July 5th Writing Exercise: I remember

[These writing exercises, I may have mentioned before, aren't supposed to be punctuated at all -- your pen is not supposed to leave the page at all in fact. I couldn't resist punctuating them in my journal, and for this blog I will cut them up into some paragraphs so it's not quite so hard to read]

I remember: I remember thick cotton stockings over my legs, and the nicks and scrapes on the black paint on the wooden floor of the Stage Right, the night of Tosca's opening, when I was a 10-year-old kid, and I had a goat in my arms like a nativity figure, and I was nervous and excited despite the fact that I didn't have to sing. And I knew that Barbara & John (lifelong neighbors as a child) with their salt-and-pepper hair were out there and my Mom -- I think, and maybe my Dad.

And I remember something about the director-lady or the director's assistant, and she was nice, and hustled us around backstage and helped us with our costumes - and we got dressed in a long room with white countertops in front of enormous mirrors with lights all over them just like you thought they'd be backstage at an opera-=house or theatre.

I remember the pudgy-faced black curly-haired little Italian kid who lived in our apartment complex and had gotten us the parts, and I remember how his arms and fingers were fat like a baby's and how he was so arrogant, and self-assured because he'd done this before, and his Mom doted over her young Opera star, gave him candy (covered with olive-oil for all I knew) and how I really didn't like him much but he was one of the few kids in the neighborhood who could speak English, it being mostly Cambodian and Vietnamese immigrants pretty fresh off the ship.

They lived across the street crammed 10-12 in a 2-bedroom apartment, and you could smell the fish, bitter cooking smells at all hours of the day and night, and it was kind-of off-limits -- I never went through that complex where the kids walked around the gravel-covered parking lot in thongs (flip flops) and torn shorts -- circling around on little bicycles, their grandmothers & great grandmothers nearby with nothing better to do than watch the children, where they were in a foreign land, and the cars drove by fast, and I'm sure the grandparents didn't speak the language at all and were thusly afraid of everything and pulled their culture they brought with them in the seams of their clothes, and the smells those clothes carried, they pulled that culture in like a flower-stand on a rainy day, the pulled it into that little apartment building, or more likely, into that little apartment itself, all thick with the smell of old people and pickled fish and sesame oil, and I'm sure they hit their kids if they spoke english at all, and sat in those cramped dark apartments and tried to recreate Vietnam, but couldn't because the Safeway up the street wouldn't allow it, nor the advertisements they put in full color in the nearby papers with coupons to draw out the poor-- reluctant ones -- I'm sure it wasn't allowed at all and that the system got in after all, and the kids started buying their own clothes, with bright colors and stripes and spent more time in the parks, now that their bikes had bigger wheels and ranged farther and farther, and they didn't have to depend on the timed efficiency of the schoolbus every day, and they got aloof as they grew tall & handsome, and drifted away.