The Chronology of Water. Lidia Yuknavitch
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Название: The Chronology of Water
Автор: Lidia Yuknavitch
Издательство: Ingram
Жанр: Биографии и Мемуары
isbn: 9780983304906
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The environmental extremes in Lubbock are stockyard cow shit smell so pungent it makes your eyes water as well as causing a special gagging reflex, and hot wind orange dust storms so thick you can’t even see the hand in front of your face that also feel like you are being attacked by little Lubbock evil devil pins if you venture out.
Avenue Q, Buddy Holly Plaza. Big bronze Buddy Holly statue. Google it. Buddy, he’s circled by a walk of fame including greats like Waylon Jennings and the venerable Mac Davis. Budfest takes place during the first week of September, Buddy Holly’s birthday. During Budfest, drunk West Texans dress up like Buddy and his woman and … holler.
Prairie Dog town. Picture a very large dirt area contained by a cement fence in the middle of nowhere. A cement fence about knee-high. And inside the cement fence? A great many holes in the ground. And in the holes? Prairie dogs. So if you were drunk and high and sitting on the cement wall in the middle of the night, the thing to do would be shine a flashlight and then throw rocks at all the heads. Like a grown up whack-a-mole. What’s not to like?
Yeah. And when I say flat? I mean if you jump you can see Dallas.
Lubbock. Great place. Honestly you should save up.
By day I went to swim practice at 5:30 a.m. and breakfast at 7:00 a.m. and classes 10:00 a.m. through 3:00 p.m. and weight training at 3:30 p.m. and swim practice at 4:30 p.m. and dinner at 7:00 p.m. every day but Sunday with a pack of hot swimmer women and then the nights were ours.
All night. Every night. As much night as you could get in you before 5:30 a.m.
I was in love or something like it with my roommate within a month of meeting her. Maybe it was her drinking ability, or her swearing ability, or her rock and roll or her Bose speakers and kick ass stereo or her being from Chicago and thinking West Texans were cretins or her butterfly stud shoulders or her big tits or her bandana or her torn up jeans or her one-hit pipe. Maybe it was just her name. Amy. Amy, what you wanna do. I think, I could fall for you, for awhile maybe longer if I do.
I don’t know how much you know about swimmer partying but, well, it’s formidable. College swimmers are nearly all on some kind of scholarship. That’s money. There were the two British twins with spikey bleached hair. There were endless Barbie Texans with hairspray and drawls. There was a fantastic senior dyke and an amazingly beautiful boy-bodied Asian woman and mystical. Romanian. Of those with peckers, there was a tall lanky tow head with hair as white as mine whose last name was Creamer that I fell for like a blond brick house, there was a surfer So Cal king of Bruce Springsteen and Elvis Costello and beer dude, there was a two-stepping horn dog from Dallas, there was a guy from Amy’s hometown who orchestrated the mandorm parties, and a whole pack of swimmer guys with rockets in their pockets and shaved skin in places regular guys didn’t know about.
When I say we partied, I mean an epic poem.
About halfway through the year my days became swim practice at 5:30 a.m. big melon headed hangover and skip godforsaken cafeteria shitty instant eggs breakfast at 7:00 a.m. and skip classes at 10:00 a.m. 11:00 a.m. 12 noon drink hair of the dog beer eat cold pizza and Haagen Dazs ice-cream and listen to Zeppelin get high take a test once every week or so and weight training at 3:30 p.m. and swim practice at 4:30 p.m. and fuck dorm dinners they taste like shit and you have to sit with a bunch of West Texan fuckwaddery lets go out early and drink lets hit the Rock-Z and dance and dance and dance and drink and barf and screw every day every night.
I lost my scholarship the second year. I flunked out the third.
Love Grenade I
I ALWAYS WANTED TO BE THE KIND OF WOMAN JAMES Taylor would sing: I feel fine, anytime she’s around me now to. “Something in the Way She Moves.” You know that song. Don’t you wish someone wanted to sing that song to you?
Alas, my song would be Blood on Her Skin, Dripping with Sin, Do it again, Living Dead Girl. Yeah. By Rob Zombie. Because in college I was a living dead girl.
My first husband, beautiful boyman, reminded me of James Taylor. Of how exactly like his hands, exactly his voice, exactly his long lean body. Exactly his introverted acoustic guitar genius, exactly his artist eyes, exactly his ego underneath all that thin man. I shoulda been with Rob Zombie but I wasn’t. For a few years, in Lubbock, Texas, where I’d come on a swimming scholarship, I was with a JT man named Phillip.
Me: Doc combat boots. Kohl-a LOT - racooning my eyes. Ripped to shit tights and plaid catholic girl skirt and black leather biker jacket. No hairspray, no fingernail polish, no purse. Utterly out of place in Lubbock, Texas.
Those years were filled with him painting and playing guitar and me listening and getting high and making love and oh yeah, going to school. Which by the third year I’d flunked out of. The only As I received were in Philosophy. And that was because the professor was high every class so we just sat around shooting philosophical shit until we all started coming to class high too. Going to school, sleeping with Phillip. Trying not to fall in love with my roommate Amy. And swimming - though every month of each year the swimmer in me drowned a little more in alcohol and oceans of sex.
It was snowing the night of the first breakup in Lubbock. Snow in Lubbock looks weirdly dumb - Lubbock is as flat as flat gets. No mountains. No trees. No hills. When it snows in Lubbock one must get drunk and drive around. Don’t think badly of me. Remember what I told you - Lubbock is dry. So a woman gets … thirsty. And there isn’t much to “hit” in the dead of night, and even if there was you would see it a mile away.
So it was a drive around night. After a while we stopped. And I was drunk as a monkey, and I climbed up onto the shoulders of the Buddy Holly statue in a cemetery-ish park.
The Buddy Holly statue isn’t all that high, by the way. But I was acting like I was king of the world.
The main event was Phillip. Phillip cut the fingertips out of his gloves and played guitar at the base of the Buddy Holly statue. He played the acoustic opening to “ Wish You Were Here.” Which he’d picked out of the sky by ear. He played “Sweet Baby James.” Then he played “Suzanne.” At Buddy Holly’s feet. With a drunk ass blonde lifting her shirt up to the 30 degree night sky going “FUCK ALL Y’ALLLLLLL. EAT ME. WOOOOOOOOOOO.” To no one in particular except Lubbock.
I’d been with Phillip for about a year. How I fell for him was I heard his voice behind my head right after I walked past him in the dorm hall. He had the deepest voice I’d ever heard on a white boy. It was the kind of voice that curled around the top of your spine and jaw and made your mouth open, wanting. In my head was I am so far from my father I am so far from my father I amsofarfrommyfatherIamsofarfrommyfather.
When I turned around, there he was. With shoulder-length locks of hair, thick as shit eyelashes, Moccasin boots, and a guitar.
There he was that night, down in the snow playing “Suzanne.” Singing the night wide open. Me perched atop Buddy Holly sort of cross-eyed, looking at stars and drooling on Buddy’s bronzed head. Even angry girls can be moved to tears.
There are two reasons for us going busto.
Reason one: I spent the entire year making poor beautiful Phillip break into strangers’ homes at night to fuck on the floor. I don’t know why. It did a real number on him, I can tell you. He’d get so terrified, but he’d do it, and I’d run and turn a light on and he’d nearly coronary leaping with his 6’ 3” lanky ass body to turn it back off. I’d break into whatever liquor I could find and he’d try to fill the bottles back up with water СКАЧАТЬ