No Cartwheels

"No cartwheels."

The heat rises off the cement. No bikes coming my way. Backpack well-zipped.
GO FOR IT.
I go for it.

Then it is over. I know that it has happened, but I can't remember exactly what it felt like to have my legs in the air, my weight in my hands. So I cartwheel again.

"No cartwheels."

I walk up the steps by Cubberley Auditorium, and then over to Moonbeam's Cafe. I am hungry.

TRY THE LEFT SIDE.
No.
Alright.
I try the left side.

My friend Tess is sitting by Moonbeam's with a boy. She giggles, like it is slightly ridiculous but, actually, slightly normal. So, why? she asks. I mumble about sitting in class all day.

------------------------------------------

"No cartwheels. It's very charming, but it's a health hazard," said Marv, my boss at KFUN.

KFUN is a self-proclaimed "public media" station with "content that makes people think, feel and explore new ideas."

"Don't let it consume you," he warns me about work, "Because it will."

The ceilings are high and the tall walls are gray. There are long beautiful hallways with freshly vacuumed carpet just waiting to be cartwheeled.

When I met Marv here for an interview, we talked about filmmaking and writing. An obsolete website tells me that ten years ago he made experimental films about "the disintegration of the family." He said, "I'm SO glad to meet you...I know I've said that about ten times. But really, SO good to meet you. I have a feeling you're going to keep me on my toes!"

My first day, Marv took me out to lunch. We saw his boss at the restaurant, but when we passed his table, it was as if they didn't know each other. When we got back, Marv took me with him to four meetings. I swiveled in the chair. I bit the sides of my fingernails, chewed the inside of my lip. They dragged. But if Marv, the creative no bull-shitter, could do this, I could sit through this too. I was his sidekick. His former intern, now "assistant", Manual, left him notes addressed to "Margo." I told myself: I aspire to be on a "Margo" basis with Marv.

Finally, at 6 o'clock, Marv faced me, planted both his hands on my shoulders, and said, "Well, you can go to my next meeting with me, or you can feel free to go."

"I, think, I'm baked?" I said.
Marv laughed and patted me on the back, and as I meandered around the dimly lit cubicles to make my exit, I overheard him chuckle to his colleague, "She's so cute. I just love her!"

On my second day at work, Marv sat nested in his cubicle, among a grid of plastic gray panels. He stared at the glow of the computer screen batting emails from writers, public relations managers, and editing his monthly documentaries about local art galleries.

When he would jolt up from his cubicle for his lunch break, he'd jangle his arms like an 80s break dancer. As he walked down the hallway, his arms swung like they were getting shocked with electric voltages. When we went to art galleries or on shoots to interview artists, Marv would swoop his arms in a vortex around his head and milk cows in the air in front of him as he instructed artists and curators.

"You're a dancer!" I blurted with excitement to Marv. I had realized it with a tinge of envy.



Marv didn't seem to think much of my observation.

Marv encouraged me to pitch my own project. I came in with an idea: "We cover a lot of galleries...Why don't we do a feature that focuses on just ONE piece of art?"

"Go do it!" Marv said.

Marv handed Jay, the other intern, movies to take home and review, and he got all 6 of his reviews published.

Draft after draft after draft after draft, I worked on my film about the ONE piece of art. I poked my head over to Marv's cubicle and after each draft he would give me his notes. I eventually got two 2 minute films published.

Now, it is almost the end of the summer and the end of the internship. We come to a room and he closes the door. Marv sits down across from me. He asks me if there is anything he can do better. I get 10 seconds to think about this, shirk, shrug and gurgle, before he continues:

"You need to communicate with me. When I hired you, I was really excited about you. When you get older, you fit into narrower structures," he motioned his hands together like a river getting squeezed in between the land. "But - I think I gave you too much freedom."

Then he tilts his head toward me. "You know, I think you are actually a free-er spirit than I am."

I look around the stark room. White plaster walls. Thoroughly sucked clean vacuumed carpets. My red cushioned chair. Marv's blue cushioned chair.

I want to kneel down at his feet and beg and beg and beg, until he will finally agree that my spirit is not free. If I had wings, I wouldn't have to do cartwheels.

"Everything I tell you to do, you have done. But this," he wags his finger between us, "Needs some work. You have to focus. You have to stay grounded," he says. And that reminds him-

"Oh. That reminds me. No cartwheels. It's a health hazard. You could kick a wall or something. We can't be liable."

I nod. Of course, of course. I shake my head. I slap my forehead. Of course!!!!!

--------------------------------------------------

It's months later, internship over, and I'm back at school. I email Marv to ask if he'll write me a rec letter. No response. Eventually I call him. He says sure. I stay up until 4am every night scouring the internet for possible jobs or publications to apply for. While most girls my age are having sex, I am up late revving myself up with email after email about how passionate I am and how much I want to contribute - but with no responses, no gratification, no release...

---------------------------------------------------

Now it's 3 days after the phone call with Marv.

After chatting with Tess, I go back into the buildings for class. Then I go to the computer clusters to check my email:

Hi M:

I just had a discussion with HR regarding this letter. Unfortunately, I am
unable to produce a letter of recommendation for you at this time.

Sorry about that. I wish you the best of luck in all your future endeavors.

Yours,
Marv

I walk up concrete steps as I dial his phone number.

"Hi Marv."

"Hi, how are you?"

"I'm good. I just... want to understand what happened?" I grip the steel rail.

"I went to HR and they said that would not be a letter of recommendation worth sending."

"Oh," I say.

I ask Marv to explain as much as he can. Lay it on me. I stagger down to a random chair under the arch of a branch, in front of the Art Building.

"You are great, ambitious, and have so much initiative," Marv replies. "But," he says, "I just would have to qualify it, and say that she needs more structure. And on some of the more mundane tasks, you didn't do very well." I am hungry. The 4am libido of emailing internships wears on me. Tears start to slip out of the crevices of my tear ducts.

"Just one second," I say to Marv. I hold the phone away from my face to take a few gasps.

"I don't want to hurt your feelings," Marv says.

"My feelings aren't hurt," I say, with all the maturity I can muster. Or at least I don't realize they are. He's right. I don't have a right to be hurt by constructive criticism. "I'm just emotional right now, because I want to improve so badly." My voice starts to crack.

"This is a learning experience for you," Marv says. "I hope you become wildly successful."

"Yeah."

I tell Marv that I've already put his name and phone number on some of my applications, so if they call him, could he please just tell them he's busy and can't talk?

"I won't say anything bad on the phone," he says. "I just can't write a letter."

"Thanks Marv."

I unplug the phone to my ear. I feel too soggy to do a cartwheel right now. My chest feels too heavy.

But as the days go on, the heaviness in my chest lightens, although some of it evaporates into sharp shards that get caught in my head.

I am at Millbrae waiting for the train to let go of my week with a Friday night in the city. I sling my purse tightly over my shoulder. I barrel myself down.

There I am, for that instant, with all of myself in my hands.

Letters to a Young Poet

I turn the silver grooved handle all the way, because I have no patience. I have no patience, even though it will be scorching hot too soon. As I step into the bath, a silk sash pours down the back of my skull, and it opens up a thought of you, and how you were like a little baby, trepid in the hot water. We had to turn it down to tepid. You with your tight tan boyish body, even though you have those eyes like chocolate smeared in circles over a bright pistachio house. There are chocolate cracks where the pistachio shows through, only in a couple of spots worn down by the dew.

Very soon the water is scorching my ankles, and so strong that I am about to keel over and vomit. I quickly crank the silver grooves on the right handle and shut off the hot left handle, so a thick stream of chill comes gushing out the tap and eddies around my feet, a swirl of hot and cold, like oil and vinegar.



I chuckle to myself about the whole about to vomit thing. I’m not going to vomit, but then I hear myself say “I can’t believe… I can’t believe…” That’s what I thought to myself less than a month ago, when all I could do was cup my forehead in my hands “I can’t believe… I can’t believe…” there I was in Foreign Cinema, the princess brought by Rainer Maria Rilke to his fancy, glamorous restaurant. I was so hungry but first we slung our elbows over the cocktail bar, and the bartender complimented me on my order as if I’d known that was her favorite. But she knew you, and you were her favorite. You took me over to the oyster bar where the boy smiled in his bandana, and you told me that you used to be there shucking oysters in your bandana, back when your hair was a dark fat mop and you had a beard. Before you were gone. The ceilings were high and the lights flickered low as we ate melted cheese and fish and your risotto, all of these dishes you used to cook, before you quit, before your 3 month trip to India. I snagged sips of your whiskey. Until we were waiting for dessert and all of a sudden my stomach tore like raging waters inside me. I slung over to your side of the table, holding my stomach in my hands. But then I slipped over to the restroom, where I sat caged into the black stalls and it became paralyzingly clear that I could not move. All I could do was sit there with my hands like crutches for my head. “I can’t believe… I can’t believe-” I thought dumbly to myself, “that this is where and when I’m having my frat boy moment.”

I was never into alcohol. I was always too good for alcohol. I was almost too good for you.

When I get into the bath and unfurl my body down into the soapy waters, I can’t imagine how you were there too. This thought comes to me at night sometimes, when I spill myself out into bed. Were you actually in the bed with me? Even the last tossed night, when I told you I was racked with bitterness and anger, and you mumbled sleepily that bitterness and anger isn’t me. It seems that since you’ve gone, this house, has inflated while the space inside has been wrung out. The furniture has swollen, and I don’t see how you fit into this space. Perhaps you’re larger than life – in my mind. And my body fills the entire tub. Where did you go? How did this air, above the tile and below the whir of the fan, contain your body?



As I lay in the water, I realize that the light is bright. Damn light. I strip my body out from the current of the bowl. My torso has already been suctioned down into the spores of the water, and as I cleave it out, little bubbles pop out from around me. Into the air like a flying fish I slash down the switch, and then in the darkness I come back down. In this darkness, this is where you were. This is where I clung to the cold tile wall with my hands behind my black while my chest and belly were sopping wet. You stood over me and you kissed me while my body tried to equilibrate. To be honest, I can’t even remember if I was uncomfortable from the heat or completely happy. I can’t remember. All I remember are shadows of that scene. I don’t even remember what your lips felt like on my lips. But I know they must have been there, and they were soft and dry because you could control your saliva. I don’t remember how wet you were, and I don’t remember the stiffness of your shoulder blade against my collarbone, or the way we both breathed heavily through the steam. I don’t remember how the cold wall felt good against my back, it simmered me like you simmered my brain. You with your metaphoric mind, you understood me. You even understood what I meant when I said you meshed with me like a drop of cold water on a sizzling stove. What I don’t remember I have to claw through my imagination to retrieve, and it hurts. It hurts.

Once I tried to whine. I tried to be like a wolf howling at the moon, “Oh you are leaving soon! You are leaving soon!” But you turned to me. Your eyes glared straight and cold.

“If this ever becomes at all uncomfortable or painful for you, I don’t want that.” You laid your face frozen toward me. I must have squirmed and given out a nervous giggle. It was almost like a teacher scolding me. It was a warning. Don’t let the pain come out, you were telling me. Don’t let the juice go sour. Don’t let it. Don’t let it. I mean, you were telling me that you didn’t want to see me suffer, but it felt almost like a threat. If I suffered, it was on your account, and you cared so much that you’d make yourself gone.

No. You were too quick to assume. See what you don’t understand, is that I was suffering before I met you. You’re like a drop of cold water on my sizzling stove.

When you walk away, the kettle wails.

I have pangs. I must miss you. Or maybe it’s just because I haven’t eaten any lunch?

The bath ends anticlimactically. The tub is unplugged, lights up, damp towel wrapped around my body, door open, I am hit across the hallway. My lower back and my butt are throbbing through my flesh.

I guess my flesh retains the heat. It throbs. But for how long?

There are no clothes that will melt me like a glove. Just my froggy pj pants that cut me at the waist and sog around my ankles, my purple turtleneck sags around my chest. My butt throbs. But with each breath, with each moment as I lean over my drawers, with whatever it is that transpires (I guess they call it time?), my hearth is escaping from me in some kind of spiraling evaporation.

I’m really trying hard to not let the pain seep out. I’m trying to not let the pain seep out, because somewhere in India you’ll see it like green smoke, or you’ll twist your nose and crinkle your brow as a whiff comes at you from around a sneaky corner, and then you’ll really be gone.