Sometimes I feel like the world has pole vaulted over me.
An excerpt from Fade Into You:
My grandpa’s from Echo Park. He grew up on Carroll Street, in a rundown apartment. They’d come over from Canada, the part that’s above Washington. They were French, Spanish. The last name changed somewhere along the way. Became Darling. Can’t tell you how exactly but I’ve made up tons of fun stories. Spread them thick around town. It’s a thing do when people ask. But that doesn’t matter anyway because my grandpa’s family never talked about before California. They’d cut that part out like a cancer. We burned the tip like a shoelace, made a hard gnarled new closure so the past won’t unravel.
This I do know, here’s the truth and you’ve got no choice to believe me but I’ll tell you what, I wouldn’t lie about it anyway because I think it’s cool. Were in the social registry. When Junipera Sera and his long lineage of Padre’s took off down the highway of old news and Pio Pico rode into town with his books and architecture my great, great grandfather stood in line to record our shit. We exist. I’ll tell you that.
Alta California, my girl. My woman. Queen. Open your legs and give birth to this dirty nonsense. This muck rucking nest of black magic and flickering film reels. You unforgiving greedy plot of flowers. You empty desert. You cotton ball dipped in sand. My history lies with you. I’ll make hands to that. I’ll spray paint my name across a slip of a boy to claim you. A stocky rod. A silver, shining, sad, eyed boy. Brown. White tube socks in Nike chanclas. Tiny pin pricks up and down his mocha arms. Yellow crust around the outsides of his mouth. Thick tongue trying to moisten up. SGV scarred and scabbed blue into the skin. Old English. Let’s take him. Let’s eat him alive, you and me.
1995
