The Beat Coffee House

by D.

Downtown Las Vegas36° 10′ 8.8716″ N, 115° 8′ 25.5264” W
Date: June 21, 2010   Time: 4:30 pm

Inside, coffee shop. Outside, desert filth. The Okies had the Dust Bowl. We Lost Vegans get the Dirt Bowl, and it is this valley.

Dirtball. That is me: I’m grit-coated but sheltered by central air and good music. Coffee aroma and hipsters surround at other tables. The summer city is tough and sleazy, a neon and pavement oven electric, sandblasting us all with what must be economic decay. Granules of the End of Times. The air was not this sandy before the recession. It was hindered and frozen, paved over and tamed by progress and prosperity, but the desert must be reclaiming the concrete ghost town edges. This is the most abandoned town in the United States. Nature never takes long. Continue reading…

The Year

by Dena

And we met in the dark, on the bar patio. The stars barely flitted through the smog so that no stellar light reflected in your eyes, only the red end of your cigarette, which you held the wrong way like some naughty little SS agent. I didn’t like your nose and your purse didn’t go with your coat. This is how the lonely start fighting: I knew you’d never be good enough for me. I’d rather have been at home in my slightly shitty underwear unable to find porn wrong enough to get me off, frustrating myself like a cold and ruthless spouse. This is what I think of you and this what I’ve thought from the moment we met, and yet I asked you some stupid question to get you to talk to me. Continue reading…

New Year Tea Ceremony

by D

We archive the rules of engagement,
boil water, warm pots.
The delicacy is done with waiting,
ready to be devoured.

Tea leaves us fortified
but knowing.

There is no maxim to fit,
no congress to draft new laws:

only our red bird hearts,
beating oolong stained
wings in fine bone cups.

The Birds

by D.

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Manta Ray Mantra

by Dena

I am red hot on the sidewalk, red hot on some sunny May Shanghai side street, gawking at a strange little sidewalk seafood market full fish, bottom dwellers, mollusks. A star fish, a turtle. Any fish you wish. It’s lovely. I think of a good meal. I start to feel hungry. All this seafood. Even a manta ray. Holy shit. A manta ray?

Manta ray for sale. Manta ray for sale! This is beyond my scope of expectation. I want to think I am worldly and ready to wrap my senses around anything people might do. I want to think so. Manta ray for sale.

Next to next, odd creatures flounder in bin after bin of shallow water. The only one that registers is the manta ray. People buy other swimmers, haggling and walking away with bags of aquatic captives while I perseverate on the manta ray. I glance at my man. Nonplussed. Watching me look. Patient jaded lover.

Manta ray, manta ray, manta ray. It becomes a manta ray mantra. I decide to breathe.

Manta ray. Manta ray. Manta -

I interrupt myself mid-manta ray chant.

I ask my lover, “Who here has a fish tank big enough to handle a manta ray?”  A wry smile is all I am given.

No one looks rich enough to have such a fish tank. Harried Chinese bargain and hustle to the front of the line. The grandmas shove everyone else out of the way. The people wait to look, perhaps to purchase. They look at me. The grandmas laugh. Chinese people look at my gaping jaw. I am not saving face. I am not poker straight. Manta ray.

I think of Man Ray. I take a photograph of the manta ray.

Manta ray in a bin of water. What will happen to this manta ray? Where is it going? How will it get there? Plane, train or automobile? How much will it cost? Prices are on the bins, but I can’t calculate the conversion over the rhythm of Pacific manta ray chanting.

I think of the Long Beach Aquarium with its pool of manta rays for visitors to touch. They are vinyl smooth, friendly as puppies and peaceful as doves. I find shelter inside that memory. My beautiful little four year old son chanted out loud his own manta ray mantra. “Hi, guys. Oh hi, swimming guys!”

We let them circle to our touch for an hour. “Hi guys!” he repeated for that hour. “Oh hi, swimming guys!”

At home there is a huge, endless fish tank behind reception at a deluxe hotel. It has sharks. Channel Three made a big deal out of the sharks before the grand opening, but they were only dinky little sharks. Hard to spot. Looked like fish. Fish! Not even big fish! I had gone out of my way to see those sharks, but they were jack shit sharks. Manta rays were the only cool thing in that failure of a shark tank.

No. No owner or proprietor of a large fish home would shop for a manta ray on this Little Lost Chinese Street to Nowhere But Other Chinese Streets.

My lover leads me away from the fish market. I cease the manta ray mantra. I do not look back. I let the unexpected manta ray go like a bad date or a stupid argument. I let go of my fear, but my fear jumps back so fast that my blood is rendered cold.

A man in pajamas and Thousand Cloud slippers has a monkey on a leash. He impedes our progress. He appraises me. I look down. A monkey. This is enough. Enough! What a fucked up street. What the fuck is a fucking monkey doing on this fucked up street? I have had it. This is enough. Monkey. Manta ray. Man Ray. I take another photograph.

A monkey! A god damn son of a bitch fucker of a monkey. I hate monkeys. They horrify me with their creepy toes and faces. They are wiry. They will murder your face if you give them a chance. Never let monkeys have access to knives. I am sweating but frozen, so cold.

The monkey man screeches out some class of Chinese, but I know he is saying, “JUMP MONKEY, JUMP.” He won’t stop. He yanks the monkey by the leash but the monkey refuses to jump. I hear the monkey think, “Fuck your mother, you human son of an ass-fucked cunt. The best of you was left behind on the sheets, cocksucker.”

I hate monkeys. I do not like them. I petrify, freeze. A monkey. The manta ray. A monkey.

I shiver hard. I pee a little.

The monkey and the nasty pajama monkey tamer scram once my lover hands over a few coins.

Fucking crazy street! I do not breathe. There is no Monkey Mantra. I do not breathe until we turn the corner to a less eventful street. I just do not breathe. My shaky hand is cold in the warm hand of my lover. Manta ray, manta ray. Manta ray.  Man Ray. Fucking monkey.

Lee, Me and the Fallacy

by Dena

Lee worked in a Kung-Fu Shoe Shop. The shop makes and sells Kung-Fu shoes. They are very fine slippers. The soles are made of hundreds of layers of fine cotton hand-stitched tight to form the shoe’s insole and outsole. The uppers are plain or embroidered cotton.

Lee calls them Thousand Cloud shoes. He dislikes my calling them Kung-Fu shoes as they have other practical applications.

Lee was insulted when I asked him whether all the little children in the shop like hand sewing the soles of Thousand Cloud Shoes. He told me it is a shoe shop, not a sweat shop. The Master has run the shop since the very dawn of time and has always been fair and just.

Lee will not tell me why he parted with his Thousand Cloud job. He does not like to talk about leaving China. His countenance is staid. He is stoic. He is a living Steinbeck novel.

I cannot imagine letting him go. He is my best employee. Lee says I am the worst boss he has ever had and that I drive him harder than an ox in a rice paddy. He says I am mean and racist and a dirty red-haired devil. I let him get away with this because he is right.

Lee brought me a pair of Thousand Clouds as a gift after his first visit home in seventeen years. I love my Thousand Cloud shoes. They wear like a thousand clouds. They have a red Chinese character embroidered on the top. I asked Lee what it means and he said it means asshole.

Lee said it appears the Kung-Fu Shoe Shop Master is wealthier than he was twenty years ago. He said the workers look better off than they did before. The factory girls are resplendent in their fake designer clothes. They reject Mao style with their powerful pockets full of Mao money. They do not wear the Thousand Clouds. They emulate the city’s newly minted aristocracy. They long to hold larger pieces of the new wealth. The wealth is to be spread out and shared, but people on the top tier and the bottom tier are not included in this philosophy.

Lee is stunned by the way the city has developed around the unchanged shoe shop. Lee is disturbed by urban China. Foreigners are everywhere and road signs are in English and Chinese. He could not see the sky for the malls and financial buildings and Chanel billboards.

He said his city is sprawled out just like the suburbs of Los Angeles, except that the tract houses are apartments stacked on top of one another like Legos.

He said the apartment buildings are short compared to buildings further in the city, but that they are incredibly tall compared to the buildings just outside of most American cities. He said the view from his brother’s 20th floor window the city is like a giant’s version of the suburbs of L.A. except that many more people live in each unit than in Los Angeles, and the green spaces in between are like giant suburban American backyards. He said the towers line up and disappear over every horizon. He said they hold rooms crowded with three generations of families and sport laundry hanging off of all the balconies. They hold rooms of one or two people earning good money. Some are very nice and some are not, but each little dwelling has its own sink and modern bathroom. There are still old style dwellings in the city, but they are few and appear to be populated by migrants and not city folk.

He said the ordinary people of his city still live their lives openly unlike in L.A., where people huddle in their backyards and living rooms, afraid to look at each other on sterile street corners. Lee likes the ghettos of LA the best because community thrives within the confines of the poverty and violence. People look and live and there are things like street vendors.

He was relieved to see the nature of Chinese city life is largely untouched. A middle class is slowly emerging but Lee can see it’s false: it’s poverty plus a large television set , a laptop computer and many pairs of shoes. The people have more money but it’s just enough. The average Chinese isn’t mobile and won’t cease to be productive.

Lee says America and China are reaching toward each other in reverse. The only difference is the American people live under fascism without the pleasures of socialism. Americans are losing excess comfort while Chinese are gaining it.

Lee wants to go home.

Lee can’t go home. Home is much like America: a capitalist society without freedom of expression. Each nation poses. In either nation one can be arrested and tried without due process simply for speaking out loud. This is nothing new in China but it’s new for America. The rights of Americans are corrupted. The law was shattered by greed.

Lee wants to go to Cuba where the government doesn’t lie about wealth or freedom. It is what it is, and if you don’t like it you will disappear.

I told Lee there is a Chinese-Cuban restaurant in Garden Grove but that he is a U.S. citizen now. He’s not allowed to go to Cuba.

Lee said this is the point.  Honest oppression is the best oppression.

I told him to be quiet and get back to work.