| Grandma Lopez, age 12 at childhood friend, Lisa's friend's Spanish era particle-board apartment. Back when Grandma Lopez was a black girl the size of the chip currently on her shoulder, spoke in bad ebonics, smoked Newports, and terrorized the small college town of Amherst, Massachusetts where all the white people smelled like unsuspecting baby lambs from all the wet wool sweaters. Photo taken with stolen polaroid film from the 7-11 across the street where the Lisa's friend would have them both watch her babies and then send Lisa and Young Grandma Lopez to spend her food stamps on candy to convert the stamps into change for her. Training for later. | |
The pencil-thin disco eyebrows and glittery socks would also come later. The white painter's pants were then. Right then.
Mrs. Lopez once stole a gallon of milk from that 7-11 just for the milky thrill of it (plus it was the closest thing at the time and she'd been stealing radios and coats by then, so why not wash the last of that innocence down with a little milk?). Of course the milk sellers called the cops, and Young Grandma Lopez had to jog into an apartment-building basement across the street. The cops found her behind the hot water heaters, clutching the plastic gallon of 2% milk and feeling like a bad idea that ended up on the "Quincy" cutting-room floor and ended up as a "Good Times" 3-parter starring Janet Jackson.
But milk? She didn't need milk. No one needed milk. She needed a man to love her right and smack her around in the morning and apologize by tea and say, "But you know I love you baby. You just make me so... so... crazy in those white painter's pants. They are so now. All you need is a shiny pair of socks."
But for Grandma Lopez, it was in the cards: from then on she'd always end up clutching for the wrong thing at the last minute and end up with a gallon of 2% milk.
Her friends made fun of her and she was ashamed.
Her parents protested in the streets for this kid of crap? Lesson: kids totally waste all the sacrifices you make for them. Look around us! Don't believe me. They're fucking monsters. As soon as I can't wipe myself, I'm gonna blow my head off instead of going into some state-run old folks home. No way man.
So have a good time now and don't kid yourself--pardon the pun; make your kids clean a lot of stuff and keep their lives hard so they'll appreciate the silverware you deign to give them once you've no use for it and you're gumming your food. Might cut down on your bedsores. If you don't believe me, it's even in a Johnny Cash song, "A Boy Named Sue."
Make them sleep on childhood peed-on mattresses all through their teens so they'll really appreciate the vinyl Barca loungers found in the trash later. Like Grandma Lopez that time she screwed up and ended up in the group home, listening to Rick James's song "Cold Blooded" in the smelly recreational basement with the broken pool table and stolen sloppy kisses by the washing machine, behind the hanging laundry in the corner...like her, your kids will think that the maggots crawling out of the tears in the vinyl are RICE.
But rice goes with milk and becomes rice pudding.
...And that, my friend, that's the kind of poem that goes over the toilet in the 1/2 bathroom.
Okay, now let's go forward in the story...
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Erika Lopez P.O. Box 410011 / San Francisco, CA 94141
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