“grow Grow GROW Goddammit! You can thrive, and you're calling it quits? Not on my watch – no more amnesty. Only animosity and adversity from here on out. Grow ingrates.”
That's what I said to my succubi on Wednesday. They live on my patio. Other people call them succulents, as in plants. Either way, I used to speak to them gently before spraying them in the face...
I first met my succubi in San Diego. I'd been going to this one local bar called the Blue Parrot and was invited by some New Age types to their place for more drinks. While there, I met a gardener who gave me a seashell that looked like a cutlass handle, one aged pepper, and two succubi – tiny creatures budding free from their mother plant.
My San Diego succubi stayed tucked away in that cutlass seashell in a dark corner of my backpack for nine days. These plants survived a nearly sleepless 55+ hour greyhound bus ride to Austin last year. They didn't complain when I couldn't find a place to stay that first night in Austin because of some stupid sports game crowding out all the hotels. I tried to hang out with people living in Zilker Park (having been introduced to them by a fellow greyhound traveler), but I left after they started snorting speed. My succubi didn't bat an eye when I went to west 5th and 6th street; my general plan was to make friends with someone in a bar and ask to spend the night on their couch. Instead I drank too much and woke up on a baseball field near Lamar and the fright train tracks. I stumbled back to this bridge at Lamar and Riverside and slept there.
The finer details of that time are for another story, another blog. The important part to know is my succubi made it through all that, and they started to grow once I got back to Tennessee. I took them with me on the move back to Austin, and lately, they haven't been doing so hot. Here I thought that my succubi were tried and true, that they'd seen the last of their tribulations, yet they started to wilt on my patio. I tried bringing them inside, watering them more, watering them less, and transporting them to a another pot filled with parched brown Chicagoan moss that hadn't been watered in years, yet I seemed unable to halt their decline.
Thus, this week I decided to go undercover as a plant. Due to their high visibility, I would observe Texas flowers. If I could learn their ways, then I just might be able to save my faithful succubi.
Initial Research
I noticed the Texas wildflowers while biking to the post office – blue, red, yellow – primary colors morphed and combined along a stretch of highway. A deluxe Crayola box of 128 shades would've paled in comparison. At first I thought this arrangement was professionally done, but I started to notice these patterns everywhere. I decided to follow the prettiest ones and found myself biking through a college campus that spit me out onto Congress.
I knew that I should be web writing to pay my bills and looked for a cafe. The first one I found was at the edge of a giant garden store known as the Great Outdoors. The cafe didn't have wifi, so I opted out of web writing and went to explore the several acres of plants behind me instead. The store had an upstairs and downstairs section for succubi – people milled about the plants like exceedingly indifferent, grossly inefficient pollinators. I approached a man looming over the upstairs succubi. He was not obese but had next to no neck; rather, his jaw seemed to merge with his collarbone. He reminded me of a caterpillar, so I figured he knew about plants.
“Excuse me, can I ask you a question about succubi – succulents?”
“Sure, what's up dude?” he asked. I told him the succubi story, leaving out the bus ride and sleeping under a bridge parts, only conveying the necessary details to let him know that I wanted to save these plants and their history with them.
“Um, I don't work here,” he said.
“That's okay. So, how about these,” I assured him and pointed out some succubi that looked to be a similar species as my own.
“You know, sometimes you just have to leave them alone, let them sort themselves out. They don't need much.” He wobbled his chin for emphasis. I nodded sagely while he launched into a story about how he'd bought a heart-shaped succubi for Valentine's day. We wished each other good ones, and I went downstairs. I decided that not only would I let my succubi have their space, but I'd bring another succubus home to fan their jealous fires. Witness the Living Stone – its success depends on me never over watering it.
I also purchased an iron flying pig. At the checkout, I reached into my backpack and showed the cashier flowers that I'd picked along the way. She was able to identify the Blue Bonnet, Texas' state flower, and a Black-eyed Susan. She also warned of an invasive species spreading throughout the land but could give me no name, saying only that it was a yellow, weed-like flower.
The Usurpers
I pondered whether I should find a book listing all the Texas wildflowers but eventually decided against that. Instead, I met a new friend for a picnic, combining my flower quest, a peacock earring I found under a cafe booth, and part of some broken headphones in hopes of making a good first impression.
After the picnic (which included a bottle of wine) and we parted ways, I was restless, hungry for sensation and more conversation. I texted four of my Austin friends to see if any of them wanted to get drinks. Everyone had prior engagements, so I decided to drink solo. I started at the Eastern with Bulleit bourbon. When it started raining, I got a Lonestar tall boy too. When the downpour lessened, I bought an Imperial and a shot of Jameson to celebrate while contemplating flowers.
Flowers, and plants in general, don't experience time the same way we do. Their movements are very slow and precise, and above all, they are patient – if you've ever seen tree roots that have split pavement or clinging vines that have eaten away at brick walls, you already know this. Knowing this made more restless, so I went to another bar and another and another and another, faster than flowers.
Wanting to get laid also drove me, thinking that enough alcohol would make me suave while drastically decreasing my chances with each drink. (In fact, the closest I came to any action that night was after biking up to the Wendy's drive-thru. A gentleman cut me off to give me a double burger that I'd forgotten and offered me a blow job. I politely declined, saying that I was too tired.)When it comes to sex, plants are way kinkier than us. They rarely embrace. Instead, they use pollinators, insects in many cases - the equivalent of having a flying sex toy that might pass among hundreds if not thousands of partners. Knowing deep down that I could never compete with that, I finally passed out at the White Horse bar, having come nearly full-circle, since it's right next door to the Eastern.
I think the bartenders let me sleep for a few hours, because it was 2am when one of them helped me out. Something was wrong with my bike; it kept wobbling and bucking, trying to shake me off, so I walked it the several miles to Riverside instead. That night, I reached an understanding of the invasive yellow flowers that are trying to blot out the Texas wildflowers in two words: one more. One more what? Exactly. What's being taken starts not to matter so much as the power of taking. Since I hadn't consulted a flower guidebook, I began to think of these invasive yellow flowers as the Usurpers.
The Station Agent
My shirt was ripped at the bottom and had chocolate frosty stains around the collar. What I felt wasn't a hangover so much as a heavy brain fog after a nasty downpour. I didn't follow flowers that day. I didn't do much of anything except mentally retrace my steps, making sure everything was in my wallet and apologizing to people to whom I'd sent gibberish texts last night. I'd also somehow acquired a pack of cigarettes with eight missing.
Shades drawn, my apartment became my recovery cave. I retreated to bed with water and my laptop. I also checked my OkCupid profile to make sure I hadn't been stupid. As I looked through my messaging history, I did come across an old, odd message from Chinese_Dentist. It read:
“HEY what's up, how are you liking austin so far? yeah, it's pretty good. where are you living? the east side, of course. okay nice chat.”
It seemed a rather one-sided conversation, but perhaps it was a message within a message. Perhaps someone had heard of my multi-week quest to beat the fright train at its own game, and they were making first contact! During an earlier search for sites connected to the fright train, I'd seen a trainhopping question posted on Yahoo! answers. The reply voted as best answer didn't make sense to my untrained eye, so it must've been a code. I sent it to Chinese_Dentist, hoping she'd know the cipher:
“espinil elkie yu tu mosieri. Thanks!”
On that sluggish, brain-foggy morning, she'd still given no reply. To distract myself from that disappointment, I watched The Station Agent, since I'm a fan of the very talented Peter Dinklage. The movie had fright trains as a central theme. Dinklage plays the character Finn, who leaves the city for rural New Jersey after his mentor dies. Finn just wants to be left alone to watch trains but finds himself getting more involved in the lives of a few townfolk. I won't give away the plot, but it reminded me that having friends to drink a beer and do nothing with is a blessing. As a species, we have that in common with flowers (not that flowers drink beer, but if you discover such a flower, please tell me. I'll murder you and claim the discovery as my own). No, what I mean is that we keep each other company.
The next few days were not enjoyable. Tuesday night was a sledgehammer that shattered my already flimsy weekly schedule, so I had to play catch-up. I started my tax return (was appalled by the results) and tried to stick to work but felt vaguely cheated spending most of time on tasks that I didn't particularly like. Yes, well that's life. Most people do that day in and day out, you might say. No thank you.
The highlight of that several-day period was smoking cigarettes from the mystery Tuesday pack on my patio and berating my succubi (I ran out of nicotine gum and decided not to get more). By then, my San Diego succubi had gone from wilted to withered, their stalks collapsing and leaving only three lonely leaves. I flicked ash into their pot and freaked out that I was smoking cigarettes once more, having already experienced some of their risks before. After a few puffs, I'd spray each unfinished cigarette with my spray bottle and deposit their soggy remains into the pot.
Chicagoan Moss
Saturday morning, I was expecting to spend my time in much the same fashion as the last few days. I found myself looking at this piece of art that I have yet to hang in my apartment. It was given to me by Mr. Bailey, who had been my brother's next door neighbor in New Orleans. He was giving me a tour of his yard and outside artwork. When I saw the piece, I told him that it looked like a satellite image of another planet. That made him happy, so he gave me the painting. When I look at it, I see the yellow parts as fields of alien daisies thousands of miles wide.
The is because Mr. Bailey also told me a story about how, as a kid, he'd give his dates daisies because he couldn't afford roses. A girl scoffed at that, but her mom saw it for what it was and put the daisies in her best vase. Mr. Bailey also showed me several paintings inspired by that time. One was a close-up shot of these daisies; one black flower was coiled around a daisy, red and black seeping from it into the wholesome yellow. When I asked him about that, he said: “the deadly daisy will make you feel beautiful for a day.”
I decided to keep to my flower vow for at least one more day. I went to the Lady Bird Lake trail and headed east. Once you get past Pleasant Valley road, there's an invisible net; it filters out people and lets in more flowers. I saw ravines on fire and the tiniest of yellow jewels. I saw shapes that I wish I could make and poses that I wish I could take. The best part is that that beauty isn't necessarily for us. While flowers appear pretty on the surface, many of their true colors aren't in our visible spectrum, designed instead to attract their pollinators who see through different eyes.
I kept wanting to collect specimens and make up names for them (like tutupenis for a set of flowers that didn't look like anything else). However, I started to feel greedy. Plus, I wasn't sure if some of these wildflowers were protected by law. “You can only have just one,” I told myself, but some flowers were so magnificently huge that I had to leave them be. All that day, I did my best to avoid the Usurpers and their one mores.
When I got home, I picked the damp cigarettes out of that succubi patio pot. “grow Grow GROW God... please, just grow.”
I wish I could say that my succubi did make a miraculous recovery, but that wouldn't be true. I put them, along with a pinch of dirt, back in their cutlass seashell to keep my other memories company. Why not?
As for the patio pot to which I'd transported my succubi as a last-ditch effort – well, it's served many functions, but it was originally used to house this moss that I dug up from a parking lot crack behind my first Chicago apartment two years ago. That was back when day drinking was a way of life and flowers weren't all that exciting. I hadn't watered that parched-brown surface until I tried to save the succubi. I don't know if it was all the soggy cigarettes, but somehow a tiny patch of that Chicagoan moss is now a faint shade of green.
No comments:
Post a Comment