Meeting Xing

You meet him so often you’ve taken notice. He's a man whose presence tiptoes around things, a man who will walk into a room and no one will notice, a man who even in public seems to claim less than his fair share of space. He's the kind of person that the mind easily forgets. So to notice him, for you, is something special. You’ve noticed, for instance, that the side pocket zipper of his backpack bag is broken, that he keeps to the right edge of the pavement and walks in a straight line and that he has a scar behind his left ear, which you first mistook for a tattoo of a crescent. Mostly, you’ve noticed that he’s a man of incredible regularity and who keeps to his schedule like clockwork. Even the way he walks - how he plants his left foot ahead and then the right – is so regular and timed you’d think his feet respond to a beat, to a metronome planted somewhere in his head. A symmetric rhythm. You see him every evening when you go for your runs or take your walks. He’s become a feature of your landscape, a monument, a landmark. Him and his blue bag.

You used to pass each other like ships in the dark. Now you say hello and jog on. Or walk on. You’ve become acquaintances of sorts. Sometimes you pass and when moments later you look back, what do you see? Him keeping that regular pace of his, looking down at his little feet, plodding ahead, going home. To his family. To his dog. To his video game. To his book perhaps. He reminds you of drive.

Secretly you call him Xing because, hell, dude looks Chinese. He might not be but he looks like one. Often times you've tried to imagine how he’d react if one day instead of your usual hellos and how-are-yous you said, “Mr. Xing, sorry to disrupt your walk but I really do like your scarf. May I know where you purchased it if you don't mind...I’d love to get me one like that.” 

Now, homeboy's phone might ring at this point, "The" Nokia tune that you know so well because your first ever phone was a Nokia, an ugly thing the shape of a Lifebuoy soap, which despite its ugliness you adored like the light of a new sun. He will raise his finger to motion to you to allow him answer it first, then he'll reach into his blue bag and grab it. “Salome, mia dakika apar kende abiro. Pod wach moro omaka kae matin,” he'll say, which will knock the wind clean out of you and perhaps push you to take a step from the concrete pavement into the grass. And have you reach out for the street-lamp post to support yourself and catch some breath because you’ll feel a little dizzy and short of air. Naturally, he'll step into the grass too, out of concern and he’ll ask if you’re okay, if he should call an ambulance for you. You’ll say you are dandy but in your heart of hearts you’ll know you lied to your friend here. Later, though, while you lie in bed in your apartment going over the incident in your mind you'll say to yourself that the lie served him right for pulling a coup de surprise on your ass the way he did...what if he killed you? He'll put the phone back into the bag and say, “Sorry man, am not Xing. They call me Onyango Rabet Sibuor Owadgi Awino,”Holy bag of shit. This is when a weaker man might take off.

Maybe he will not tell you anything. Maybe he’ll stop dead on his tracks and look straight into your eye and not utter a word the whole time. Now, let me tell you something about that look of his. There are looks that break a man in two, if you know what I mean. Looks that say shut the fuck uuup!!!. Mothers are known to go for them when they’ve had enough of your horseplay; that evil side-eye that pins you down and suffocates you in three seconds flat. Homeboy's look here is that kind times fifty four thousand; it leaves you feeling scorched lovely. You'll feel the gaze penetrate you with a fever-dream slowness and you’ll wish you never said the X word but that won't matter; t'will be too late.  You’ll be embarrassed something awful. Little beads of sweat will gather in your face and armpits and your back too, perhaps. And he'll stand there not taking his eyes off you for a full minute. And your head will be bowed in defeat like you’re the victim of an Isis beheading orgy, looking at your feet and noticing for the first time that your shoes have aged some. You won’t know what to do with your hands so you’ll bury them in your pockets and keep them buried...and wait. After what will seem to you like a lifetime he'll walk away.

Maybe he’ll tell you his name is Shao, not Xing and you’ll be like, “Sure Shao I apologize; I don’t know why my friend Xing keeps leaping into my head today” like liars everywhere. And he’ll say no problem no problem (twice), seeing clean through your lie. Bad start. Another guy might not like you for being so shameless but Shao is not that other guy. Shao will see a friend in you and invite you to hang out during the weekend which you’ll agree to and while you hang out with him and Ming (his girlfriend) that weekend he will launch into a little life story. You'll get to know him a little better: that he first came to the United States two years ago to visit an uncle in New York; that he stayed a month and visited Seattle and San Francisco and D.C. and The Grand Canyon as well. And that when his visit was over he decided he liked the experience and wanted to come back. That he went back to Beijing and sent applications to several colleges but got rejected by all but one, the one he almost didn’t apply to in the first place. Here, his voice will trail a little and take a small bow and Ming will reach over and rub his arm ever so gently. You will notice that he did indeed looove America because he will talk about her the way one talks about a lover – in a manner more touch than sound, like it’s something for the heart alone. Something to be felt. He will compare America and China and comment on many varied things, words spilling out of him like bats flying from their cribs at dusk to chase the sun. He’ll say that Donald Trump is an asshole. And you’ll laugh then ask if he has friends who’re down with Trump but your question will hang above the room unnoticed because Ming will already be telling a story about this Goth group she recently joined that is Oh my God... total gold dust!. Shao will then ask you about yourself, which will strike you as one of those unintentionally broad and unanswerable questions. Now, I don’t know about you but how do you answer a question like: tell me about yourself or who are you?  Being ever so quick on the draw, you’ll string words together and give to him and hope his Chinese ass asks no more questions. Ming. Ming will surprise you. She'll pussyfoot into the living room at some point holding a half-rolled blunt and ask if you smoke. She'll say it with so much charm, in that silvery voice of her's, you'll feel tempted to consider the offer but you'll say, politely of course, that you don't. And what will she do? Quote a Wiz Khalifa line about how not smoking pot takes your country a whole generation back and then some. No, she'll rap the whole damn song line for line while she lights the joint before she takes a puff. She'll then pass it to Shao. And as she waits for him to pass the joint back she'll pull her sleeve up and show you a tattoo of Wiz Khalifa's album title Rolling Papers. A die-hard fan. A certified stoner and rap enthusiast. Shao will tell you that Sundays he likes to eat noodles and go downtown to play pingpong with buddies of his: Guang, Cheng, Hong, Mani and another dude -Park - who you'll remember because he sold you a bike on craigslist weeks ago.

Maybe Xing will straight out ignore you. Maybe he’ll have had a bad day and feels kinda bitchy. And doesn’t take too kindly to being stopped on the way home by funny looking evening running halfwits to answer to questions about scarves. You will stand there watching him walk away, you feeling rejected and him walking faster than you ever saw him do. Then he’ll look back at some point and you’ll think to yourself “Xing sure got attitude today”...then you'll get back to your running.

The Neighbor Downstairs

        There’s something about hammocks. Something uninhibited and hip. And urban cool and artsy, like a graffiti mural. And perhaps a bit rebellious as well. Something that would wear a t-shirt emblazoned “fuck you” in bold letters to a protest march and wave a placard and show big brother the middle finger when occasion called, on the one hand...but also don a million dollar designer suit like the godfather when business calls, on the other. A deep well. Whenever I see a hammock I think chutzpah. Guts. I think rakishness, like walking up to your boss when you don't dig your hustle and saying, "I quit!!!" Hell, that takes some nerve but it's mad sexy. It shows character. For the longest time I've wanted to own a hammock like mad! Abraham Maslow must have lain on one when he wrote the Hierarchy of Needs. That’s because lying on a hammock gives you ideas. It is a statement. It says I have arrived.

        This here is not about hammocks, though. It is a story about my neighbor who owns one and reads an author by the name of Mario Vargas Llosa, and the Spanish bible. I looked that author up; he’s a big deal.  Real big deal. A kahuna. See, I stay next to a little recreational park where folks with a bit of spare time come and make merry and unwind. And so I get to see what shit park goers do. My back window [those long French windows that slide] opens into a little porch where you can chill like royalty and feel lazy and have no eff to give [I’ve always wanted to say that, hehe]. That’s where am sitting right now. Across the street is the park. Enough of that; back to my neighbor, will we? I don’t know her real name because I’ve never asked. All we say when we meet is hi-hi [which is boring and uncreative]. The rest of our language is silence; stiff silence, the kind you can cut with a butcher’s knife and step back and watch blood ooze beautifully out of. I think it’s just me she’s afraid of because I hear her sing sometimes when I sit in my apartment doing my work. Or when she laughs. Or when she fights with her boyfriend who comes around quite a bit. I stay on the floor right above hers. Whenever they fight I stop to listen because it’s beautiful. I never heard anyone cuss more colorfully. Her cussing is truly a work of art. I know Boyfriend a little: a tall geeky-looking guy with ruddy cheeks and a permanent look of shock like someone who's seen the buttocks of a snake. Always in skinny pants and those huge-rimmed glasses that geeky folk like to wear. Something about him looks funny or odd in them glasses...I don't get it. I see him at the bars sometimes chasing tail like crazy.

        I know I did say that I don’t know Girlfriend’s name but I secretly call her Katarina [Everyone needs a name]. She looks like one to me. And Katarina is a solid name, if you ask me. And slyly affectionate. Katarina. The sound of it opens the windows of a room, like the first four notes of a hymn. Any room. It belongs to the kind of girl that wears comfortable leather shoes and sports a thin watch and walks like she's her own best thing. With a self-belief like you wouldn't believe. A girl that crosses her legs, leans her elbow on her knees and leans in towards your face when she gets seriously passionate about Pope Francis or Mother Teresa. One who sends you a handwritten letter signed off: Take care dearly!!!, with a heart sign at the end. Am told Katarina in Greek means ‘pure’ but homegirl probably doesn’t even know it because she doesn’t speak Greek; she speaks Spanish.

        Saturday afternoons when it’s warm Katarina walks across the street to the park. She walks in a neat line, a bee-line, clad in a loose floral beach dress and sandals the color of an ox’s heart, her hammock draped over her shoulder like a flag. One hand holds a bottle of something and the other a book. She’s a girl on a mission. After she ties the ends of her hammock to two adjacent tree stems she slips off her sandals and mounts the hammock barefoot like a prophet stepping into a hallowed place – with reverence. That’s when we lose her because from now on she belongs to Mario Vargas Llosa. Mario has her and Mario takes her places we cannot take her and she, in turn, gives herself completely to Mario so that if a wasp were to land on the bridge of her nose it would have to sting her before she’d even be aware it was sitting there. Her face lights up and the corners of her mouth curl into a smile sometimes; Mario must be hell of a funny dude. Occasionally, she reaches for her bottle and takes a swig.

         Now, wouldn’t you know, Friday two weeks ago I woke up in the living room of my apartment feeling like I’d been stepped on by a migrating horde of wildebeests in the Mara? I would have been there all night if the folks in the apartment below hadn’t been having themselves a big old fight at three in the morning. I was startled awake and I was too fried to move, at least right away. Boyfriend was trying to snake Girlfriend, saying he needed space, and she was like, Motherfucker, I’ll give you all the space you need. I already mentioned Boyfriend’s little Rico Suave routine at the bars, didn’t I? Am sure he just needed more space to cheat. Fine, he said, but every time he went for the door Girlfriend got to crying and would be like, Why are you doing this?

        By the time Boyfriend got himself into the hallway I was already in the kitchen to grab a glass of water. I was thirsty. Girlfriend would not stop crying. Twice she stopped, she must have heard me moving around right above her and both times I held my breath until she started up again. I followed her into the bathroom, the two of us separated by a floor. She kept saying something in Spanish that I couldn’t make out, and washed her face over and over again. Now that I think about it I feel bad. I feel horrible for eavesdropping. I feel like shit.

        Next day I told my boy Kofi what happened and he said too bad for her. If I didn’t have my own women problems I’d say let’s go comfort the widow. I agree.

        Boyfriend came around a couple of times the next few days for his things and, I guess, to finish the job. He is a confident prick. He would listen to what she had to say, arguments that had taken her hours to put together, and then he would say it didn’t matter, he needed his space, period. Then she’d let him know her [in the Biblical sense, of course] every time, perhaps hoping that it would make him stay. And you smelled the desperation oozing out of that apartment, her clutching at this guy, her fears rising to the heavens. And you know what’s shabby? The way they talked after. About their beautiful past. About how cool they were together and how they're gonna lose all that. And how it wouldn't be the same again. And I’d think Man, this is sick. Put on your skinny pants and weird f**kin glasses and leave already, sonovabitch. F**k!!!

        I don’t know why I started following her life, but it seemed like a good thing to do. No, make that an interesting thing to do. Most of the time I think people, even at their worst, are pretty boring. But I guess I was already deep in this drama and might as well see it through. Stay and witness how she finds her way home from this harrowing, heart-rending angst. She was a girl lost and hurting and torn painfully apart, as everybody does sometimes.

        After one of their shags, Boyfriend never came back. No phone calls, no nothing. She called a lot of her friends, ones she hadn’t spoken to in the longest. Girlfriend spent a lot of her time crying, either in the bathroom or in front of the TV. She was wrecked. She even stopped singing those bachata songs she sang before. It was absolutely jarring.

        Last weekend I got the cojones to ask her up for coffee, which was mighty manipulative of me. I met her at the laundry room. She hadn’t had much human contact since skinny pants left, so what was she going to say? No? She actually seemed glad to finally speak to someone. I was surprised to see her looking sharp and colorful. I thought she’d be teary and miserable-looking and shit. She said she’d be right up and when she sat across from me on the kitchen table she had on makeup and a gold necklace.

“You have a lot more light in your apartment than I do,” she said…which was a fair call because what I have plenty of in my apartment is light. We drank a pot of coffee and she played some songs on my laptop, which I had brought to the kitchen. I had heard her listen to these songs down there. Good songs. We didn’t have much to talk about. She was depressed and tired and I had the worst gas of my life, God. Twice I had to excuse myself. Twice in an hour. She must have thought that bizarre as hell but both times I came out of the bathroom she was staring deeply into her coffee, the way fortune tellers do. Crying all the time had made her more beautiful. Grief will do that sometimes. Not for me, though. She walked over to the potted plant that I have in my living room and plucked a leaf and smelled it and smiled.

“Do you smoke?” I asked.

“I don’t. Am a Jew. Do you?” she replied.

“Well, it makes me sleepwalk and pick fights…so I generally stay away from it.” I don't know what bit of that response she found funny but she just cracked up like a female hyena making away with a carcass.

“Honey will stop that. It’s an old cure. Just take a teaspoon a night.”

“Really!? T'will stop the sleepwalking or the fighting?"

"Both."

"Ok, am down if you say so.” 

        She told me she’s Elizibet [hehehe...what!!!]. Well, you folks out there who butcher names, please don’t butcher this one. Please. Ever seen those notices they put in libraries that say DO NOT RE-SHELVE BOOKS. A MIS-SHELVED BOOK IS A LOST BOOK…? Same with names. A butchered name is a wasted name. So guys it’s not Elizabeth, Olisabeth…hell, it’s not Liz, for those who like fancy.  It’s simply Elizibet, from Cuba. Ladies and gentlemen. My neighbor, the hammock owner!