Cirrus Clouds |
Patrick Joseph |
The length of time, which my mother had been cheating on my father, is unknown to me. It had been since I was at least fourteen. That was when I heard her having phone sex late one night when my father was at work: gentle moans of faux-pain. Then I went through her phone and found text messages to Mr. Jonah Hindel saying she missed his touch and was squirting everywhere. For a while, I hated my mom; I carried this secret like dead weight, stacks of wood, and blamed her for the tiny splinters I got in my hands.
When I google searched Jonah Hindel I found out he was a dermatologist at the hospital where my mother worked. I wondered if they fucked in the building, in his office, or in her car in the parking lot. These were the things my fourteen year old self thought about.
A sixty-three year old man paid me a hundred dollars to let him choke me with a belt as he got off. My eyes were blood-shot as I left the hotel room, staring up at the gold mirrors on the ceiling of the elevator, soft, gentle dings in my ears, and catching blurred glimpses of the city skyline, the sun still up, the buildings still dulled. Nobody asked questions. Nobody really cared.
I do this a lot. It’s amazing how simple it is to enter a hotel. How nonchalantly you find the elevators, like you know where it is you’re going. How smoothly they all ascend, the dark, polyurethane wood and your timid reflection saying that it’s okay to turn around now.
Sometimes I wish the elevator never stopped ascending, that it would just travel on and I’d never have to figure out which hallway I head down and which door I knock on. If it just kept going then it would be alright. But it’s cash. And I’ve got collegiate loans to pay.
My mother always looked younger than she was. Everyone said it. And that we looked alike. My parents were fourteen years apart, unaffectionate mostly. My mother liked to sing, she liked to dance around the house.
I once stole a photograph from an album my mom had. I did this after I knew she was cheating on my father. It’s a picture from 1986. It was before I was in existence, before I was being talked about. Likely, I was thought about.
My mom is sort of straddling my father at a table. She looks thin, her hair dark as a shadow, and my father has no wrinkles, all his hair, and the same smile. He’s laughing, his tinted, large glasses nearly falling off his face. One of his hands is on my mother’s lower back. My mom is wearing white pants and I can clearly see a dark colored thong through them.
This was youth, proof of love, I thought. So I kept it, held it.
A rash. A deep, crimson rash formed at my belly button and began to travel up my happy trail, down my happy trail, and spread. It itched after hot showers. It itched and I can’t remember how terribly.
“Did you put cortisone on it?” my mom asked during my desperation call.
“Yeah.”
“And it didn’t help?”
“Only for a little bit.”
“Okay,” she inhaled. “What days are you off? I can have you come into the clinic to get you looked at.”
My mother’s hospital isn’t regal. It towers, but it has the looming stature of a prison. Possibly because some prisoners do go there for their appointments. Generally, it’s for underserved people, drug addicts, and those with mental disorders. My mom has been kicked, punched, threatened.
I stood outside and waited for her, against a brightly colored mural with waves of pastel streaks cutting through a dark face. My mom said it was the most hideous thing there was to the building: the only color on it.
A rugged man limped over to me, his dark hair on the verge of graying, in half dreadlocks. “Do you have a cigarette?” he asked me.
“No, sorry,” I responded. “I don’t smoke.”
“It’s cool.” He stood next to me for a moment and then said. “Do you have a lighter?”
“No, I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay.” He shifted his weight to his good leg, shuffled about. “Man, I miss Michael Jackson.”
I looked toward him, his face studying the concrete. “Yeah, me too,” I said.
I followed my mom down yellowed hallways. The lights were fluorescent, accenting the pollen colored bricks and dingy ceiling tiles. I hadn’t seen my mom in a few months. But she was as she always had been. She hugged me, kissed me on the bearded cheek.
She introduced me to several colleagues with pride. Her oldest son, just finished graduating college, yes that big university in the city.
“Wow,” they said, “Congrats.”
Mothers always maintain a sense of pride in their child.
One woman, youthful and tan, rubbed my shoulder and said, “Is this him?” to my mother. “I held you when you were just born,” she exclaimed. “Now look at you, all rugged and handsome.”
My cheeks were sore from grinning so long.
The room my mother brought me into had posters on the walls of smiley faces. In different languages it said: point to the face that expresses the pain you are feeling. As you moved to the right, the faces became more distorted and constipated.
“When the hell did you get this?” she asked, her index finger poking at my tattoo on my upper chest.
I had just taken my shirt off and now brought it up to my neck as if she would forget it was there. “I don’t know, last summer.” She rolled her eyes.
“I don’t see much, just a little red,” she said, moving my shirt to the side. “It could just be an allergic reaction. Are you using any new body wash or something?”
“No,” I said. “It doesn’t itch right now, but it comes randomly.”
“I’ll send a doctor in,” she said. “You can take off your jeans.”
As she got to the door I called, “Mom.” She stopped and turned around. “Do you think it’s anything serious?”
“No, honey, I think you’re fine.” And that was all I needed.
I called my mom the next morning when I heard her moaning from her closed empty bedroom. She was at work. I told her I needed to asked her something. I told her I heard her on the phone last night and heard noises that I didn’t like.
She told me that she wasn’t on the phone. We sat in silence for a moment until she said, “Okay?” When I murmured in responses she said she had to get back to work and we hung up.
My mom was always able to control my sisters by telling them that their behavior wasn’t lady-like. She didn’t really believe in it but she said it because it worked.
“That’s not very lady-like of you,” my mother would shake her finger.
“Mommy,” my sisters would say, “what’s lady-like?”
“Well, honey, being a lady means you’re behaving.”
“What does it mean to be behaving?”
“You are polite, mature, and kind.”
“What makes a girl feel like a woman?”
“Well, feeling strong, empowered, beautiful.”
“Does a man make a woman feel beautiful?”
“No, honey,” said my mother. “A man does not make a woman feel beautiful.”
My sister sipped out of her juice between her gums. She just lost her two front baby teeth. “So, daddy doesn’t make you feel beautiful?”
My mother stood at the kitchen counter, her back to me and my sisters. The sink water ran, whistled down. She said something, her words left condensation on the window looking into our backyard. I saw them: “No honey,” they said. “Daddy doesn’t make me feel like a woman.”
I suppose that’s how honesty looks: like condensation on glass.
The hospital room door whined, creaked, laughed. Slowly, a hunched man entered with lanky, chimp-like arms. His beard was a thick snow, grey sputtered throughout it. On his head sat a Yamaka. His feet dragged and it seemed his bones could collapse in on themselves instantly.
Skin hung loosely from his jaw line. His face was unkempt as though it was too much work for him to shave. And he smiled at me, his two front teeth prominent, like fangs, puncturing his thin lips.
“What a strapping, young lad,” he huffed. His hand extended toward mine after he shut the door. It was such a dry hand, it held for so long, it seemed as he said, “I’m Doctor Hindel.”
My grasp evaporated. This was him? This was the man that made my mother go wild? Was she introducing me to him this way? To show me, to come to an understanding?
“Your mother,” he said, letting go of my hand, “is a great fuck.”
No, I imagined that. “Your mother,” he said, letting go of my hand, “is one of the hardest working nurses here. You should be proud of her.”
His accent was thick, somewhat German it seemed. I can’t muster up the tightening that looped itself over in my stomach. The way it dragged my body down to my ankles. His eyes were pewter, hanging. What could I feel? I could barely comprehend my mother now.
“She always talks about you.” He waved his hand like the discussion of me was in the air. His thin lips cowered together as I stretched a smile, pulled it at each end.
“So,” he began, putting on latex gloves, “let me take a look at you. Sit up.” The gloves stretched over his fingers, like spiders. I sat up straight, unable to inhale. His nails began to sift through my chest hair, pulling it to the side, combing through relentlessly. I felt something slowly carry down my throat. I forced it down faster.
He moved down through my abdomen, separating hair there, inspecting.
“Okay,” he says, stepping back. “I’m going to need you to remove your underwear so I can check your genitals. Okay?”
He stepped back as I obeyed and I thought about what he looked like as he watched my mother undress.
“Lay back on the table.”
Those fingers, the same that ran up the thighs of my mother and into her vulva. I felt the cold cushion through the paper that crinkled as I shifted. And his fingers began to press, move the shaft of my cock, lift up my balls.
And in that moment I began to think of other things, looking at the tiles of the ceiling, those smooth foam tiles with the elongated black holes, held by thin metal beams, the ones that stain yellow, bow and shift easily. They were the same ceiling tiles as the ones in our basement. The ones we threw soccer balls at to get them to move.
Then I thought about clouds. I thought about all the clouds and tried to remember their names, and how we had to memorize them in middle school, be able to identify them on tests by black and white pictures, and how pointless that was. Nimbus, cirrus, stratus, nimbostratus, cumulonimbus, altostratus, I said in my head. I tried to remember their altitudes. I tried to remember what they looked like, what the wispy ones were called; those were my favorite. The ones that looked like spread white paint, or long hairs from the beard of God. That’s how my mom described them.
“Okay,” he said, “you can put your clothes back on and I’ll go get your mother.”
An icy gust crawled up my skin from the air conditioner in the lone vent in the room as he left. I didn’t itch.
My mother was on her hands and knees scrubbing my toilet, my bathtub. She spoke to me the same. She wore thick, plastic gloves that nearly reached her elbows as she sprayed my desk, counter tops, and vacuumed the couch. Even as she took my sheets and put them in a large trash bag, she still spoke to me as she did, still loved me just as she had. All my bedding in a large black bag, all my clothes in other big black bags. And she still spoke to me like she did her first son. Still the same.
And in the car she asked no questions. She just drove and spoke about other things. She didn’t mention that I had crabs not because she was embarrassed but because it didn’t matter. I was still her son, even with a new prescription in my pocket.
We stood in line at the pharmacy and when I was too embarrassed and stepped out, my mother took the paper her lover had written and waited in line for me. We walked around the city as it became dark until an hour or so had passed and we returned to the pharmacy. The bright cobalt lights of skyscrapers, their metallic glow, somehow made me feel alright, like the end of the world wasn’t near. There were no stars, just a looming moon that ducked behind glowing pearl clouds.
And then we stood in the bathroom of my apartment, my bare ass facing my mother as I rubbed a thick cream all over my body, through my chest hair, around my pelvis. With a new set of gloves she rubbed my back with some in the areas I couldn’t reach. The tiles were cold, but her hands were warm. I just stared at the sink, letting the water run to warm for me to wash my hands at the end.
Then she asked me if I was hungry and I told her no and that she should head home; it was nearly midnight. And even then, even still, she kissed me like a mother does, with mounds of trash bags at her ankles, and I was naked except for a pair of white socks, standing in the living room in the golden haze of a lamp. And I thought how damn lucky my father was that he got to marry this woman, that she said yes. She carried his children, carried them as if they were always newborns, as light as wisps of wind, as though we bore no weight at all.
When I google searched Jonah Hindel I found out he was a dermatologist at the hospital where my mother worked. I wondered if they fucked in the building, in his office, or in her car in the parking lot. These were the things my fourteen year old self thought about.
A sixty-three year old man paid me a hundred dollars to let him choke me with a belt as he got off. My eyes were blood-shot as I left the hotel room, staring up at the gold mirrors on the ceiling of the elevator, soft, gentle dings in my ears, and catching blurred glimpses of the city skyline, the sun still up, the buildings still dulled. Nobody asked questions. Nobody really cared.
I do this a lot. It’s amazing how simple it is to enter a hotel. How nonchalantly you find the elevators, like you know where it is you’re going. How smoothly they all ascend, the dark, polyurethane wood and your timid reflection saying that it’s okay to turn around now.
Sometimes I wish the elevator never stopped ascending, that it would just travel on and I’d never have to figure out which hallway I head down and which door I knock on. If it just kept going then it would be alright. But it’s cash. And I’ve got collegiate loans to pay.
My mother always looked younger than she was. Everyone said it. And that we looked alike. My parents were fourteen years apart, unaffectionate mostly. My mother liked to sing, she liked to dance around the house.
I once stole a photograph from an album my mom had. I did this after I knew she was cheating on my father. It’s a picture from 1986. It was before I was in existence, before I was being talked about. Likely, I was thought about.
My mom is sort of straddling my father at a table. She looks thin, her hair dark as a shadow, and my father has no wrinkles, all his hair, and the same smile. He’s laughing, his tinted, large glasses nearly falling off his face. One of his hands is on my mother’s lower back. My mom is wearing white pants and I can clearly see a dark colored thong through them.
This was youth, proof of love, I thought. So I kept it, held it.
A rash. A deep, crimson rash formed at my belly button and began to travel up my happy trail, down my happy trail, and spread. It itched after hot showers. It itched and I can’t remember how terribly.
“Did you put cortisone on it?” my mom asked during my desperation call.
“Yeah.”
“And it didn’t help?”
“Only for a little bit.”
“Okay,” she inhaled. “What days are you off? I can have you come into the clinic to get you looked at.”
My mother’s hospital isn’t regal. It towers, but it has the looming stature of a prison. Possibly because some prisoners do go there for their appointments. Generally, it’s for underserved people, drug addicts, and those with mental disorders. My mom has been kicked, punched, threatened.
I stood outside and waited for her, against a brightly colored mural with waves of pastel streaks cutting through a dark face. My mom said it was the most hideous thing there was to the building: the only color on it.
A rugged man limped over to me, his dark hair on the verge of graying, in half dreadlocks. “Do you have a cigarette?” he asked me.
“No, sorry,” I responded. “I don’t smoke.”
“It’s cool.” He stood next to me for a moment and then said. “Do you have a lighter?”
“No, I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay.” He shifted his weight to his good leg, shuffled about. “Man, I miss Michael Jackson.”
I looked toward him, his face studying the concrete. “Yeah, me too,” I said.
I followed my mom down yellowed hallways. The lights were fluorescent, accenting the pollen colored bricks and dingy ceiling tiles. I hadn’t seen my mom in a few months. But she was as she always had been. She hugged me, kissed me on the bearded cheek.
She introduced me to several colleagues with pride. Her oldest son, just finished graduating college, yes that big university in the city.
“Wow,” they said, “Congrats.”
Mothers always maintain a sense of pride in their child.
One woman, youthful and tan, rubbed my shoulder and said, “Is this him?” to my mother. “I held you when you were just born,” she exclaimed. “Now look at you, all rugged and handsome.”
My cheeks were sore from grinning so long.
The room my mother brought me into had posters on the walls of smiley faces. In different languages it said: point to the face that expresses the pain you are feeling. As you moved to the right, the faces became more distorted and constipated.
“When the hell did you get this?” she asked, her index finger poking at my tattoo on my upper chest.
I had just taken my shirt off and now brought it up to my neck as if she would forget it was there. “I don’t know, last summer.” She rolled her eyes.
“I don’t see much, just a little red,” she said, moving my shirt to the side. “It could just be an allergic reaction. Are you using any new body wash or something?”
“No,” I said. “It doesn’t itch right now, but it comes randomly.”
“I’ll send a doctor in,” she said. “You can take off your jeans.”
As she got to the door I called, “Mom.” She stopped and turned around. “Do you think it’s anything serious?”
“No, honey, I think you’re fine.” And that was all I needed.
I called my mom the next morning when I heard her moaning from her closed empty bedroom. She was at work. I told her I needed to asked her something. I told her I heard her on the phone last night and heard noises that I didn’t like.
She told me that she wasn’t on the phone. We sat in silence for a moment until she said, “Okay?” When I murmured in responses she said she had to get back to work and we hung up.
My mom was always able to control my sisters by telling them that their behavior wasn’t lady-like. She didn’t really believe in it but she said it because it worked.
“That’s not very lady-like of you,” my mother would shake her finger.
“Mommy,” my sisters would say, “what’s lady-like?”
“Well, honey, being a lady means you’re behaving.”
“What does it mean to be behaving?”
“You are polite, mature, and kind.”
“What makes a girl feel like a woman?”
“Well, feeling strong, empowered, beautiful.”
“Does a man make a woman feel beautiful?”
“No, honey,” said my mother. “A man does not make a woman feel beautiful.”
My sister sipped out of her juice between her gums. She just lost her two front baby teeth. “So, daddy doesn’t make you feel beautiful?”
My mother stood at the kitchen counter, her back to me and my sisters. The sink water ran, whistled down. She said something, her words left condensation on the window looking into our backyard. I saw them: “No honey,” they said. “Daddy doesn’t make me feel like a woman.”
I suppose that’s how honesty looks: like condensation on glass.
The hospital room door whined, creaked, laughed. Slowly, a hunched man entered with lanky, chimp-like arms. His beard was a thick snow, grey sputtered throughout it. On his head sat a Yamaka. His feet dragged and it seemed his bones could collapse in on themselves instantly.
Skin hung loosely from his jaw line. His face was unkempt as though it was too much work for him to shave. And he smiled at me, his two front teeth prominent, like fangs, puncturing his thin lips.
“What a strapping, young lad,” he huffed. His hand extended toward mine after he shut the door. It was such a dry hand, it held for so long, it seemed as he said, “I’m Doctor Hindel.”
My grasp evaporated. This was him? This was the man that made my mother go wild? Was she introducing me to him this way? To show me, to come to an understanding?
“Your mother,” he said, letting go of my hand, “is a great fuck.”
No, I imagined that. “Your mother,” he said, letting go of my hand, “is one of the hardest working nurses here. You should be proud of her.”
His accent was thick, somewhat German it seemed. I can’t muster up the tightening that looped itself over in my stomach. The way it dragged my body down to my ankles. His eyes were pewter, hanging. What could I feel? I could barely comprehend my mother now.
“She always talks about you.” He waved his hand like the discussion of me was in the air. His thin lips cowered together as I stretched a smile, pulled it at each end.
“So,” he began, putting on latex gloves, “let me take a look at you. Sit up.” The gloves stretched over his fingers, like spiders. I sat up straight, unable to inhale. His nails began to sift through my chest hair, pulling it to the side, combing through relentlessly. I felt something slowly carry down my throat. I forced it down faster.
He moved down through my abdomen, separating hair there, inspecting.
“Okay,” he says, stepping back. “I’m going to need you to remove your underwear so I can check your genitals. Okay?”
He stepped back as I obeyed and I thought about what he looked like as he watched my mother undress.
“Lay back on the table.”
Those fingers, the same that ran up the thighs of my mother and into her vulva. I felt the cold cushion through the paper that crinkled as I shifted. And his fingers began to press, move the shaft of my cock, lift up my balls.
And in that moment I began to think of other things, looking at the tiles of the ceiling, those smooth foam tiles with the elongated black holes, held by thin metal beams, the ones that stain yellow, bow and shift easily. They were the same ceiling tiles as the ones in our basement. The ones we threw soccer balls at to get them to move.
Then I thought about clouds. I thought about all the clouds and tried to remember their names, and how we had to memorize them in middle school, be able to identify them on tests by black and white pictures, and how pointless that was. Nimbus, cirrus, stratus, nimbostratus, cumulonimbus, altostratus, I said in my head. I tried to remember their altitudes. I tried to remember what they looked like, what the wispy ones were called; those were my favorite. The ones that looked like spread white paint, or long hairs from the beard of God. That’s how my mom described them.
“Okay,” he said, “you can put your clothes back on and I’ll go get your mother.”
An icy gust crawled up my skin from the air conditioner in the lone vent in the room as he left. I didn’t itch.
My mother was on her hands and knees scrubbing my toilet, my bathtub. She spoke to me the same. She wore thick, plastic gloves that nearly reached her elbows as she sprayed my desk, counter tops, and vacuumed the couch. Even as she took my sheets and put them in a large trash bag, she still spoke to me as she did, still loved me just as she had. All my bedding in a large black bag, all my clothes in other big black bags. And she still spoke to me like she did her first son. Still the same.
And in the car she asked no questions. She just drove and spoke about other things. She didn’t mention that I had crabs not because she was embarrassed but because it didn’t matter. I was still her son, even with a new prescription in my pocket.
We stood in line at the pharmacy and when I was too embarrassed and stepped out, my mother took the paper her lover had written and waited in line for me. We walked around the city as it became dark until an hour or so had passed and we returned to the pharmacy. The bright cobalt lights of skyscrapers, their metallic glow, somehow made me feel alright, like the end of the world wasn’t near. There were no stars, just a looming moon that ducked behind glowing pearl clouds.
And then we stood in the bathroom of my apartment, my bare ass facing my mother as I rubbed a thick cream all over my body, through my chest hair, around my pelvis. With a new set of gloves she rubbed my back with some in the areas I couldn’t reach. The tiles were cold, but her hands were warm. I just stared at the sink, letting the water run to warm for me to wash my hands at the end.
Then she asked me if I was hungry and I told her no and that she should head home; it was nearly midnight. And even then, even still, she kissed me like a mother does, with mounds of trash bags at her ankles, and I was naked except for a pair of white socks, standing in the living room in the golden haze of a lamp. And I thought how damn lucky my father was that he got to marry this woman, that she said yes. She carried his children, carried them as if they were always newborns, as light as wisps of wind, as though we bore no weight at all.