn off the lights, or actually commit to going to sleep. I’ve locked myself in my room on several occasions and placed my bike in the middle of the hallway, in case some intruder should come in, then they’d knock the bike over and I’d at least know they were coming. even if i had no way to escape since the front door’s the only way out. I also leave all the lights on. I couldn’t sleep last night because the sound of the rain hitting the metal bars on the window was, in my mind, a man trying to bend those bars (there for my protection) and get into my room to do something ultimately resulting in my death. I have a lot of dark visions as soon as I start to get tired. this impending doom and gloom. guns. the intruder opens my bedroom door and just shoots me. no struggle, no attempt at an explanation, no robbery, just there to end my life, plain and simple. and of course visions of knives and slit throats (this one usually in slow motion or sped up, but never in real time) and stabbings and being smothered and all manner of horrible ways to be murdered by an intruder in your home. or looking in the mirror. I’m just expecting someone to come up behind me and grab me. and my breath catches and I can feel these phantom hands on me. I don’t know what to do about this. I’m generally happy for the majority of my day, but when I’m not, it’s a feeling i’d never felt before this thing happened. primal fear. and shouldn’t that be gone by now? a good amount of time has passed. when does it go away? I guess it would obviously take more than a week of being alone to do it. so I’ll give it time. but in the process of giving it time and still feeling this terror, what can I do?

sometimes these death visions (that sounds like a graphic novel or something) are tempered by revenge fantasies where there’s the inevitable struggle, but I am the victor. ha ha! I beat the man with the baseball bat I don’t own. or some other weapon created in the heat of the moment by a random furnishing. my computer speakers? surely I could use those to defend myself (read: kill someone) should it come down to it. or he has a knife and I knock it away and then we have a fist fight, where I would obviously, with all my fighting experience, beat the shit out of him. or something even simpler, like someone hears me scream and the police or a neighbor or someone come to my aid. in time.

there’s this feeling any time I enter a dark space by myself, and even at jules and rory’s on those rare occasions when I was the first one home or the only one home, that even if this isn’t the time that an intruder is in my personal space, it is going to happen and I have to be prepared for it. it’s not “if” I should ever experience anything like that again, it’s “when.” which sort of sucks, but I don’t know how to make it stop.

and these aren’t feelings you really get to have a conversation about. particularly with people you’ve just met in a new city. hence the writing it down. maybe it’s not good, but since I don’t know what is good anymore, it’s worth a try.