Rockers



Seems like yesterday when Jeanie and I took the long drive out of Brooklyn in her beat-up Volvo, Vulva she called it, heading wherever she said, which turned out to be down South to her cousin's digs, sultry and green, July heat steaming off the grass like smoke. The next afternoon we were all sprawled on the lawn, sharing a joint on a knoll behind their white house, looked like a toy model of a plantation house, a block-shaped falling-apart thing with columns and a sleeping porch, a doll plantation-house. Made me damn horny, I got to say, our wherever road trip, the heat, music, the weed, which Jeanie said was OK to smoke, me being pregnant and all, because it was natural, she said, grew in the ground, you harvest it like soy beans or corn. Six months gone, belly spooling over unzipped jeans like a popover.
Don't recall the Georgia dude's name or even his face, only that I balled him that night in some smoky little room off a bigger room where the others were partying, the music thumping—Can't you see, oh can't you see? That song, some guy wailing about what a woman did to him. We said ball in those days; fuck is what you say now, the Germanic ficken, meaning "to strike."
Who was he, anyway? Jeanie's friend of a friend of her cousin, or maybe cousin of a friend's friend? This man I pulled into some little room with its little bed, and curtains all around the bed—I don't think there was even a door, just faded paisley curtains the color of cooked shrimp, and our lust separating us from the rest. Why were we so psyched for paisley back then? Looked like creepy little eyeless seahorses. And who was I to get some anonymous babe into this bed that wasn't mine, a stranger's house, my belly thrust out like a beach ball between us so he couldn't climb on top of me or me on him, because it might pop, Jeanie said. So instead we did it spooning, this man behind me ramming, and I rocked and rocked and rocked myself back against him.
I could've rocked the world in those days. It was like I had this ocean in me, waves of it sweeping me one way then the other, made me crazy sometimes, like I could never be still or settled or know what the hell I was feeling from one swell to the next. Like having your own earthquake where the earth underneath you goes liquid all of a sudden, and the ground you believed was solid swells up under and around you in little waves, and you'd rock and rock then rock some more. I figured that's what we'd do, the baby and me, we'd rock, then I'd feed it and we'd rock some more. After that... what? I admit I hadn't thought it through, what happens when you and your baby belong to each other for the rest of your lives. I thought having him would resolve me. Though to be honest that was an afterthought, after the baby was already swimming in my ocean like a tiny turtle who'd hatched on the beach, then scuttled over the sand to the sea in search of home.
We fell asleep together, this stranger and me, and sometime in the pre-dawn hour when it was still dark, I opened my eyes slowly, knowing there was light coming behind this darkness that would grow brighter, the darkness dimmer, thinning like an old man's hair, the sun rising whether we wanted it or not. In those days mostly not, because then we'd have to face whatever it was we slept to forget, our loneliness, our insufficiencies, our regrets, counting on whoever we slept with to hold us tight in the dark, before dissolving in the light like a smoke ring—poof. The music stopped, the dawn bled in and he was gone.
Later that morning Jeanie fired up the Volvo and we headed home to Brooklyn, the little magnolia tree I bought at a roadside stand, to plant for the baby's father in the miniature courtyard behind our apartment, propped up on the backseat. If he ever came around again, he'd see it, flowers from Georgia. I pictured them white and waxy with a heady scent, like a lotus blossom maybe, which symbolizes luck and perseverance. I read that in a fortune cookie once. Somewhere in North Carolina we picked up a hitchhiker who stayed with us through New Jersey, making out with Jeanie in the back beside my tree while I drove.
It never did bloom, that magnolia tree, dried up and died weeks after it was planted. Maybe it was because of our harsh Brooklyn soil? I imagined iron shavings, bits of glass, old needles, the scars of the city in this tiny spitball of a courtyard, where only pigeons and sparrows the color of dirt came now and then, when Jeanie tossed out breadcrumbs to draw them in. But Jeanie said no, that the Southern soil was worse, fouled with the blood of slavery. No pretty tree can atone for that, she said. Of course, Brooklyn then wasn't Brooklyn now. People like us couldn't live there now. Nowadays more Brooklyn residents can afford to sanitize their courtyards, their neighborhoods, renovate old buildings like ours, which is another way of saying tear it down and build it new, extravagant, exclusive, Caucasian.
I let the bones of that magnolia tree remain in the ground, a perch for those wayward pigeons and sparrows. In another month my son would be born, and on a warm fall evening with the scent of colder days on the horizon, Jeanie and I will bring him out to our little courtyard, sit side-by-side on the wrought iron bench she picked up at the flea market for such occasions, and rocking them both in my arms we will watch the night come in.