china pants

I was at my parents’ house, and just fed up with it, as happens sometimes. I put on a clean pair of white cotton underwear that had been stamped with ancient China scenes, an old baggy sweater and old baggy jeans and jumped in my car to drive it off. I was pulling up on your street in San Francisco, which somehow looked like an old neighborhood in Sacramento, when you were getting out of a car with an associate.

You were a cross between a bunch of guys. Neil Gaiman. Bob Dylan. Jonathan Cott. Rumpled. Rumplable. Creative. Intense. Professorial. Devastingingly direct. A genius of sweetness both hidden and overpoweringly present. I wondered if your associate was the guy I’d heard questioning Terry Eagleton at Yale in that accent of yours, that accent that seems from nowhere on earth, but might be one conferred by so many years in that league. Heard it once on a guy at Shambhala Books in Berkeley and became obsessed with the thought that maybe he was your brother. I’ve sometimes wondered if this accent was even from somewhere I would ever know, the hallmark of a kind of scholarship too tedious for my wilderness or the herald of a place lost in the mists of time.

It seemed to me you were returning from having dinner out. You’d seen me behind my wheel. It was dusk, and you were crossing the street to enter your house, and I was looking in my rearview mirror to make sure I knew which house you entered, through which door. I knew I could recognize the red door after I’d found a parking space and could come knock.

You let me in. You took up a position in bed, fully dressed, and started grilling me about what I was doing there. I had just set out for a drive. Didn’t know I was coming. There’d been no plan. I might have just kept going, gotten on 280 and cut the miles smoothly and quickly enough to get a little release from my skin for a few rare and gorgeous moments, but I just ended up where I ended up. I remember saying to you, “What do you expect me to do? Go to Green Gulch Farm and talk to one of them?” That sort of put a skip in your general attitude of unwelcome, but just a skip.

You then started in about me reading my books. I was somehow lying truthfully to you about this. I’ve read them so many times, though not lately, but I was speaking as if lately, and it somehow was not a lie at all. I’m certain of it because I would never lie to you, ever, not even in my sleep, and what would be the point? You’d know. So you kept grilling me, about my physical condition now too, and I was saying as I was letting my tent-like jeans drop and pulling up my tent-like sweater, “I’m a damn size six! How much slimmer do I get?” But you’d started laughing and pointing at my sensible cotton China underpants. I just made some grunt about the symbolism helping, pulled up my tent-like jeans and down my tent-like sweater, saying I’d just meant to be comfortable and drive out of my skin, out of the world, for a spot of relief, reiterating that I hadn’t known I was coming to your place when I set out, hadn’t known it till I was there, in fact.

I was crawling over you to get to the door to leave, not impose another moment, and you asked very softly if I might want to come and spend the night with you sometime. At the very same moment as this utterance was sending the gentlest of blown feathers radiating through my body like the light wave that radiates through the ground circles of nuclear mushroom clouds, the word “Yes” was coming out my lips and my body had gone limp across yours. All our clothes on and the covers.

It woke me up, sucking for air, with my damned sleep disorders dancing on me like demons, and the world tweeting and swooshing and roaring out the open window next to my bed. I was, of course, very sorry to have escaped that moment so unceremoniously, without knowing if we were going to make plans, but told myself that at least you’d heard my answer.

Threw down my agony of greed for more moments, and feeling of failure for blinking out when it hit the frontier of existing and transcendence, but made it be enough that you very certainly heard my “Yes”.

I pulled on my baggy old jeans and my baggy old sweater and made myself some coffee, wondering if I could find an image of some China underpants for you here. I think you don’t need one.

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And then, after getting up and getting this up and having my morning pills and coffee and breakfast, I slammed back to sleep like a giant redwood hitting the ground. I spent a lot of that time being married to a retired Bill O'Reilly with slaves and relatives galore, rooms being built, artifacts being shoved around, taken in and out... and Brad Pitt was either his son or his next incarnation on my ring finger... or both. I'm pretty vague on that. Then I was shed of that scene and there was the lovely man who had the bodega and fine champagne. It was a veritable scrooshed fun house of horrors and oddities, this four-hour dreamfest, snoring with enough caffeine in me to raise an elephant. I survived the marriage thing in detached observer mode, but felt warmly toward the guy selling the miraculous champagne, may have tried to hug him, assure him that things would work out okay.

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