Dishes: Gus Stevens

Photo by Gus Stevens

"I have a scraper."

"A scraper?"

"Yeah, like a little plastic thing you use to scrape off the food."

He nodded his agreement and extended his hand to receive the flat palm-sized piece of plastic. With the tool in his left hand, he balanced the small pile of cooking utensils and pans they'd used to prepare their dinner and walked away from the camp.

His feet were bare and the sand fleas bounced brainlessly against his ankles as he walked down the shore. Adjacent to the water, he squatted next to a large rock behind which the tide had carved a slightly deeper pool as it retreated for the night. He didn't have any soap.

He passed the scrapper over the pasta burnt to the bottom of the pan with a useless vigor. His toes grew numb. His arms couldn't remove the oil and waste no matter how hard he scrubbed with the petroleum by-product.

After several minutes however he scooped a handful of sand from between his feet and plastered it onto the edge of the pan. With a minutes scrubbing, the pasta was lifted from the surface of the pan along with years of careless stains. He couldn't have imagined before that the accumulated mess of broken shells and grains of glass would be so effective at restoring the pan to its storeroom brilliance. But it rested in his hand all shining and new-born, exfoliated and clean.

He sat for a moment longer than necessary, toes now covered by the sand, and he felt scoured and sterile and ready. Such, perhaps, is the result of sand and salt.

Work (washing dishes-- also, can you tell who I've been reading? heh)

I had been willing to wash dishes.  In the end that's what set me, like jello sets awhile in a mold in the fridge,-- set the shape of me in this cold world over the long time of it all.  And what was the shape?  Perhaps, like jell-o, an ordinary mound of angel-food-cake-shape; orange; chunks of could-it-be-peach hovering suspended in the ripples; whip cream to fancy it up.  The shape of me, just a dated household dessert. Cheap.  Good for the nails.  Easy for kids and the old folks.

Despite my common ways I never did have to wash dishes.  Not for pay.  I wash up for friends.  After I myself cook.,  Boyfriends' kitchens, Id' clean them when I got to waiting for him.  Didn't bother if the filth was too far gone.  But while the dish washers are most certainly in my realm with their sad eyes and sodden hands and scarred arms, lurching toward me and swinging away like broken ballerinas set to dance on the trapeze wire, somewhere behind me I came to perceive a something a light a thing bespoke a little word such that they'd put me on the floor if there wasn't anyone prettier.  Is it breeding.  Manners.  Money.  A nameless lace of overlapping bones, a bone tree.  Brittle as dried grass.  Those bone tree branches sown of something and the weather making them something else, too.
My bone tree has some ivory, I guess.  But my weather had so buffeted and smoothed and down right blown me til there weren't no china left, just the scrub juniper of my ordinary orange-jello self whipped on a sea cliff and clinging every branch to the thin soil of life.  Kinda pretty if you like that sort of thing.

Here at the flats Chala washes the dishes.  Washerwoman of Albion.  But paid.  She come up to California from Mexico-- seen times so hard you think the liberals gave birth to her to tell the story for their cause.  The coyote meant to bring her son to the states twice paid, twice lost.  The drugs.  The beaten diabetic husband,  The new boyfriend.  She's got raccoon eyes on account she has been up since two a.m. by time she comes here.  Works in the refrigerated abalone plant.  The make-up seeps into the crinkles around her eyes and rings them in a charcoal halo.  She freshens her lipstick between scrubbings.  Red.  Matte.  A ghoul.  A ghoul's face.  Maybe she'd be harmless but for that.  A busy body maybe, but a kind heart.  Ever since my first day with Chala on my shoulder weeping and telling me in helpless skipping-stone syllables the long story of her long lost life her youngest lost twice back to mexico and now a third time to drugs and miscreants I have yes I am truly partial to the makeup.  Don't mean busy-body.  I can't be sure of anything yet.  Ever?  Blame the dam that broke apart when she heard my low sweet Spanish.  Blame the mutual feeling of helplessness in the world.  Like she came a cross a friend in a deep fog.  And in deep fog gave a shout to find another, an other, rejoicing as all do, in even the paltry saline light of an orange streetlamp on a fogged street, and in that orange glow the roar of words coming out of her like vapor but heavier, and so numerous they gathered to a roar like fat drops in a cataract.  Gotas, they say.  Tears.  Lagrimas if they sneak up on you.

Now it has been seven years to the day since I have seen my home.  Possessed it is of a flinty look.  Grey skies and half-closed lids I see them still, moving in pairs in faces overcast, into buildings and along sidewalks like travelers on an escalator.  Then there is a pause and a meeting and you look and can't find where the eyes are looking but looking they are to something that is not-you ordinary-you.  Looking to something just beyond the reach of you.  No it was a home of sorts but no real hearth no inglenook no warming fire.

Here now the sun shining on this wood makes another small sun in the varnish.  My mother in faces.  The fathers and brothers.  The one's I'd rescue like a long lost seal pup I'd rescue my father I'd rescue me.  Blind of sleep and tethered naught I foreglimpsed him in the truck he will drive when he comes.  The next trip he will take may he not blow yet from the tree of his good youth may it not.  His is nostalgia so furious its little piranha teeth always coming for him ever he turns; turns.  He will best it yet for I see he tries and as he tries he makes a tiller's progress.  After all it is commonness we share though it chafes him worse than I.  Ours is a desert thing and what heaven we dream of is what heaven a laborer can dream of.

I know this as I too have helled my way pursued by hours years desire welted  by the bare flame of itself.  What if not more wretched than the nakedness itself.  The hurt of a burn and the filth of it to want to be other than you.  To seem someone.The heat of that cools slowly but it does indeed cool broke from the engine whence it lit.  What twitches yet in me of these does wear and make coarse in those exposed places but with my common sturdy eye I mark the shadow of this foolishness as a sailor marks the shore, its lie a fine filigree of coast sharp as razor fields of lava beneath the waves and no more harbors but the last one.

A laborer's heaven is my heaven so I say god of labor help me work I am willing to wash dishes.