Chinatown crackseed blues

After coffee in Chinatown, my friend Beth Yahp (here from Sydney to see family) and I wandered into a store full of large bags of crackseed candies, amazing piles of salted plum, lychee, and so much else. We paused at a box full of light hollow yellow objects, and wondered what they were. Spotting a woman at a computer nearby, I said, "excuse me, excuse me"; she turned and said in distinctly American English, "It is incredibly rude to ask a question of someone who is eating," which I then saw she was doing. I apologized. Beth and I turned away and were then confronted by an older woman with a Chinese accent. "What is your question?" she asked. "We were wondering what these objects are," I said. "They are fish stomachs," she responded. "What other questions do you have?" she asked, staring at me, her tone belligerent. None. We left the store.

 

"You only give me your funny papers"

 

The man in his 60s had been talking to people at the United gate; he was clearly a man who liked to converse. We sat next to each other in row 28. A vet, he'd been a nuclear weapons specialist when he was young. Wrecked his teeth. He wears a grill when he travels to explain insurance benefits to people: on this trip alone, he'd been to Idaho, Chicago, Indiana (he was wearing an IU jersey), and Connecticut. A lot of it he drove. We were flying from Hartford to DC, and then he'd fly home to Texas. He can't sleep after a long trip like this one, though he sleeps a lot on the road. He'd witnessed an ICE raid at Midway airport, or he'd more than witnessed it; a man "in uniform" demanded his papers, which he refused to give, telling the guy he wasn't a cop, had no authority, and to f-king leave him alone. "They're going after the black and the brown," he said. "You know why they pardoned all those J6 rioters." Runs into racism all the time. "I'm in charge here," he told one office manager; "do you want to know about your benefits or not?" That guy backed off.

 

He pulled out his phone's calculator app and started multiplying numbers. What the government takes from everyone who works (400 million of us), what they take over 30 years of our work lives, how it adds up to four quadrillion dollars. "Do you even know what that symbol means?" he asked, to which I shook my head no. "Where does all that money go?" As we approached Dulles, huge mansions came into view, not McMansions but MaxMansions, and he noted that some of the money had gone there. Started rapidly inserting his left index finger into the circle made by his right fingers. "That's what they're doing to us, all of them. All the old politicians have to go." When he'd posted his equation on FB, he was called into the boss's office, and some feds came looking for him where he lives.

 

His congresswoman is Jasmine Crockett and he's not telling her to go. As he walked off the plane, his bad hip was clearly hurting him; he was heading home by way of other conversations, no doubt. 

 

[Lilith was with me in spirit, though she'd never have fit under the seat]

No country for old dogs

This is no country for old dogs. Behind the fence around her small concrete lanai, in the sun Sweetie resembles a prisoner, shadowed slats running across her back. One friend thought she was a pig. Most days, she still lifts herself out of her plastic hut and staggers toward the peanut butter flavored treat I hold through the fence. (I try not to touch them much, as I'm so allergic to peanuts.) Other days, her eyes look out of her cave, stark with what? Pain? I can see her brindled spine now, her ribs like a bulge above her belly, a line of black nipples hanging. Diarrhea had been mostly hosed out yesterday. A yellow plastic bone never moves from its spot. Some days she lets me touch her.

 

At the top of the circle at the cemetery, Ola and Hoku, their emergency green shirts vividly backlit, walk toward Lilith and me. It's like a small parade. Lilith sits at Ola's feet while he grooms her, fur flying. "She's so calm today," he says. She stares out at the bay, the mountains, the woman who grieves for her son each day. My philosopher dog.

 

"The raccoon repellent didn't work," Hoku says. After a few days, the pigs are back. Fresh dirt and not from the "escavator" they love to drive. Still smells like garlic though, as if someone were having a big plate lunch. Pakalolo on the side.

 

In parting, I tell them about Sweetie. Should I post a sign to say, "Take me to the vet!" I thought about her all the way to the cemetery this morning. Let her be free of suffering.

 

A poetry of quietude

"SMILE! You are on voice and video cameras!" reads a new sign at the ticket shack outside the Temple. I look in on the woman we used to talk to as she fed the cats or prepared to sell tickets. She was vaping. We waved as I said something cheery about the surveillance state and she smiled crookedly at me. At the cemetery exit, Lilith insisted on sniffing where the cats (now kept from under the shack with plywood barriers) and chickens wander through the rows of flowers for sale. "She's inspecting," I say to my friend, the conspiracy theorist. "Always," he says. 

 

Up the hill, a woman and man approached us from "the heart," or the steep circle at the top of the cemetery. "Are you the lady who walks here every day and wrote a book about it?" the woman asked. Her friend, Joan, had told her about us. Are you the woman who hears fireworks? I asked. She lives behind the Temple's gift shop; hears cars racing through the cemetery some nights. She tells Rex (the boss) these things, but he blames them on the Karaoke place across the highway.

After I take their picture, the man says maybe they'll be in my next book. The walkers are still free from cameras and microphones; theirs is a free speech zone. But workers now inhabit zones of silence, a place of gestures divorced from words. Their hourly wages cannot afford the luxury of speaking.

You're the robot!

A and B were talking just outside the guard shack, so Lilith and I approached. B said he was fine, well not fine, and he pointed at the new camera set on the side of the shack. I said something about Trump's America. "Oh, the surveillance state, that was Biden." A: "I can't believe you supported Biden." I tried to say it was the Democrats I was supporting, not Uncle Joe, but he responded with another attack on the Dems for installing Kamala as the candidate. And besides, the new boss hates Trump. He's a Democrat. I didn't say anything about my political ambivalences. Ambivalence, like irony, is hiding under a rock somewhere (a power washed rock, I'm sure).

 

A started in on No Kings, the hundreds of millions of dollars funneled into the protests. "I've been to them all," I said, "and no one paid me a cent." "That's because you're a ROBOT." "Don't you call ME a ROBOT." 

 

The other day, my auto body shop friend told me, apropos of leftist over-stepping, "I hate what our side does sometimes; we NEED those words." He listed a batch used in stand-up routines. "I NEED the word RETARD," he said, "because that's what he IS."

 

Union brothers

Heading uphill toward what once was Ferdinand Marcos's grave, Lilith and I encountered a short Filipino man power washing stone walls. He stopped. I leaned in to say how much I love the moss and lichen. "Boss's idea," the man said through a bluish cartoon mask, which he lowered. "Have you seen the big stone wall?" Yes, I responded, I used to love the green moss. "Ugly," he remarked. I said something about hoping this cemetery regime ends soon, and he reached over to fist bump me, green debris on his right hand. I said I'd heard that trees are being power washed too, and he pointed up the hill, where Lilith and I were to find palms nearly naked up to a point that no one could reach. "He thinks the black stuff is ugly, but it's not going to work. It doesn't all come off." Sure enough, the trees wore ghost lichen and moss, faint shapes that reminded me of hundreds of photographs I've taken of them before they were ghosts.

 

The subject of surveillance cameras came up. "If he puts them in our dining area, we're going to the union," the man said. I said I was glad they have a union.

On the way out, close to Kahekili Highway, dozens of cars were entering the cemetery. One woman was standing beneath a palm writing a condolence card; her young daughter, in a bright dress with her hair carefully combed, was reading gravestones. "Big funeral," I noted to a man in a San Francisco 49ers shirt. "Yes, someone with a lot of support in the community," he said. "A stevedore." I said I'd appreciated the support my union had from the stevedores when UHM went on strike. "He went to UH," the man said, "football player." Young.

 

Ruminations on the surveillance state

"I just want you to know," said worker A, his tone uncharacteristically formal, "that cameras with audio have been installed in the building." Lilith and I mouthed our thanks and hellos as we walked by. Out of recording range, I was told that the boss said cameras were there for the workers' "protection," that they wanted to work there. Up the hill, workers B and C tell us that cameras are being installed everywhere. "I don't care," said the one; "the guys who are bothered by them are the ones who don't want to work." 

 

"You know," worker A had said, "I talk to a lot of people who are grieving. We have conversations--rather intimate ones--and I don't want them being recorded." He hesitated at the word "intimate," but there's no better word.

 

I, too, record these conversations. Is my intention different enough from that of the boss who so clearly distrusts his own employees? I'd like to think that I record them--and you read them--for better purposes. Is the archive for control or for preservation, and are they always separate? Do we write out of suspicion or trust? Out of fear or love? Is there any pure space, and if there were, could we write about it? At what point do I stop posting stories and photographs on the internet? Shall I write in the voices of the trees, the mongooses, the stray cats?