Café L'Amour

It was my father who first taught me the importance of mozzarella cheese. “Chow is continuous,” he’d say, fishing out the small, egg-shaped pieces from the water they swam in. It was a saying he’d picked up from his years in the military, and one of the only remnants of it I could see in him in our day-to-day. He would hand them to me, letting them slide from his palm into mine, and motion to the bamboo cutting board stationed on the granite countertop by the sink. Being the youngest in the house (aside from my 3-year-old brother, who wasn’t fit to operate kitchen utensils), it was my job to perform the thankless task of slicing the cheese for each meal. Mozzarella was difficult. It had a habit of slipping out from beneath the knife, and sometimes my slices would end up grossly misshapen - odd, oblong discs too fat on one side and barely substantive on the other. Still though, I much preferred it to the unbearable job of grating cheddar, mostly because of that moment at the end of the block when I’d have to start being extra careful or I’d slice pieces of my knuckles into the great orange heap.
At that time we lived in a house my father had designed himself, with bamboo flooring and a main level that was only one sprawling room and high ceilings that my father called “Valhalla.” The house was built on a slope, so the deck on the main level actually sat a story above the golf course our backyard ran into. During the twilights of summer, with the mist of the golf course sprinklers drifting up, my stepmother and my uncle would sit outside and play backgammon with a bottle of merlot while my father and I cooked, singing along heartily to Frank Sinatra and Tony Bennett. My father has always been into that sort of thing. He called it Café L’Amour, and on evenings when I’d rumble down the stairs and head for the front door he’d call, “Hold on, darling - Café L’Amour is open tonight.” I didn’t have to stay, but I did. I was 14 and supposed to be hating my life, and in the typical ways I did, but there was never a time I felt happier and more fulfilled than when I could hear the sizzle of meat on the stove behind me as I worked my hands sore slicing apart ball after ball of mozzarella.
We had to move away from that house for a while, and when we came back we couldn’t afford it anymore. Café L’Amour is not closed, though. It comes back to me quite often, actually, even at the most fleeting note of big band - but mostly in my undying passion for mozzarella.

The Silent Year (The Lost Year)

I can’t remember anymore exactly what it felt like to be silent. I remember the frustration, of course, the restlessness and the tears, but the feeling of opening my mouth and trying to push out noise that never came is lost to me now. I remember the look on Liz Lawrence’s face as she shuffled up to me on my first day back at school after the accident, but only because her face has changed so little in these last three years. I remember consoling myself with Bright Eyes lyrics, a bad habit of mine since I became a teenager. “It’s the ones with the sorest throats who have done the most singing.” I tried to think like that, tried to convince myself that surely this accident was a gift, to show me just how much my voice had mattered. Or something. Perhaps my voice had been taken away by the devil. I remember going to church and being told that. I remember feeling invisible, like an infant, inconsequential, as all of my important thoughts dissolved as soon as I attempted to present them in the din of the crowd around me, never to be heard by anyone except my myself in the back of my throat. Living in a new city was difficult enough without being mute. So was everything. Starting my junior year of high school, falling in love with a girl for the first time, struggling with my faith. Despite all the vivd pictures I have from that time, though, the most important memory has been lost to me. I can’t remember anymore exactly what it felt like to be silent. All I have left is the slight strain I feel when I raise my voice, that tug deep within my throat, and the odd shortness of breath when I try to say too much at one time. It makes me fear I’m taking my voice for granted again. Did it mean anything? Have I learned my lesson? What will it take for me to finally appreciate what I have before I lose it?

October

“In my heart, October is yours.”
The next thing Jessica says to me is, “But don’t tell anyone that.”
I respond to this with an illustrated letter that is three pages long and an assortment of small gifts that she says she received but on which she never made any further comment.
I know why this is, just as I know why I have to keep my October a secret and why I wasn’t allowed to go see her in San Francisco last August. (Secretly, I had hoped to claim that month as my own as well.) The Why is called Savannah, and the Why’s face makes expressions that are far more painfully beautiful than my awkward lips and small eyes could ever manage. All the other months belong to her, especially that August now. I think she knew I was going to try and take it. Sometimes, I look at pictures of them together, but I really shouldn’t, because I always end up sitting and staring at my hands folded in my lap, feeling small and forgetting what to do with my body.

It’s getting better, though.

In my heart, October was hers, until this one. I’ve given her October away, though I haven’t yet told her that. I don’t feel guilty about it though, because the new owner looks just like her. It’s kind of unsettling at times, actually.
On October 3rd, this new owner and I drank merlot born from the sun and the winds under Christmas lights in the warm fall air. She inspected the label with a wrinkled nose, set it down and proclaimed, “The best wine always come from South America, I swear.”
I slid my tongue over my teeth and tasted the red stain there, and I thought of how the flavor of the wine lingered on her lips when I kissed her. Like I was drinking it from her. I looked at her, so familiar, that same dark hair and those same playful eyes. But different. She spoke with an accent and instead of lowering her gaze to the floor when she spoke to me, she’d bite her lip and smile.
“I think you’re right,” I said. “So far, South American wine is the best.”

CocoRosie at Republic, 27 September 2010

“Picture this: Your lips on my lips.”

I saw before me two gleaming specters, two circus angels in white lace and red lips, the legendary gypsy sisters known affectionately by their mother and by us as Coco and Rosie.

Anchoring me, keeping me from evaporating with the music was the thin arm of a dark-haired, sweet-faced girl I met but two days before, when she laid her cold palm on my face and told me she was looking for a princess. Two lights dangling from her belt showed our feet stepping lightly towards each other, tentative, but animated.

Rosie’s wail hearkened an apocalypse, broadcasting bizarre prophecies from beneath her waterfall of wavy hair. She danced like a wild child, an acrobat, exposing her palms to us like a priest giving a blessing.

Coco played with childrens toys, waving around an orange keyboard with rainbow keys that emitted fuzzy tones like those of an old radio. She tossed the sounds of windchimes over the throbbing mass before her like a spell. I felt the stems of my girl’s fingers wandering over my arrowhead hips as the tinny sounds of a tiny xylophone popping merrily in our ears.

“I’ll wait for you until the streets become sand.”

My girl and I played handgames in sync with the porcelain figures above us, the hem of Coco’s dress swirling around her ankles, my palms sometimes missing my girl’s and coming into abrupt and welcome contact with the soft gingham of her forearms.

Behind the twirling girls onstage and their zoo of instruments, a screen showed us images so ghastly and gorgeous that we were overwhelmed with the task of just seeing them. A carnival swingset circled in technicolor over living trees; my girl shined her light on my hands so I could roll a cigarette for us. We smoked it fingertips to mouth to mouth, under the blinking human eye of a white horse I was sure was an owl at first.

“And all the while, I clung heavy to your back, my desire harnessed deeply in your spine.”

Exhaustingly strange, unbearable beautiful. The gypsy sisters’ red mouths, swinging wide over their pale faces, came to meet at the same microphone to blend melodies just as our mouths met against each other’s to do the same.

I don’t know how it ended. I don’t know how our terrible angels left us there as we begged for more. I don’t know how I came out of that place that had seemed inescapably eternal. I don’t know how many kisses flew between my lips and my girl’s as we realized our inevitable parting; I don’t know how I came from holding her against me, buried in the heat of hundreds of people, to feeling nothing but the cool outside air on my skin. It was like I’d fallen asleep and woken up back on the streets, trying desperately to retain each small fragment of the breathtaking dream I’d just had.

Somewhere inside me, though, that night is not over. I am still under those blinking blue lights. I am still staring into the vibrating hazel eye of the white horse. My palms and neck still glitter with that golden resin; our mouths are still exchanging the sticky taste of tobacco, our hips still rocking together with the otherworldly notes of the harp.