Shadows of Waste
All the death and sunshine of death, the rains that bring down the fires, the low slip into the shadows of waste. Born to run the hills, born to walk the city looking for something that will turn a boy into a man, a follower into a leader, a punk into a pimp. The city is yours, boy. The city is yours like your shadow is yours. I walk to the van and check the time on the ticket again. I know it reads 6:48, I know what time it reads but I am killing time. I feel like a creep waiting on a woman while homeless men hit me up for change: Been years. Been years since I’ve been with a woman who looks like her. I reach in my pocket and shake my change. My fingers feel her skin and my nose moves across her neck, over her shoulder. I feel her legs around me. I pull my phone from my pocket and read the time. She’s late, she’s late because she’s figured out you are nothing, she’s late because she’s stalling you. You who travel the roads to nowhere, you who barely escaped prison because of the truth, you who disdain your race and the hands of time. But time is watching, boy. Forty years of breath and blood, all the moments mean now, all the moments find you here, waiting on her. Waiting on the mercy of her skin, the touch of her lips, the smell of her perfume. Waiting on her to descend the rotted staircase, where lesser men have walked to see the trash of sex on the third floor. Waiting for your Luciana, waiting for her boots to appear and walk you to the end of your year.
I walk to the edge of Chinatown and stare at the lions. It occurs to me I’ve never touched one of them. I rest my hand upon a gold snout and look back across Burnside to the Paris. It’s been turned into a pornography theater. When I was young I’d walked its halls looking to rent a room. I didn’t rent the room because the hallway looked and smelled like piss, and the room was diseased from years of alcoholic junkies doing what they do. I knew what they did. I’d seen it from my father, then from others as I lived across the country. I watch my old city, a woman I no longer care for, she holds the beauty with her buildings and bridges and light, but she has been failed by people who no longer make art from their brains and blood. I hold my palm to the snout and watch the boring damage. I think about Luciana, a trapped pearl, a fast beating heart running for empty, her fires and wants relegated to opaque, throw-away encounters. The beauty of her is lost on the bad seeds, the weakness, the boys she devours who will never become men because they’ve turned the city into a mother who spoils them, and distorts her daughters with the lowest of hopes. And I used to run these streets drunk and mad with love. I used to see graffiti with high art and hard messages, artists proud of their city, the freedom that sweat brought after a day of breaking rocks, bleeding into nights of creation in tiny living rooms across the districts, and my heart aches for that again. It aches for the calling back of good things, for the rebirth of real love. All of this planted in my mind, I have to smile because I know Luciana rebuilt the city for me with one phone call the day before I was about to leave. It doesn’t make me wrong about anything, I’ve been able to remember my city, to feel it once again. One more burst of color, one more pulse that blows the dust from the keys.
My phone chimes. I read the face of the message. I cross Burnside and walk the sidewalk up past 4th. I don’t get to see her boots descending the staircase, but I see her walking toward me and smiling, her bag over her shoulder, her hair moving just so in the cold wind, her body layered with a black shirt and black overcoat.
I drive her back to her neighborhood. My blood is on fire. She sits and looks around the city. She doesn’t drive, never has. I watch for a parking spot, get one, and we’re up the stairs and in her apartment, most of which I can’t remember except the number, because we’re walking the stairs to the basement while she dumps her garbage and we walk out onto the street, order coffee and walk the blocks while she smokes and we talk about the past, about each other. Her hand in the crease of my elbow, the steam from the coffee and the smell of her cigarette, all of it in perfect beat with the smell of her hair, the smell of her skin. Her body clean like snow. I watch the sidewalks and the vignettes, the people in the windows drinking wine. The air is crisp but not cold, and the streets are still warm with the last trace of early fall. The leaves have all dropped, and they’re crushed beneath her heels while I watch the city in line with her profile, her shoulders.
Back in her apartment, I see a shrine on her book shelf. The place smells like her, like her skin and clothes, like the taste of someone’s blood, sweet and without contrast with another. I lay her on her bed and lean her back. I raise her skirt and see her perfect little pussy. I pull her panties aside and run my tongue up and down. She tastes like sunlight, like moonlight, her sex swells against my tongue. I suck her and swallow her, and my lips are wet. I feel a drop run down my chin and between my collar bones. Her open legs, her breaths fast, her hands dig into the back of my hair. I run my tongue around her below and I am iron again. I want to take my time with her, with her lingerie, with her skin. Her eyes are rolling like I’d imagined them to, and I feel the range of her, which is endless. Outside the streets of Portland are cold and braced for winter, for the wall of rain pinned with small weeks of snowfall. The wicks of three candles are jumping and sending long distorted shapes of glasses and small statues against the wall above her television. The incense spirals smoke out toward the shadows. I’m on top of her moving like a machine. Her stomach is tense with me inside her. I grab her sides and pull her to her hands and knees, arch her back and grip her hair. Her back is lean and hard, and my hands wrap around it with my thumbs against her spine. There are screams and aches of sex, her mouth is open while my hips move her hair around her chin. We’re listening to Ella Fitzgerald fill the room. She’s moving onto me and making me go harder, faster, until I can’t take the time with her anymore. I grip her sides and shoot into her, and we freeze there. A drop of sweat runs down my nose and onto her spine. She quivers and breathes out and we collapse to the bed.
Across from her in a café. The bright grey sky bends through in the window and watches her face, and her eyes are watching me from across the table. I’m staring at her lips, her hands around her mug, while her eyes suck the poison from my blood. I talk about writing, and about everything I have kept to myself. She moves her hand over my knuckles. Her fingers are warm on the veins of my hand. She tells me about her house in her home country, about her family and a body she smelled burning as a child. I listen to her speak and my stomach jumps like a mad fool. I have one more week with her, one week left before I leave for Los Angeles. It’s been a long four days back in the town, but right now it’s every town, every city, every place I would want to be. I drink the coffee and memorize her flesh.