Home.

Dear Adam Powers:

It is raining so hard outside. I am at Fenario, the name of the house where half my band lives. We are recording tonight. It is a tense affair. Scotts is wrestling with Logic Studio and the midi tones are fighting the good fight. Des is strumming away as he is wont to do, wandering aimlessly and saying little or nothing.

I am waiting patiently for my Pizza Rolls to cook. There are four people in this house right now, and three of us are planning on eating Pizza Rolls like it’s our job. One of us is currently having a “pre-snack” consisting of two Banquet Microwave Dinners and some guacamole and chips and says he will “only have a few.” I figure if I make forty-two Pizza Rolls, we will be safe.

Logic Studio is a confusing program and Scotts, although he is a genius, is fed up and doesn’t really want to deal with the leak in the ceiling. He slams a saucepot next to the drumset to catch the drip. I leave the room.

Though I refuse to admit it out loud, storms make me want to throw up. Rain is the reason that I had to move to North Carolina, and it is the memory of rain that makes my dad wake up screaming in the middle of the night, rain that hardened a mother I thought was already as tough as nails. Rain put my brother in Raleigh selling cars to no one thanks to a bad economy. Katrina was a bitch but we move on.

Secretly being in such close proximity to a memory of New Orleans that screams “past tense!” with its black shocks of hair like daggers on otherwise translucent and pallid backdrops, and it’s not a matter of want or need, but it’s the elephant on the bench next to you, in the past tense, and it’s bowls full, blow UP, snacks and juice and techno music, sketches and naps and jerking, constricted bodies, slight and sparse and strong and pale, charcoal soul, virgin soil, cotton, kool-aid, helium throats. Mimeographed, stamped, closed and filed in a cabinet box that won’t be pried.

Home came up in conversation the other day when I was with some friends, over a beer, at a table covered in cracked linoleum, and a girl unrelated to my group spilled her pink drink all over the terrazo floor. . .and I thought of those disgusting, fantastic, seafood-rotten streets as that liquid hit the ground running. Sedimentary bricks, crumbling, ivy-covered iron bars to promote humilty, modesty, and my face just peeking through, planning, approved, everything so sinister and crude, puddles of muck that never dry up, watch where I step, keep your eyes attuned to neon.

After Katrina I never wanted to hear about the politics, the newsprint smudging fingertips, and I’d blow it off, but inside I’m blowing up, no needles, no pebbles, no stickers in the grass, no egg hunts, no track and field, no hair sticking to the side of the face smoking a cigarette outside the tattoo shop, no closed circuit cameras behind the bartenders’ heads, no walking down the balcony steps wishing I’d jumped instead.

No more hanging at the library learning the cajun two-step, playing in teepees, interactive culture toys, archaeologist dig, dig, City Park lusher by the minutes, minutes, teeming Magazine, iced coffee, brats in the Whole Foods, skaters kept to the left, smoky clubs and cock-a-roaches everywhere all over the sofa, loafing, back when I liked cider beer, back when Snake N Jakes was the best thing next to well-deserved demerits and lesbian phases in high school, back when the pot was best smoked in a school uniform next to the train tracks, seeing the guts of the bars countless times from blocks away but never going in, I’m heartfuckingbroken but too scared to be dramatic, these being my only remaining vestiges of The Big Sleazy.

Logic Studio has been abandoned thanks to copious bouts of lightning; even the cows in the Fenario cattle field are too scared to show themselves.

Pizza Rolls are ready. I have to go divvy them up. These boys are greedy. That’s not true.

Love,

Mandey