Crazysexysool (from Intercourse, coming in Summer 2010)

Crazysexycool (And not necessarily in that order)

It’s the same year, a different month. Autumn is singing Atlanta a lullaby for the long winter ahead. There is a homeboy sleeping in my shoebox. He’s getting on my nerves. She lives not too far away.

We crossed paths on the job. We have the same sense of humor. The outline of her breasts beneath that tight-fitting tee were the tractor beam that lured me in. But it was more than that. She too lived in a house filled with printed pages, VHS tapes and DVDs. She was over the scene I so desperately wanted to be a part of. And she’s older, which in my mind translates to her being wiser. It takes nearly a decade for me to figure out just how wrong I am.

I’m trying to watch the movie because I don’t want to make a mistake. I’m trying not to look her in the eyes because I know the dam will explode. We know too many of the same people. We want too many of the same things. She is not one of us. But she wants to be. Hindsight being 20/20 I realize that I might have just been her way in.

But I am hundreds of miles from my closest home. The afterglow of mangoes and incense has long faded. She wants me to feel safe on her couch. She wants me to stay.

It starts with the lightest of kisses upon my neck. A chill goes down my spine. She straddles me. She pulls her shirt over her head. They are perfect, bordering upon spectacular. She feeds them, switching them out for the warmth of her mouth every few spoonfuls. She slides south, her long hair covering her face as she begins a life within my lap. I am an explosive set to detonate as soon as she begins. She makes it feel like the first time down below. She makes me believe that this is not just another episode if the same. The cream rises to the top. She swallows it all for dessert.

The next thing I know I am in a tub of hot water. Her fingers squeeze the soap through my lengthening locks. She dries my hair and oils my scalp every Thursday night. I never ask. She always volunteers. I get the flu the same time she gets staph in her toe. We take care of each other.
But the same things we want come in different packages.

I don’t realize that I’m just a boy and she’s a woman. I don’t see that I might have been her perfect candidate because to me time and options are still infinite . Back then I just went with the flow and tried to do the best job I could. I was always late to the dance on the games people play, even when they didn’t realize it. But that’s another story.

Six months fly by like gulls crossing the Hudson. I am 20 pounds heavier from all that she’s fed me. She barely lets me near a stove. But today is Valentine’s Day. I’m trying to break the curse that has rained disaster upon me every 14th of February since the girl showed up in my dorm room wearing another man’s shirt. I just want her to know how much she means to me. I want things to be cool.

I buy penne pasta and littleneck clams and a few jumbo shrimp for an appetizer. I put a fire under one skillet and then add another to the range. Water comes to a boil. I crack the Bajan rum and mix it with pink grapefruit juice, her favorite.

She watches me while I cook. We drink. I mix heavy cream with prosecco and squeeze a lime until it’s dry. The meal comes together like Divine order. I am thankful to my homeboy for the rum. So I take 30 seconds to call him and tell himself while the shrimp saute’ in butter, lemon and ginger. Her content expression turns to a frown. The argument erupts long before dinner is ever served.

I don’t understand why a phone call upsets her. It seems selfish that she wants me there every night I choose to work on novel. It will take me years to fully grasp that I made her happier than most of the men before me, that what she was most afraid of was that I was destined to choose someone or something else.

It is only a few months after this, after she left the airport in a cab because I was caught in traffic that I decide to say goodbye in the form of “Your fired.” This is more than five years before The Donald made it into a catch phrase. Her final set of heated words over nothing put me across the line.

During digestion on that birthday night, more drunk than I’ve ever been before. I tell her its over. She says 'Ok' as she drifts off to sleep. I don’t mention it in the morning. Neither does she. Neither of us can let go just yet, even as our nails leave marks on the edge of an existence hanging directly over oblivion. I can still feel that first kiss upon my neck. I wanted it to last forever, but like my lil sis Kaypri is fond of saying, “everything has its expiration date.”

Clams in a Prosecco Cream Sauce Over Penne


Ingredients

1lb. littleneck clams
1 pound jumbo tiger shrimp
1 small carton of heavy cream
1 bottle of Prosecco (Italian sparking wine)
1 box of penne pasta
1 bulb of fresh garlic
1 piece of ginger
1 lemon
4 tbsps unsalted butter
1 yellow onion
Olive Oil

Directions

Wash clams and peel and devein shrimp.

Put a pot of water on the stove to boil with a bit of sea salt and a dash of olive oil.

Pour the cream and prosecco (2/3 cream to 1/3 prosecco), squeezed lemon juice and a touch of sea salt to a small pot and put on a low heat.

Put a medium heat under a skillet and add several cloves of chopped garlic and onion. Then add the butter, followed by the clams, and shrimp. Saute’ until both are done.

Add pasta to water, cover and lower heat. Let cook for 10-12 minutes or until pasta is soft but still a bit firm, then turn off and drain.

Serve clams, shrimp and onions on tops of pasta and then cover with sauce and serve.

(A Caesar or mixed green salad is a perfect appetizer)

Leftover Memories

I remember being a kid of ten or eleven in search of my grandfather's signature iced tea. I got myself a big cup, filled it with ice, took the pitcher off the top shelf and poured. But what came out wasn't sweet tea. It was a thick brown liquid with chunks of meat in it.I almost dropped the cup on the floor. I thought it was disgusting. But that was only because I'd never had his turkey soup. Little did I know that I would only get one more chance to experience the greatness that that soup was. He passed away less than two years later.

More than 20 years after that moment, on the verge of midnight, I am adding what's left of the once 22-pound Thanksgiving bird to a lobster pot. I fill it with cold water. I dice yellow onions and garlic, fresh basil, crushed bay leaves, sea salt, black pepper, a generous amount of curry and add them it all to the brew. I put the pot under a medium heat, cover it, and wait.

In 40 minutes the smell climbs through the whole house. The heat squeezes the flavor from the marrow in every bone and every piece of gristle. The meat gets so moist that it peels off into the liquid. The bones separate within the midst of the bubbling goodness. It's been a complicated night, but the memories melt away with the aroma. I am a little boy watching my father's father at the stove in nothing but a white tee and his boxers.

I didn't know at the time that he'd been cooking for his whole life, that it had been he who fed his brother and sister while my great grandma did what she had to to keep a roof over their heads. The pots seemed so big back then, so powerful and under a control my little hands could never muster. And yet here I am doing it for myself, thousands of miles and years away from that house on Adrian Street where my education began.

Of all the folks I've known that have passed on, I think I miss him the most. Though he was by no means a perfect man, he was a gracious host to all that came through his doors. A child of The Depression there was always food in his house. His boys from the old neighborhood would come through for a drink and a smoke, proud that they'd been successful enough to have homes of their own with yard and grills and ranges with warmers at the top. Success was getting a new car every few years or putting a jungle gym in the backyard for me, his only grandson.

As the soup boils it becomes very close to the color of that liquid I accidentally poured into that cup. Mine is a little lighter, more yellow, because of the curry. But I'm proud to even come close to the greatness that was, and to have such a great memory to build upon.

An hour later I take the pot off simmer, put a pad in the fridge and sit the pot on top. This should hold us until the cavalry arrives. Pay day is soon come. Until then we make do. I turn the light out in my kitchen and head for my bed, drifting off with the aroma of the past, present and future swimming through my skull.

The Appetizer (from Intercourse, coming in Summer 2010)

I was almost eighteen when I met Nasrene within the incense-heavy cloud of a place called Dejoulle African on Cascade Road. I came armed with a “best of” selection of poems, which were all I was writing for public consumption at the time.

I was one of the last readers of the evening. So I was happy for the little applause that I got. The club’s closing tradition involved standing in a circle, holding hands, and repeating a mantra (which I’ve long since forgotten). When in Rome I do as is custom. When the circle shattered she was standing there, a pure chocolate goddess standing 5’8 high. She had on these silver frames with no glass in them and a long crocheted dress that looked like something fresh out of Woodstock. She listened as I spoke to others giving me praise. She was waiting for me.

I walked her back to the front gate at Spelman. It turned out she was from a town not far from my own. A day later we’re sitting under the tree next to the student parking lot. Using a pencil, she sketched my face on a big pad. She wanted to know me. She wanted to be with me. I wanted to be with her. It had never and would never be that simple again.

It was only a few days later that she led up the two flights of stairs to her dorm room. During the single hour (out of two semesters) that I managed to pry my roommate from the other side of my room, she had swallowed me whole with the trifecta of force, rhythm and endurance. It was my first time and the moment where I definitely understood why so many dudes hailed the blowjob as the best experience of their young lives.

The grin on her face those few days later had been both shy and mischievous. I was afraid to touch her. I didn’t want to mess it up. I didn’t want to make mistakes. It was both nothing and everything like what I had imagined, not the self-serving act captured in present-day porn, but a flood of warmth and intensity that had taken me beyond the known universe for six minutes of pleasure. I was in love. But that, however, had been a mere prelude to the real deal.

I had been hard from the moment she scribbled the question on a slip of paper and handed it to me just as my roommate reentered the room. It read: “Do you want to have sex?”

We couldn’t get to her dorm fast enough.

I remember the way she smelled as she wiggled her panties over an ass God had taken with. A single drop of wetness ran down the inside of her thigh. I did a double take. She couldn’t have been that turned on already.
She dropped Janet’s Janet into the changer and “Throb” burst through the speakers as she pulled me on top of her. Her tongue deliciously knotted with mine before it traveled into various unchartered territory.

Her hands and her lips and her feet and her ass were a well-oiled machine that I tried to drive pro, even though I barely had a learner’s permit. She was in total control, even though I was the one on top. I tried to create a rhythm, moving in time with her hips. I wanted to have absolutely nothing in common with the subject of BWP’s famed classic, “Two-Minute Brother”.

And I didn’t. As a matter of fact it went on for far longer than even she would have wanted.. Some kind of way she came, and if she didn’t, her performance, complete with moaning and trembling, was worthy of critical acclaim.

We pushed and pulled until the hourglass ran out on male visitation. Then we danced the night away at Dejoulle, on the same floor where we’d met not long before.

The next day she brought a Tupperware container filled with rotini and marinara. The sauce was sugary sweet as she fed it to me under a streep lamp in the parking lot outside of my dorm. I could tell that she’d put a lot into it. She wanted our meal to matter.

In the weeks that followed she would give me a private class in Intercourse 101, a series of nightly expeditions into all that the dudes back home claimed to know about, but most likely did not.

My biggest regret is that I didn’t get to cook for her in those days, that timing and circumstance made it impossible to express my appreciation for her many gifts. Even when I saw her the last time, just before she married one of the truly good guys, I know that she still cares, as do I. That’s what love is.

Cafe' Ugly

When I was 13 or 14, my father and I moved from my grandparents house in Benning Heights to the first and only home he would ever own as a single man, a one-level two bedroom with a basement in Temple Hills, just a spit away from the Marlow Heights shopping center, which was the center of the world for anything you wanted to get into back in the day: movie theater, record stores, video arcade, Pizza Hut, barber shop, etc. Jammed into this hotbed of commerce was the Steak in a Sack Cafe, a greasy spoon hidden within the mall that you would have thought time would eventually take down.

The place had already been there for a decade or two. The walls had wood paneling from the 70s and no one on the staff seemed to be under 50. The same went for the customers, many of whom seemed like they should have been extras on an episode of Alice. All it needed was a waitress named Flo with a beehive hairdo saying "Kiss My Grits". The Steak in a Sack was also a white folks hangout it seemed, something left over from what the county used to be before the Black middle class left DC to make it it's own. The food was okay. The ambiance was acceptable. And it was right down the street from where we lived. Because of the many funny-looking characters we would see perched at the bar and in the booths my Pops nicknamed the place
"Cafe Ugly".

Fast forward 15 years and we enter its doors again. This time there's not a white face in sight. The headwrapped and noticeably pregnant waitress moves around at the speed of light, taking orders and dropping plates on tables as if the owners are holding her loved ones for ransom in the back. The paneling is still there. The booths are still cheap pleather. The food is still acceptable. Not much has changed.

As I go to work on flapjacks, turkey bacon and home fries, my Dad gives me a brief lecture on pastrami as he eats what would be considered a miniature version of the real deal at any Jewish deli in the 5 boroughs. But when he and I came there it was never about the food. It's was about the convenience and the coziness of the place, as Pop was working hard to conquer and settle his piece of the brave new world beyond the city where he was born.

I remember the work we did renovating the house there, and the parties I threw in high school that were my first social success. I remember getting chased by ten boys from the neighborhood looking to jump a stranger. I did a Carl Lewis into the supermarket, ducked through the meat department and found an angel in the form of a clerk who let me out through the freight entrance so that I didn't go home bloody.

It feels so close that I can still touch it, but nothing in that mall is the same anymore. Even the supermarket itself has been redone, leaving fewer and fewer traces of one of the many worlds from which I came. But Cafe Ugly is still there and apparently still making paper, which proves that some things never change. I'm just happy that my Pops is still here to dine with me, my best friend for life and the best teacher I ever had.

Brazillian Coconut Shrimp Stew

Ingredients

1 lb. Medium Tiger Shrimp
1 cup white wine
1 can coconut milk
2 vine tomatoes
Fresh cilantro
1 white onion
Three cloves of garlic
Olive oil
Sea Salt

Directions

Peel and devein your shrimp but save the shells. Place the shells and the wine in skillet, bring to a boil, reduce heat and allow to simmer for 10 to 20 minutes.

Chop and dice the onion, tomatos and cilantro

Saute' the shrimp in the olive oil, cilantro, garlic and tomatoes until well done

Remove the shells from the skillet and pour the stock mixture in with the shrimp and vegetables still under a low-medium heat.

Add the coconut milk and still until the broths is orange. Cover and allow to simmer for 25 minutes.

Add sea salt to taste and serve.

Coal Mountain

"This is the part where Orlando scores 15 points in three minutes," my boy Robin's neighbor jokes as we watch the final moments of the NBA Finals on TiVo, an hour after the game has actually ended. Relaxation is in the air up in Silverlake and I have no intention of moving. But when Robin's phone rings and he tells me that some friends are having a barbecue at seven in the evening in Echo Park, something tells me that it might be worth tagging along.

Armed with a 12 pack of Pacifico beer, turkey burgers and cheese, we show up at a cozy wood house drowning in foliage. Exile, the famed underground beatmaker is the only person I recognize amongst the mostly white faces. A dude in a pork pie hat strums a guitar as he sings one of his own tunes. Another guy shows up with a girl whose dressed like it's wintertime outside and seems as nervous as clumsy as the geeky chick in a high school movie. The sink is piled high with dishes and stained with organic matter a CSI crew probably couldn't ID. Two Mexican women, one with big pretty eyes and captivating tattoos on both shoulders, float between all the various worlds within the single room. There's only one problem: Nobody's actually barbecuing.

After spending a decade in New York, I'd gotten used to witnessing the bumbling antics of people who think they know how to barbecue: dumping entire bottles of lighter fluid on a single set of coals, painting up meat like five seconds before it goes on the grill, and serious undercooking and overcooking based upon criteria that might only make sense to a five year-old, it got to the point where my friends, even if we were in the homes of strangers, always turned their heads to me as if I had been named grill ambassador. Now, five months into this new place, I was at it again.

With a dirty counter and no cleanser, no Brillo, and a rack of spices about as organized as store inventory the day after Christmas, I rubber turkey burgers with sesame oil seas salt and a touch of soy sauce. I rubbed chicken with teriyaki, black pepper and cumin. I drenched hot sausages and long slabs of carne asada in whatever made sense, and slapped them all of on a grill someone had filled with an entire bag of coles. Needless to say, things cooked quickly.

As I brought in each platter, the two ladies and one of the houseguests, who was also Mexican, began chopping cilantro, onions and tomatoes, and organizing bread and condiments for a cafeteria-style meal. While the white boys listened to vaudeville records on an old phonograph, the folks of color were all about eating. The food appeared and disappeared. It wasn't my best work, but the entire room eventually came alive with praise, full mouths and thumbs up thrown in my direction. As the clock jumped past one it felt strangely good to be out and about at an indecent hour, a welcome change from all of these early bedtimes and assemblies of folks talking about the same thing forty different ways. Driving north to south on Vine, I thought dreamed of days ahead when I might have something to celebrate again, when the Job-like storyline of my life here might finally come to a close. That future, if it is to be, can't get here fast enough. End of line.

Grilled Chicken (or Steak) Fajitas

Ingredients:

Shredded jack and cheddar cheese
Soft flour tortillas
Boneless chicken breast (or steak)
1 White Onion
Three cloves of fresh garlic
1 Green Pepper and 1 Red Pepper
Fresh cilantro
Sea salt (add to taste)
Two jalapeno peppers (serves two)
Olive Oil

Directions:

Put two tbsp of oil into a skillet and put over a medium heat.
Dice the peppers, onion, garlic and sage

Add the garlic and let if fry before adding the chicken (sliced or chopped)
Cook over a medium heat (flipping with a spatula) for three minutes.
Then add the peppers, salt and seasonings and allow to cook, turning constantly, until done.

Drain and then add to tortillas, adding cheese liberally. Fold it or roll it and get busy ;)