Carmine's Gumbi Recipe

PREFACE: This is a version of the signature dish from the now shuttered Carmine's Italian Restaurant in Pasadena and Arcadia. I used to work there when I was 19, and this dish was a staple amongst my friend group. When they closed, the recipe was lost. Nothing comes up on Google or Yelp other than a few people looking for the same thing. I haven't had it in at least three years; so, using the brief description from their old menu, I decided to try and figure it out myself. I got pretty close. I used the trusty marinara recipe that my best friend taught me years ago and a meatball recipe that I adapted from Matty Matheson's recipe. You can see my original journey cooking the Gumbi on my Instagram story highlights here: https://www.instagram.com/stories/highlights/17881040629671984/

FOR THE MARINARA

Olive Oil
1 Yellow Onion
4-5 Garlic Cloves
1 tin of FLAT Anchovies (not Rolled!)
One small can of Tomato Paste
Dried Oregano
Red Pepper Flakes
Salt and Pepper
Splash of Red Wine
2 LARGE cans of San Marzano Tomatoes (I like whole, but crushed works as well)
1 LARGE (or 2 medium) cans of good tomato sauce

1. Coat the bottom of a heavy pot with olive oil and turn heat to medium.
2. Dice your onion and garlic. You’ll blend the sauce, so a rough chop is fine.
3. Sweat the onions slowly. DO NOT BROWN THEM. Just trying to get them clear.
4. Add your garlic after about 4-5 minutes, so it doesn’t burn.
5. Season with salt, pepper, red pepper flakes, and about a 2 tablespoons of dried oregano.
6. Cook for another 2-3 minutes, moving everything around with your spoon the entire time.
7. Add the entire can of tomato paste and cook for 4-5 minutes.
8. Add the ENTIRE tin of anchovies with their oil.
9. Once the anchovies very sadly disintegrate, turn the heat up and add a splash or two of read wine. It’ll sound SO good. Keep everything moving for another few minutes until the all that’s left is this beautiful deep red sludge of tomatoey goodness.
10. Open up your cans of tomatoes and sauce and add them in.
11. Turn the sauce all the way to LOW. And let it cook for SLOWLY for about 90 minutes OR MORE if you have the time.
12. Scrape the bottom of the pot about every 15 minutes, so the tomatoes don’t burn. It’s tedious but worth it!

NOTE: you can stop here and have a DELICIOUS sauce with some pasta of your choice and some Parmesan cheese and a parsley garnish, and you would be absolutely happy, but let’s keep going.*

ANOTHER NOTE: You can serve the sauce like this, unblended with big beautiful San Marzano tomatoes nice and soft, but for the purposes of this dish, we will blend it.*

FOR THE MEATBALLS

1 lb. of 80/20 ground beef
1 lb. of ground pork
1/2 lb. of mild Italian sausage
1 slice of white bread or sourdough bread
2-3 eggs
1/2 cup of milk
1 cup Bread Crumbs
Red Pepper Flakes
Salt and Pepper
1 1/2 cup of shredded Parmesan Cheese
Olive Oil

1. Soak bread in the milk for a couple of minutes.
2. Add all the meats, the milk/bread mix, eggs, bread crumbs, about a tablespoon or more of red pepper flakes, salt and pepper, a tablespoon or two of olive oil and Parmesan into a BIG bowl.
3. Mash around with your hands until everything is WELL incorporated. This is gross. I know.
4. The mixture should be JUST wet enough for the meatballs together. If it feels too dry, add the third egg or a little more milk. If it’s too wet, add a bit more bread crumbs.
5. Roll up the meatballs into about half a fist, maybe a bit more.
6. Heat a NONSTICK pot with A LOT of olive oil over MEDIUM HIGH heat. The oil should coat the entire bottom.
7. BROWN BOTH sides of your ALL of your meatballs. DO NOT cook them all the way through. JUST brown them. You’ll get this BEAUTIFUL sizzle sound that is the best thing ever.
8. Add your meatballs into your marinara sauce! The meatballs should cook AT LEAST 60 minutes in the sauce.

ANOTHER NOTE: You can AGAIN stop here and serve this as pasta and meatballs, and you would be absolutely happy that you did so. Maybe make a little garlic bread? Have a glass or seven of wine?*

FOR THE GUMBI

2 cups of your homemade marinara, BLENDED
2-3 diced up homemade meatballs
2 cups of shredded low-moisture mozzarella
1 1/2 tbsp of unsalted butter
Rigatoni
Diced Parsley or Basil
Parmesan
Baby Portobello Mushrooms (OPTIONAL)

1. Bring water to a boil and salt the water. Cook your pasta about ONE MINUTE less than the HIGHEST time your box suggests.
2. In a sauce pan, heat about a tablespoon of olive oil.
3. Toss in your marinara sauce.
4. Toss in your butter and mix the two until the butter melts.
5. Toss in your meatballs (and, if you want them, your mushrooms; I prefer it without).
6. Season with a little salt.
7. When your pasta is done, toss about two servings worth it into the sauce mixture.
8. Mix real well and THEN add your mozzarella cheese and basil or parsley.
9. Mix around until everything is well incorporated (It took about 4 minutes for me).
10. Serve on pretty plates and top with grated Parmesan (Carmine’s used the nasty green tub stuff, but I like fresh parm).

BOOM. You made Carmine's Gumbi! If you're only here for this recipe, cool. I hope you enjoy making it and you share with your family and friends and people you love. If you feel inclined to do so, feel free to follow me on Instagram (http://instagram.com/timfinitely) and let me know how you liked the recipe or if you have any suggestions for improving. If you have time, peruse my website and check out some of my writing, which is absolutely nothing like this recipe! Maybe you'll like it though and tell your friends about it, and I'll finally get a book deal? WHO KNOWS. Or maybe this will blow up, and I'll begrudgingly quit teaching to focus on becoming a food YouTuber and writer. I don't know, dude.

"Searching for My Love"

## One

*Three hits of a floor tom*. 

I would sit in the middle seat of our rusting Subaru, my feet perched on the hump of the car’s floor. I would tap my hand on the seat between my legs. I want to remember if my dad is driving here, but the memory is dim. 

I want to remember a lot of him. There are bits and pieces:

I. Breakfast on Saturday mornings. Crispy bacon and perfectly fried potatoes. Overcooked scrambled eggs. He was a conductor of an orchestra of stainless steel pans. I hated yolks but asked for over-easy eggs. I would dip my bacon and toss the leftovers.

II. Ma yells at me for using the word “Homie.” Turns to Dad, “Is he getting that bullshit from you?” she says. “No,” dad says. “See, this is the kind of shit you bring home. Where’d you hear that, Timothy?” 

“The Ninja Turtles,” I say and start to cry. 

III. His sweaty hands on a shifter. We wait on the wrong side of a building for Ma. I tell him this is the right place. I am sure of it. I have been here with her so many times before. But she never comes out of the door. It is not the correct side of the building.

Memory is made of faulty machinery. You pull out cords from the switchboard, criss cross and confuse the cables, connect them back to the wrong plugs.  They all fit wherever they are placed. You don’t even have to make them fit. So the cords stay right where you misplaced them. 

Lines misconnected. 

Ma gets in the car. An hour too late. 

Someone reaches their hand out to the volume knob. Turns Bobby Moore so loud, no one person can hear the other. 

## Two

*I’m searching, searching for my baby. Yes I am.*  

“Ohhhhhh,” Ma belts out with a smile. “That’s me and your daddy’s song.

“Bust out the straight shots.” 

A vacuum handle in one hand, she places the other on her side, where muscle and bone bleed through her tan shirt. I can see the shape of her.

She dances along, sliding one foot across my tiled floor. 

“Turn it up, mijo!” she says. 

When they talk now, she calls my father *mijo* as well. He picks up shifts at a discount store, stocking the shelves with cheap home goods. He owns a cat that he ties to a tree outside his duplex apartment. He is clean and divorced. 

“How do you know what songs to play?” Ma asks me.

“I don’t,” I lie to her. “The computer chooses them.”

## Three

*I’m searching, searching for my love.* 

I wonder about the person who invented erasable ink. 1979. I wonder if he had a desk, if she wore a pantsuit to work each day.  I wonder for how long she tooled, for how many days he mixed whatever it is that ink is made from. 

What did the tests look like? Papers etched with words, phrases, sentences. Some half faded. Some— the failed prototypes— remain a deep black. 

But there’s one. The corner of the page. The word *sunflower* has been half erased. Charcoal-colored rubber remnants splayed out. The excitement got to her; he couldn’t wait to show his colleagues. 

*I think I got it.*

Millions were likely spent. Hundreds of thousands, surely. Ream upon ream of paper, from wood, from trees, from dirt. Overtime hours and Saturday mornings. The lights in the building would go off at a certain hour every night. It would be something they could never attach their name to. 

The time. Converted to seconds. Overwhelmed them. 

All to make something only *look* permanent. 

## Four

*I’m searching for the one I adore.* 

“You have to understand, Timothy: how I love your daddy is just very different.” Ma says this as we drive through the Angeles Forest, the cut-through road we take to my sister’s house in Palmdale. These winding roads, when I was six years old, unsettled my stomach; I vomited out of the back window of a rental car. Fourteen now, and my stomach is more well equipped.

I know why she feels this conversation necessary. After an extra whiskey and water on ice the night before, she made a call to Dad. Expressed sympathies to him perhaps ten years too late. *I love and miss you so much, mijo.*

“I get it, Ma,” I say. But this exchange feels more for her than for me. 

I think about it too often. Dad and his phencyclidine pills in the park. He’d come home fucked and stay in the garage, wait it out for Ma to leave for work, avoiding her eyes and words. Two pointed fingers at his face. On weekends, Ma drinks enough strawberry wine coolers to remember how to dance. Leaves me in my sister’s room while oldies boom in the backyard. Ma packs the house up into a truck when I turn seven and puts the old dog to sleep. *He’d never be able to handle the move,* she tells me.

If there are an infinite number of universes, is there a universe in which my father kicks the habit and continues to build airplanes? Is there a universe where his hair never grays? Is there a universe where my mother stops counting how many times she wipes the legs of our dining room table for dust? Is there a universe with a fix? One where the house on Almadale Avenue and its large front window are never broken? One where a plastic phone is never tossed hard enough to dent the drywall? A universe where, under bushes in my neighbor’s backyard, I don’t use action figures to create a new family. A turtle and a newscaster. Their almond infant. 

Ma will drive home tonight. She will go to bed at 8PM after three whiskey and waters. She will lie on the opposite end of a California King from her now husband. He will snore.

The universe we have is the one that we have. There’s a void of gravity between. 

## Five

*And if I find her, you know I will, I’ll never never let her go. No, no, no, no, no, no, no.* 

“Every object in space exerts a gravitational pull on every other.” 

*Every* object. 

Without this pull, we would all be floating. Physics 101. 

What an image. 

How long would it take to get used to the floating? Would there some peace in knowing that we would be taken wherever we would? That we would be free from connection to the ground. No place steady to set our feet.

A panic might set in. We might long for the force. 

“Every object in space exerts a gravitational pull on every other. So gravity influences the paths taken by everything traveling through space.”

We have no say in the attraction. The gravity. It traps oxygen. Traps water. Traps dirt. Traps our bodies. Holds them all to the Earth. 

Like a well-meaning god. Clumped and dirty hair like ours. She holds us together so much as she can. She hovers her hands around the speckled universe she’s forged, trying desperately to keep it all in place. Beads of sweat down her brow. She shakes. She looks in the mirror and groans just like us. Her hair grays like ours. The muscles under her skin retreat and create ridges on her face. She wonders if her thoughts belong to her or belong to synapses and neurotransmitters. She wonders what is her and what is not. She sometimes spends an extra hour in bed.

She works alone.

She wakes up and holds us in place. *Stay there, child.* she says, floating her palms around us. *Stay there.*

Uncle James: An Audio Essay

A glossy flyer reads Vote for Jimmy Gomez on my Uncle's refrigerator. It hangs askew, held loosely by a round magnet. When my father opens the refrigerator, I see three Coronas and four medication containers. A graduate of Harvard, Gomez represents the 51st Assembly District for California, the area that includes El Sereno, the small Los Angeles neighborhood that I grew up in and where my uncle lives.

Or lived.

Uncle Jimmy wasn't necessarily a supporter of the Assemblyman. They merely share the same name.

"The dumbass probably got a kick out of that," my cousin says, smiling.

It's hard to choose verbs for the dead. I see this right away.

We all fumble with was and is. Both seem correct. What I mean is he is still in his room on the other side of the apartment, half covered by a navy blue sheet, the room filled with relatives I've seen but hardly remember. His skin is cooling but not yet cold.

His tattoos still faded on his arms.

"What are they gonna do with the birds?" someone asks my dad.

"I think Arthur's gonna take them," he replies. Two birds perched on a wooden bar in a covered cage. They’re quiet. I hear them adjust their wings every few minutes, but they never chirp from under a dirty shower towel.

Here, I am introduced as a coda. "It's Timothy," my father says to puzzled looking family members. I shake their hands.

"Oh yeah," they all say. "You were just a tiny thing last time I saw you." They hover their hands low just above the grey carpet to signify size.

Dad says, "Come on, mijo, he's over here."

In the room, there are more cousins. More uncles. An aunt. Uncle Jimmy is wearing a hoodie cut at the neck and blue basketball shorts. He's on his back and looks asleep. His belly looks like it's about to burst.

"He thought he was just gaining weight," my dad says. "But that was one of the symptoms. It’s swelling."

In the room, I try to forge tears. From somewhere. From a memory of my uncle that I can't recall. Or memories that aren't mine. Him in the front seat of an old Chevy, my brother in the passenger. Billy Stewart songs on the radio.

I imagine him closing his eyes slightly, slouched back in his seat, snapping off-time to every other beat. An imitation Kangol hat and his graying mustache.

Sittin' in the park. Waiting for you.

I can feel pressure in my cheeks but nothing. No tears. This is my brother’s memory. Not mine. In fact, It's hard to tell if what I've built from my brother's stories is accurate or merely a mix of reality and clichéd images from Oldies compilations etched permanently into my brain.

Here are other memories I don't remember:

One. Once a week, before she died, Jimmy would walk his mother, my Grandma Hortence, to the market for groceries.

They'd walk slowly, carefully. My grandma's energy is now focused mostly in her voice and eyes, no longer in her legs.

Two. He checks out of the hospital on Friday and he’s dead on Monday

Three. My uncle had a wife. I don't know her name. They divorced when I was too young to remember, or maybe before I was even born. My mother will scoff when she doesn't show to the services. But, from what I gather, no one is surprised.

In the room, a small love seat. A bed. An urn with my grandmother's ashes set on a table in front of a frame of a sloppily put together collage of pictures. Grandma is young in some, her hair black and full. In another, she is sitting on a bed next to my grandfather, his mustache pencil thin, both smiling like movie stars. In another, her hair is gray at the roots, and she's slouched slightly.

There’s a rosary is hung on the corner of the frame.

"He was such a shit sometimes," another cousin says to another uncle.

"Yeah man. All he did was joke. Then he'd get people pissed off at him. A week later, he'd call and be like 'Ay you don't come around no more or what?'"

My dad places his hand on the bedpost but doesn't look at his brother. He looks out the small window beside him, out across the hills of our old blocks. Stillwell Ave. and Tampico. Almont St. and Barrett Rd. The remodeled McDonald's that he used to take me to after school every day. I wonder what comes to mind for him. Chilly nights when they'd rub their hands together over a bonfire and get stoned?

"All the shit I did, and he's the one that goes," my dad finally says. "My little brother."

I feel my uncle's cheek with the back of my hand, expecting his skin to feel different than mine. But the stubble from not shaving remains rough. What's going on in there? I think. To say that the booze kills him isn't accurate. Aspirin does. But aspirin is prescribed because of the Cirrhosis and the Cirrhosis is because of the booze. He takes a bottle a day, sometimes more. And the tablets eat at the lining of his stomach from the inside out.

The cousins begin to discuss burial options. "We'll spread the ashes in Vegas. He'd want that."

"Listen, I don't give a shit what happens,” my dad says to the others. “I just want a little bit of my brother's ashes. Just a tiny bit. Even if it's just a small thing to wear on my neck.” He begins to sob. "You can do whatever the fuck you want with the rest, man, but no one's going to keep that from me. My little brother."

I've never seen my dad like this. For the first time, the room feels tense. He hugs my Aunt Vera, bawling into her shoulder.

This, more than anything, brings a rush to my head. I am reminded of photographs I've seen throughout the years.

One. Dad and Jimmy holding my mother between them and laughing, her hair bleached and blonde.

Two. The four brothers. Jimmy. Louie. Arthur. Al. Side by side. Arms around each other, except Al who stands to the side with sunglasses. Tall and skinny and white hair.

Three. A wall of booze and a bar. My uncle Jimmy, no more than fourteen, chubby with mushroom hair, grasps a glass bottle.

It doesn't dawn on me until today that his real name is James. James Gomez. A name much different than Uncle Jimmy-- the only name I've ever known. That name-- James-- it wraps around my cerebrum. It finds its way through both hemispheres. It drags a smokey trail behind it. Fat fingers and a kid who didn't do well in school. White t-shirts.

James. Its letters curve about my cerebellum. The happy youngest of all the boys. A man holding the palm of his bride.

I see it all in the ink on his arms. The hair he was starting to finally lose. Was his belly set to burst or was it merely blooming?

I cannot see my dad's face lodged into my aunt's body.

"He thought he was alone," he coughs out through tears, hugging Vera. "But he wasn't alone. I lived right down the street."

Sitting in the park, waiting for—

The Missing Piece

/“Love does not consist of gazing at each other, but in looking outward together in the same direction.”/ — Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

I wrote a piece a couple of years ago called “Pietà”. /Wrote a piece/ is strange wording, however, as its pieces fell together accidentally. What happened was this: I had five or so shorter pieces that I had drafted throughout the year; I liked the drafts just fine but never felt they held enough weight to become something more substantial. Then, it was a few days out from an event I was reading at with my three best friends, and I had nothing to read. I began pasting these pieces together based on an image they all shared: fire. California that year was on fire, constantly, as it always seems to be these days, and I was having a lot of feelings about it. I figured if I put all these pieces together, I might be able to forge some thinly layered meaning from it.

The pieces shared another idea: most of them revolved around the women in my life. My mother. My sister. My grandmother. My ex.

My. My. My. And that’s exactly the kind of thinking I am trying to cut at.

Anyway.

In putting these pieces together, I was reminded of a painting I saw a few months before when I was in Rhode Island with Melanie. It was titled /Pietà/. I asked Melanie about the title, and she explained that any painting that depicts Mary holding Jesus after his death is called Pietà. I was fascinated by the idea — that a scene like this had a name. And I was also fascinated, for the first time — despite being raised Catholic and surrounded by images of Jesus and the Virgin — by the idea of Mary holding her dead adult son, powerless. And I questioned this thought: why was my first instinct after seeing this image related to Mary’s powerlessness to save her son? Why was I so saddened by the fact that she couldn’t? Why did I almost feel judgmental towards her for that?

I looked back at the pieces I was writing and figured out that what I was actually writing about for the last year had less to do with fire and more to do with the role I expected women to play in my life, how I expected these complex humans to play some part in my healing, to play some part in my resurrection. And, when they weren’t able to do so, I belittled their existence, their humanity. In small but consequential ways.

/Mother, did I maybe expect too much of you?/ I eventually wrote.

I tell you this because I’ve done a lot of work to try to process and move forward from all of this. And a lot of that work came to head this year when a former partner and I attempted to fix an old relationship.

A lot of the work I’ve had to do consciously and subconsciously over the last few years has to do with matching my actions to my belief system. I could spout off all I want about my feminist beliefs but so long as I continued to only allow women in my life to exist in context to me rather than in community with me, I was merely saying the right things but not actually living them. I realized that I held a deep grudge against my mother because I attributed my lifelong suffering to her and her parenting. I realized that I expected the women I dated to save me from myself. I realized that the friends I had, prior to my mid-twenties, were merely expendable pieces in a puzzle I formulated in my mind; once someone outgrew their positioning in the puzzle, I discarded them and looked for someone else who fit that piece.

And that was the thing. In my broken mind, growth held a negative connotation. I was scared to death of growth. Mental growth. Social growth. Intellectual growth. I associated growth with abandonment. /If someone, especially a woman, outgrows me, they will leave me/ was my thought. So I did everything I could to avoid that.

I had to move past this way of thinking. Or else I’d never be able to have healthy relationships with the women in my life. I began making more intentional choices about how I interact and relate to my mother. I began to be more critical of what I asked for and expected from the women in my life. I began to lean back a little in those relationships, attempting to take less space. I began to think more consciously about what I was attracted to in people and why.

And it was important that I did this work alone and internally. This could not be work that was the responsibility of others. I could no longer be someone’s suffering son.

And I made progress.

But, as it turns out, it’s possible to over-correct.

When I entered this new-old relationship in the middle of last year, I had, though I didn’t know it at the time, deeply convinced myself that I could apply everything I had learned about myself and my mental health and my relationships to other people to this old relationship. I had grown. I had learned. I could now do better. Right?

I had convinced myself that I could heal something that a former broken version of me could not get right. I could, cliché as it may be, heal the past.

And one of those lessons that I thought I could apply was around how I relate to women.

The problem was, in trying to allow this person to be fully /herself/, I fully erased /myself/. I fully erased my needs as a person. I became, just, /blank/.

This was not intentional. And, though I felt this happening deep in my bones, I could not see in the moment the water I was swimming in. I look back now and recall memories where I felt outside of myself, where I felt nothing at all. We would eat dinner. I would cook. And I would listen. I would offer supportive language, simple rebuttals and responses. But the emotional depth that I know I’m capable of getting to in conversation with the people I love was absent.

I couldn’t get there. I lacked language. I lacked personality. I lacked me.

I had stories inside of me. I had whole universes of thoughts and opinions and critiques of everything I heard, but like a shit you hold for too long that ends up subsiding, I held everything in and then the thoughts melted away. But, really, they were collecting and creating a mucky gunk all in my insides. And it became difficult to grab on to any of them, even in situations with others.

I was spending so much of my time erasing myself for this person that I had unintentionally erased myself for everyone else as well.

And it showed. It clearly showed. One day, after weeks of this, one of my best friends sat me down and said, among other things, /You have to realize that your life affects others now. You have a godson. You have friends that you call family. And your emotional state has an impact on all of those people./

This isn’t something I’m used to. I grew up feeling very much disconnected from my family. Outside. And the thought that not just my conscious choices but the ways of being that aren’t necessarily my choice — like my emotional state — could be consequential to the people around me was completely foreign.

And so when it was clear that I could not continue erasing myself to allow someone else to exist fully in my life, I had to move on. As best I could.

I’ve thought a lot about how this experience is exactly the brand of erasure that society has asked of women in order for men to exist fully. And, in trying to account for that societal misogyny, in trying to be less toxic by leaning far out of the space of my relationship, I was being toxic in other, perhaps smaller ways. I was in so many ways making the same mistakes that I was as a kid. They just took on a different body. What I was trying to get to was a /mutual humanity/, but I was instead shrinking the humanity of this person /and/ myself.

I didn’t trust her ability to exist on an emotional level playing field with me.

I wanted to protect her from my perspective and what can often be the rough edges of two humans existing together. I was afraid that if she felt those rough edges, she would leave.

What I had successfully done with so many of the friends I had made in my adult life I was not able to do with this person.

Love /is/ rough. Existing in communion with others is exhausting and difficult work. And I wake up every day and do that work with the people I love the most. And some days it’s deeply challenging — after an argument or a disagreement or a conversation that goes awry — and I want to trash it all and move to the forest by myself. But the people — their unconditional love and my unconditional love for them — always make persisting the natural choice.

I thought that, since I had built up this network of beautiful, mutually human relationships with people that I love dearly, then I must surely be able to rebuild an old one on the same grounds. But, unfortunately, that just wasn’t possible. I can’t allow others to exist in context to me. But I also can’t exist purely in context to someone else either. There has to be a middle ground — and there is. It’s a middle ground I’ve found with so many people that I have built solid relationships with over the last ten years. Relationships where we all are able to exist fully /with/ each other, not /because/ of each other.

I read Shel Silverstein’s /The Missing Pieces Meets the Big O/ for the first time a couple of months ago at the recommendation of one of my mentors. And it resonated in ways I didn’t anticipate. The gist of the story: a missing piece tries to find where it fits in, looking for other pieces that have a missing side that complements its shape. The missing piece eventually realizes that it itself needs to become whole on its own, through intentional work, only then can it roll confidently alongside the Big O it so admires.

And I guess that’s what I’m getting at. It turns out we are not puzzle pieces in other people’s puzzles. You are not part of my puzzle. I am not part of yours. Mutual love, mutual humanity is not a piece finding its missing part but, instead, multiple parts — perhaps with differing degrees of missing elements — building a tiny universe where they can to do some searching together. Missing pieces helping each other to search under rocks, in forests, in cities. And maybe, in doing this work, they’ll grow those pieces from within themselves, from their own individual efforts.

Or maybe being in community with each other will help nurture and till the soil to grow something new where something was once void.

Or maybe they’ll /never/ be full. Maybe no one is ever actually fully. And instead, what is most healthy is to bask in the idea of our being works in progress. Forever.

And, in this, we might realize that we were always whole, alone and together.

Aliento

I.

I’m six, and our dining table is beside our kitchen. I pull out a chair, making sure to grind the bottom of its legs against the linoleum. My mother is cleaning the kitchen sink with a dirty sponge. I hit my elbows softly against the cork board table, cross my arms, and lie my chin into them.

I let out a sigh.

I count internally.

One.

Two.

Three.

Ma continues to wipe.

Another sigh. A few more decibels.

/What is it, Timothy?/

/Nothing./

One more breath in.

And one more out.

II.

In a dream last night, Jeff Goldblum tells you about the edibility of Avocados, that if you were to grow your own, — in a yard much bigger than the one you have now, on a tree of oval leaves, deeply green and veiny, that if you used the right sort of soil, watered adequately but not too much, positioned the tree to allow for just enough of the California sun — then you could eat the Avocados whole, skin and all, save for the pit. He says it with such authority, a finger tapping on the laminated table. There’s a question that precedes all of this, one that this dream does not give you any hint of.

And you take this all as a final sign that you are not depressed anymore.

That you have moved on.

Eating the avocado whole. A new aphorism, maybe.

You wonder, though, if the problem wasn’t that you never knew you couldn’t eat the skin of the Avocado.

Perhaps the problem was, instead, that the skin was all you ever ate, that you were unaware of its insides.

III.

What if a dragon’s fiery breath was actually its mating call?

Splintered cabin wood, charred to black.

/Look at what is burning inside of me./ it calls out.

/Does it also burn inside of you?/

IV.

*August Affirmations*

On your cracking leather couch, you sit across from 7. She is thinner than you remember. Her wrist bone protrudes in a new way.

/Before I start, can I give you a hug?/ you ask her. She nods.

You take a deep breath in. And as you close your eyes, you let it loose.

You took notes to prepare for this but only reference them once. The notes are not to remind you of what you have to say but to remind you not to be diverted.

You won’t know why you’re here for several weeks.

You will realize that it is no longer necessary to carry the weight that you have. You will realize, more so, that you have lived under the false understanding that you /should/ carry weight. And that such weight must be the connective tissue between you and all those you love.

You will no longer crave the attention associated purely with your suffering.

But you will also realize that you cannot write new letters into cement that has already dried.

You compare her love to a shot-put. You describe the sphere. Sixteen pounds. You did the research.

/You fling the thing and see where it lands,/ you tell her. /And wherever it lands is where you put your energy. And I have to wake up each morning, wondering if it’ll land on me./

You argue internally with this wording. /You are not entitled to anyone’s energy,/ you tell yourself.

You are not entitled to anything, except to make decisions about how you want to be loved.

You will not die alone. You will no longer laugh at the idea of dying alone.

V.

Ma teaches me the wrong words to prayers. Or at least she never corrects me.

/Lead us now into temptation,/ I say, the lights off, my hands together.

Lead us now into temptation.

VI.

Start by sitting up.

Make sure to close your eyes.

Some like to begin with the soft hum of a singing bowl.

Take one deep breath in.

And let it out through your nose.

Some might find it comforting to place a finger on their pulse. Either in their neck. Their wrist. Their heart.

Focus there. On that beating.

Let the thoughts come. Trust why they’re there.

Then let them move past you.

Begin.

VII.

*Amazing grace. How sweet the sound. To save a wretch like me.*

/Have you ever actually listened to that song,/ I ask 7. /Isn’t it weird? That there’s a religious song that acknowledges that we are — /

/Shitty people,/ 7 interrupts.

/Exactly./

VIII.

With the lights off, you see three of one hand, translucent limbs and a spotted black. You hover your hand above your wife, her small frame looks frail under cotton bedding. You dream of a river that is not a river, a concrete encasement and a string of cars in the overhang.

A line of water down its center.

The river has no flora. No fauna. But still it is capable of drowning.

You think, what if your mother was supposed to heal this perforation? And what if your mother was merely the village drunk?

La reina de El Sereno. A slurred symphony of lazy affirmations.

Her words connected like sweating bodies embracing to transfer their weight, she would look down to you in the evenings, a gown hung loose like aged skin. /Sleep with the angels, mijo,/ she’d say. /Don’t forget to say your prayers,/ she’d say.

Our Lady of Guadalupe, with vertigo.

And down Huntington Boulevard, where an island of palms towers over your old bakery, beneath the hill in the north where your aunt’s old house is replaced now, you would eat pan and stare at your coffee.

You would think of your brother. That old black and white of him at thirteen, his hand wrapped around a bottle of Seagrams. You saw him on that bed in mesh shorts, you said to your boy, /My brother, my little brother,/ and you thought of that photo.

A half tab of white.

Phencyclidine.

You came to in an alleyway, hands thawing above a newspaper flame. You wonder if your sons will inherit your curls, the soft grays between them, the way that people love you but you prefer isolation, your thin calves, your tolerance.

You wonder how to wash your hands in the puddles of river water collected in the cement banks, when it’ll only dry come morning. You have enough dirt chunked beneath your nails to nourish a bed of orchids of blue and white. You have enough soil to make a new rib all your own.

At least you swear you do.

IX.

/What is it, Timothy?/

/Nothing./

But —

What I mean to say is this:

I need to be better...

“I didn’t know I was lonely ‘til I saw your face. I didn’t know I was broken ‘til I wanted to change. I wanna get better.”

Two weeks ago, I lay in bed deflated. For a month, I had placed comfortably all of my emotional eggs in a basket known as the Los Angeles Dodgers. I do this every year to some extent, but this year, the weight of those eggs felt tenfold. What else is there to do in 2017 when everything feels as though it’s falling apart, besides grasp onto tiny — and yes, perhaps in the grand scheme of all that matters right now, otherwise meaningless — threads that may lead us to some semblance of fulfillment?

I lay in bed on the verge of tears.

Let me take a step back for a second.

I don’t cry much. I can count on two hands the amount of times I’ve cried in the last ten years. I can perhaps even list them here. The deterioration of a relationship with the person I thought I’d be with for, at the time, the next ten-fifteen-twenty years of my life. A fight with my closest family member. Figuring out the deep wounds I still had from my relationship, and lack thereof, with my father. Seeing my first godson for the first time since a sudden break-up of a relationship that I thought at the time was relatively healthy.

There have been close ones, but they’re often unpredictable and about seemingly innocuous situations. A few years ago, on a train to Bronxville to visit our old campus, two of my best friends mentioned that this person I had a passive thing for at Sarah Lawrence *may* have dated someone that I had a mild distaste for. I nearly broke down in tears, while laughing. If pressured for reasoning today, I still couldn’t tell you why. I think Melanie and Stacey’s approximate words were, “You’re in a fucked up place if you’re crying over someone you were never going to date anyway.”

Last weekend, I nearly broke down crying in a bar when someone I love deeply texted me, and it dawned on me that I had been unreasonably dismissive towards her.

I think my Comadre has described it best: “For someone who’s always talking about emotions and how people should feel them, you don’t really seem to let yourself feel them all that much. I’ve read about people who don’t cry. It’s not good.”

And it’s true. In a lot of ways, I’ve molded a perfect facade that allows me to present the *illusion of feeling* without ever really fully feeling. It goes without saying that I am a deeply, emotionally erratic, often dramatic person, but there are times when I’m still unclear about what my most genuine feelings are and which are the feelings I present merely for the reaction of others. And the line between the two is a dangerous one. It’s the difference between processing my existence in order to get to a better mental place and psychologically manipulating the people that I love. Even as I write this, I wonder if it’s for my own processing or for *your* response. It’s often hard for me to tell.

We often refer to our “monkey brains” as the innate and unchecked actions we carry out or just fathom despite logically knowing better. I think my monkey brain is directly connected to my feelings. As a child, I learned quickly how to use my emotions to get what I wanted. I knew every way around my mother’s emotions. I knew that silent treatments worked. I knew that pouting worked. I didn’t have to cry. I didn’t have to yell. All I had to do was shutdown, and this triggered her loneliness, her disconnection, and it caused her to respond in a manner that would appease me and bring me back to life. I learned this too hard. I took this skill into my teen years. My early adult years. Shit, I took it into my late twenties. Scraps of it are still inside of me right now.

I’ve spent the last five or so years of my life trying to get to a better place mentally. The start of the journey was to face some real fears I had about who I was and how I connected to people and how I cope with those fears:

1. My fear that one day every one I love will abandon me.

2. My fear that I will never matter to someone as much as they matter to me.

3. My fear that I will never fully understand and truly know the people I love.

The real trick to it all has been coming to an understanding that these things could all very well be true. And that I have to be good *anyway*. I have to be a good friend. I have to be a good brother. Son. Partner. Teacher. Human. *Anyway*. I have to do it for myself and my own stability, not as a means of avoiding the quicksand of my fears. Nothing will save me from them. And I have to be better in spite of that. I *need* to be better.

It turns out that people will leave. It turns out that I will never know how anyone feels until they work through their own shit enough to be able to tell me. Hell, most of the time it’s not even necessary for me to know. Whether it’s because it’s not my right to know or because words are not necessary. Love isn’t only shown in words. And, most of all, love is not quantifiable. It is not my love versus your love. There is no scale for love. No Lady Justice. I can only love my best and hope to fill my life with people who love their best.

I’ve spent the better part of my life in search of the perfect words for imperfect feelings. But something as complex, as ever-evolving as what we feel can have nothing so concrete as words assigned to it .

And I need to go about life knowing all of this.

I need to feel. More genuinely.

I need to cry more.

I need to tell people I love them because it’s the right thing to do, not because I expect to hear it back.

So I lay in bed, on the verge of tears two weeks ago. The Dodgers just pummeled after holding their own for six games. And, as I described it to friends, it was like having the dam that held my emotions needle-pinned with tiny holes. Over and over again. Such a small, inconsequential thing. But everything came pouring out bit by bit. And I took it out on the people I loved, the ones closest in proximity. Because, as it turns out, I’ve worked so much to manipulate my own feelings that I still have a hard time knowing what to do with the real ones. So many things I truly feel are held up by a wall of things I *think* I feel.

I need to be better than this. I need to be better in two ways: 1. In that I need to improve every day, forgive myself when I don’t and move forward. I need to constantly do the work. But, more importantly, 2. I need to be a more healthy person. And even when it’s hard, even when I need to push away a flood of shit to get to it, I need to wake up in the morning, and I need to make my bed. I need to cook some food. I need to wash my dishes. I need to take a walk outside. I need to call my friends. I need to drink less, even when I feel like I’m already drinking less. I need to eat better. I need to be a productive human. I need to respond to the family group text more often. I need to say *I love you* more often. I need to take more pictures. I need to shave more often. I need to say nice things. I need to do better work. I need to be better. I need to feel more.

I need to do all of these things, even when it’s hard. Even if the world feels like it’s falling apart. Even when there isn’t a sign of light. Even though every day we’re all dying. Because doing all of these tiny things is a small way to keep me — to keep us all — alive.

Where Memory Goes

I got home today, and my little niece was sitting at the kitchen counter. She’s off from school for the summer, and I assumed that my mom would watch her while my brother worked. It turns out that she’s going to the YMCA day care on the days that my brother has her.

This sparked a memory.

I used to go to the Y for summer day care too when I was little. I had forgotten this. I spent whole summers there. I remembered the strict schedule, losing pogs to an older kid who had a metal slammer and knew I was naive, watered down punch in gatorade jugs, squares of graham crackers and field trips to the Santa Fe Dam. I remembered there was an older kids’ group called Funward Bound that I would eventually join. This group was highly desirable because these kids were able to go on field trips every week rather than the one or two the younger kids got to go on throughout the summer.

I remembered each day feeling so meaningful, so important, like the entire universe on the head of a pin centered on those moments on a green-painted wooden picnic table, like even as a little kid I knew that each thing that happened felt like it should be written in history.

I still feel like that each day, like a girl not talking to me, like a mother not praising, like a friend’s absence, like an ex engaged, like a bit of traffic, like a kid who I can’t get through to in the classroom, like each of these things, all the little moments, are the stars, the dark matter, the cells, the atoms, everything.

But.

I forgot about those days at the Y. Like they were blank sheets of paper. Like nada. Nada. Nada. Just like that. It took my niece’s face to bring them all back.

That will happen to today one day. To these words one day. To everything that’s happening. Everything will just become a sudden recall triggered by another person’s eyes. Or a book title. Or a song. Or a specific food. Today will be gone until then.

I suddenly felt a deep sadness. But, somehow, also fucking free.

Soda

This piece was originally published in the Spring/Summer 2011 issue of Epiphany. That issue is currently out of print now, so I figured it was safe to post it here. This was the first essay I ever had published in print.  

Daddy is losing weight. His face is a canyon, broken in over years and peaked at places where skin is pushed out by bone. If he lied down on his right side, his left cheek could hold water, a scruffy valley, enough water to wade in or cool my feet after touching them to hot cement. Daddy’s not an arm tapper. Not a rope tyer. Not a spoon burner. Dad palms his mouth and tips his head back and lets little white things disintegrate in his callous throat. He wears clean shirts, buttoned at the top, over thin white tank tops. He knows how to wobble like an adult now, never brings too much attention to himself. He is with Butch, sometimes with Arthur. They are outside of Butch’s house, in the back where the alley is, where the garage leads. They smoke cigarettes in between and drink canned beer. 

In the alley, they mumble. They talk about people they mutually know. Theresa. Gladys. Mario. “Can you believe that fucker?” “Yeah, he owes me money.” “Toss me another.” They put their hands in the pockets of their zip-up sweatshirts. They wear beanies that fold up. They all have moustaches. They all are not in their twenties. Dad is dreading his walk home the next morning, seven city blocks in the stinging mid-morning sun. He will be partially dehydrated when he walks past my elementary school, the mote that stands between him and our front door. He comes home at this time to avoid mom, who leaves for work at 7:30 each morning and doesn’t come back until five. She takes the only car we have, and he comes home and sleeps for six hours in preparation for her pointed fingers, two at him (pointer and middle), two at herself (ring and pinky), thumb pointed down. 

Either his hands are shaking or his eyes are blurry; he’s not sure which. But he can’t stop looking at them and doesn’t know what to do with them when he’s standing idle. Sweatshirt pockets. Pant pockets. Folded across his chest. One down to the side by his waist, the other holding a damp can of Budweiser. He wants to say something now but can’t or does but doesn’t realize it or does but does it so low that Arthur and Butch can only hear sounds, like he’s talking in his sleep about things they don’t know about. But they have no intentions of waking him up, rather they wish to fall asleep along side him.

Daddy’s hair is short now but used to be curly and long like mine. When my mom cuts off my locks for the first time just after I learn to talk, dad doesn’t talk to her for three days, but she keeps the curls in a baggy, alongside an unused Dodger game ticket and Fernando Valenzuela rookie card, and tapes them to a cardboard page behind a piece of plastic in my baby book. Most say I look more like her because of my light skin, because of my small frame, because of my smile and my social nature, even at five. But when puberty hits, I’ll get his voice, the same one my brother has, and people will call and they’ll say, “Oh, you sound just like your dad now,” but they’ll never mistake me for him.

It’s 9:30PM when we come, lights beamed down the alleyway, my mom tired and her hair up. “I goddamn knew it,” she says. “I goddamn knew it.” They’re on her side, standing in a triangle, and the light makes their eyes squint like rats digging banana peels out of a public trash heap. Mom rolls down the window before we come to a stop, and she says to daddy, “You know you have to take Timmy to school tomorrow.” This isn’t a suggestion, not a reminder. “You think I don’t know that?” he responds. “What the fuck are you doing here then?” she says. “I’m just hanging out. I was coming back right now.” I’m looking away, out my window at a wooden fence on my side. “Bullshit,” she says. “Don’t bring that shit here, Libby,” he says, his words all connected together like a piece of gum that stretches rather than breaks. Butch chimes in. “Why you always have to come over here bitching, Libby?” Mom responds. “Fuck you, Butch. He has a family.” Dad. “Don’t fucking talk to him like that.” “Timmy is right here, you son of a bitch. Do you not see him?” “Of course I do.” Dad kneels down as much as he can. “Hey mijo, I’ll be home in a little bit, okay? Don’t listen to us, okay?” Mom begins rolling up her window, “You’re a piece of shit.” And we roll off, back to 2020 Almadale. 

Dad stumbles home a couple of hours later, and I hear a crash against the wall along with the slight reverberation of a ring. It’s the rotary telephone from our living room. I hear muffled curse words but fall asleep before it all ends. 

When Daddy takes me to school the next morning, he packs me a lunch in a paper bag because he can only find my thermos, not the plastic box I carry it all in. I eat my cold, microwaved corn dog and my potato chips but drink a sip of what’s in my thermos and stop immediately. It’s not punch like mom normally packs but soda, and I’m not allowed soda, not at home but more importantly not at school. But it tastes like heaven, sparkly and sweet, like a pancake breakfast in a Ninja Turtle plastic cup. I hold the thermos close, away from my friends and sip some more. Then a little more. Then a gulp. I swish it around in my teeth and close my eyes when I swallow. I want to never have anything else again. But when school ends, my hands are shaking, and I drop the thermos and what’s left over spills out onto the concrete. Ms. Noma comes over to help me but notices the color of the liquid. She wipes her finger against the concrete, sniffs it, and yells out, pointing at the air, “It’s soda!”

She lectures me, tells me I know better, tells me not to bring it again. I nod with my head down. Dad is behind the fence waiting for me to be dismissed. When I get to him, he asks me what I was in trouble for. I say, “I’m not allowed to bring soda to school, daddy.” He says, “Oh, I know. But I didn’t think they actually cared.”

Action Figures

This piece was originally published in Connotation Press in 2011.

Anthony’s house is larger than mine. It has bushes in the back and undead grass and a backhouse. The backhouse is a small room with a kitchen and glass sliding doors. I don’t have a room in my house, so when he wants me to come over, he whistles, a high note then a low then another high, into my brother’s room and hopes that I hear him. Today, I did, and I ran to the room and smashed my nose against the browned window screen. Now we’re below the bushes behind his house, the ones lined perfectly against his wooden fence.

I’m learning sex from action figures. One with a yellow jumpsuit, flowered red hair, and white boots. I found her last week behind a fleet of villains and b-characters, and I yelled out to mom, “I found April!” and mom sighed when she saw me with one arm burdened with unwanted packages, the other pointing to something she knew she’d have to buy me.

The other is Leo. All beefed up, veins risen from his arms, blue bandana around his eyes, and a belt, big L in its center, wrapped snugly around his waist. They’re lying vertically in the dirt beneath the bushes, clothes on because they don’t come off, and I’m making the noises I’m thinking I’m supposed to make in this situation. OOOs and AHHs and whispers of names. I’m holding Leo above April, and Anthony is attending to our other set-up.

There, we have a makeshift contraption made of leaves and sticks and paper scraps from inside the house. There’s a medium-sized rock inside of it. This is a crib and inside is a baby. A little rock baby. Anthony is a bit older than me but seems a lot older than me. He’s three or four inches taller, and the books he brings home from school don’t make sense to me. His hair is combed back in rows, tiny columns of follicles that go up and curve just slightly, held there by mousse or hair gel. His skin is one or two shades darker than mine. I’ll grow up with him without ever knowing that much about him. But he’ll teach me to ride a bike and how to start a clubhouse, one that excludes my cousin unless he agrees to eat ants.

Interrupting one of my OOOs, Anthony makes a muffled but shrieking crying noise, which is my cue for one of my figures to come over. I choose Leo. Leaving April on her back in the dirt, I hold the plastic turtle in my right hand and hobble it over to the crib set-up. I use my left hand to move Leo’s arm vertically, up and down, joints stiff and fist slightly clenched. I hover him over the crib, his feet off the ground but his face facing the rock, and calm the little grey child.

Hey, hey, I say, hey. It’s okay. It’s okay. Daddy’s right here. The baby’s name is Johnny. Little Johnny. Daddy’s got you, I say. And here, Leo should be holding the rock but he can’t because his arms don’t allow it, restricted only to vertical movements, stuck to his side with no elbow mechanisms. Just five pieces of plastic attached at the shoulders, neck, and leg sockets. Anthony is still shrieking, and I’m trying to calm him. Or Johnny. To rub the rock softly, I have to move Leo entirely, slowly and carefully. I choose which side of the baby is his head and slide Leo’s curved fingers across it.

Everything is working here. Anthony’s squeal begins to fade when either he thinks I’ve done a sufficient job or when his lungs get tired or when he’s ready to play something else. I stay there sitting with my legs crossed around each other and look at Johnny for a second. He’s okay now, so I go back to April and lay Leo on his back in the dirt beside her. Is everything okay, I say, in a slightly high-pitched voice. Yeah, I say. He’s fine now. Okay, good. I pick up April and float her above the dirt and hold her perpendicular to Leo. I touch her face against his. The tiny pebbles and soil that were stuck to her back are grinding between her body and my hand. It’s in my nails too, my long nails. With my clean hand, I touch my palm against my left eye and rub it sideways.

Then mom is calling.

“Timothy!”

And then I’m taking my toys and leaving Johnny in the dirt with Anthony, who is saying bye and saying that maybe we can play tomorrow and saying that he’ll whistle into my brother’s window when he gets back home from school. I’m in the morning class and always get home what seems like forever before him. And then I’m running down his driveway and my mom is complaining about the dirt on my hands and then we’re eating dinner. Meat and shells and tomato sauce. My brother. My sister. My mom. Me. Dad is with Uncle Jimmy, mom says.

Mom’s never told me to wash my hands before dinner, so I’m scraping the dirt from beneath my nails while I eat and hiding my hand under the chair when I flick the soil onto the carpet.