the incredible true story of the Morton's Salt girl



When I was a little girl I enjoyed mixing concoctions. My friend Daniel and I thought we had mystical powers; a primitive variety. These genetic gifts of magic could be nurtured by drinking cordials of tap water, food coloring, and confectioner's sugar. "This", I would say, "Is my witches' broth. And it can turn anyone who drinks it into a third grader, old enough to play on the big kid's playground, with the three-story jungle gym."
Fifteen years later I look at the big kid's playground and see dehydrated scrubby grass with a swing set plunked onto it, as if dropped like an anvil from the sky. I see it as a place where I was once harrassed by the City of Lompoc Police for having no shoes on while perched on the swings (it's not illegal, you bastards). Also, upon recollection, the jungle gym is not nearly three stories. It is, in fact, just tall enough for the impact of a fall from it to put you in an L-shaped cast for a couple months. An L-shaped cast that makes ones skin itch so badly that forks are often lost in it, recovered when the cast is cut open with a saw and a scrawny and flaky mouldering arm revealed.
What a joke the big kid's playground was. And yet to Allison, aged five, it was Mecca. I could play kickball or go look for gophers, those most adorable rodents! I could try to track down my leprechaun, whom I had lost the week before behind the 'B' building. I once tasted native California ant sitting on the grass at elementary school. (Spicy, like pepper, but not unpleasant.)
Most days after school Daniel and I would walk back to his house, which stood in a cul-de-sac of houses all stuccoed deplorable shades of mustard and drab fatigue green. The blue houses were not blue like the sky, I noted, or blue like the color of my Roger Rabbit doll's eyes (my favorite shade at the time). They were the blue one would expect a sadistic dentist's scrubs to be.
I always looked forward to going to Daniel's house. He had the most marvelous Zoo Books, for one, and he also had a host of amusing toys. He had lizards and snakes made of plastic so hard one could be concussed by them. He even had a little slot machine that would spit quarters at you in a mesmerizing deluge of wealth. Generally, though, we preferred to play outdoors, for Daniel's backyard was a world of great wonder.
There was an old camping trailer full of rubbish and haphazardly constructed bongs that his father had made from plastic water bottles. There was his panther-like cat, Chang, who was unreliable in terms of personality but sleek and majestic, holding court with the opossums that lurked beneath the house. Chang was a pure Siamese, and his meow resembled the cry an old woman might make while being maced. It had a sort of rolling "r", a MRRRRR-OOO-WL. It was a shocking sound and it frequently pierced our little ears because we frequently tried to employ him in activities he did not wish to be involved in. Daniel and his older brother, Michael, would never have allowed Chang to be dressed, but were not unwilling to throw him in the dilapidated hot tub every once in a while to see if he might swim.
Daniel and I were the same age, five, when we met in kindergarten. Our mothers were somehow friends, although they had little in common besides two children aged eight and five. So it was that Daniel and I kept one another company after school every day, and my sister Hillary whiled away the afternoon hours playing Battleship with Michael, his brother.
Daniel aspired to be an expert on reptiles, knowledgeable of every iguana, monitor lizard, and water snake. He also liked sleek furry animals, like weasels, and greyhounds. He had a keen sense of what was most majestic in the animal world, and it was, he thought, the animals most adept at stealing birds' eggs and running quickly on tracks in large loops. I always thought greyhounds were sort of ugly and sad looking and preferred our labrador-springer spaniel hybrid, Molly. Daniel wanted a dog and Michael sometimes expressed the same sentiment. It never occurred to me that they might be jealous of us for having a dog, although Molly was certainly a pet worth coveting. She was energetic as a young boy on caffeine pills might be, she would run around the backyard in endless circles, leaving chalky dust stirring in her wake, and she could have cleared the five-foot fence in the backyard, had she ever tried to jump over it.
Instead Daniel had his mangy cat whom we all so admired, and myriad random reptiles. He would sometimes have an aquarium full of alligator lizards, their tales long and whip-like. Sometimes these tails would disconnect from the lizard if you picked it up by its' tail and perhaps accidentally swung it around a bit too much. The tail would then wiggle, quite sinister, at the bottom of the aquarium for a few moments before lying lifeless. And the lizard would walk around with a stump for some time.
When there were not lizards or snakes in the house, there were still frogs and toads in the backyard, hopping on the grass, croaking fat-bellied beneath trees, and lounging in the dissolving, mossy interior of the hot tub. The water in there would be anywhere between four and 24 inches deep, I suppose, but always with a layer of bubbling scum and frothy something. It was full of water weeds and green rugs of moss. The frogs were in frog heaven. The toads would soak in the tub like fat old men in a bathhouse.
We would sometimes pick the fat toads up and transport them to the bathtub inside by hand. Then we would set them afloat on chunks of Styrofoam. Daniel and Michael's mother never minded. No animal was too scaly or slimy to bring inside. Sometimes her husband was home during the day as well, fixing himself a snack, scratching his beard, and making funny coarse jokes. Sometimes when I would come home, my mother would make a remark about how he was a lazy conniver, that sat on his ass all day, but I quite enjoyed his presence. He let his sons stay up until ten by the time they were seven, to watch Nash Bridges, which made me believe that self-employed, unwashed fathers were clearly where it was all at.
Occasionally I would make concoctions in the privacy of my own home, from the contents of our spice cabinet, which also contained bouillon cubes and little bottles of food coloring. One day I made a thrillingly green cocktail:
"This," I told my favorite stuffed animals, a turtle and a giraffe, "is my latest refreshment. When I drink this I will tumble through space into a different land, where the swimming pools are filled with orange soda and which is populated by Carebears." My friend Aly and I had visited this land a few times while we were on the swings at school and had found it to be superior to this one by far. I drank a sip of the green water and it tasted divine, with tiny grains of sugar resting in a layer on the bottom of the glass that could not be stirred away.
As I sipped my creation I surveyed the contents of the cupboard a final time. There were the shiny foil cubes of beef bouillon, the bottle of vanilla extract, the baking powder, the cylindrical container of Morton's salt with the little girl on it and the saying, "When it rains it pours".
I had never noticed the Morton's Salt girl before but I noticed her quite clearly now and I could not decide how I felt about her. Wishy-washy, I then concluded. At best.
Is that supposed to be salt falling from the sky? I wondered. Salt doesn't fall from the sky like rain. And who is this girl? She looks like some sort of Red Riding Hood knockoff, but yellow, and with an umbrella.





tbc

in the evening and again in the morning
i sit and listen to the record spin

i've met a couple sweet talkers
but they dont know the shape i'm in

i used to know her well she was a real woman
and those real women get what they want

i used to know him well he was my friend
and we'd talk as we drove 'round the block

in the evening i'm the only one listening
the house is asleep

he's sitting by the fireplace
playing with a bootlace
and trying to catch a glimpse of the stars

and you're sitting on the staircase
pullin' a face
as you drink the cough syrup that you bought from the drugstore darling.

my music is
the melancholy circus anthem
the psychedelic carousel tune
(house of mirrors house of mirrors
100 reflected images of
displaced child on mood stabilizers)

neon has long repelled me
is this innocence lost?

the painted ponies
with their saddles ornate
go up and down but
never run free

(of course)

jaded carny stole my bow!
i was but five!

the scrambler spun
i chipped a tooth

I imagine a man
with crackhead talons
a few teeth and no joy
though who am i to judge:

"we are all outlaws
in the eyes of america"

my music is the last and lonely waltz
(i just want to be in big sur)

my music the quiet convergence
of a few little notes

the sort of person
who sits alone a lot
with just their mind
recalling thoughts of
california

and
my music
the crackling record's buzz

the falling duck feather
the sound of a house
settling into warmth after
a long stretch of
having been uninhabited

the creak and groan
of protesting pipes - - -

the wicked and brilliant
carnival's song
the old pond at the mission

my music is a
sentimental little arrangement

(but who could expect

otherwise)

aztec calendar

stumbling through our days
we approach the end of the aztec calendar
and we're all going down


a brilliant light of
tangerine and pink
the end of the world looks just like a cocktail from the poolside bar

if i could be assured
that what happens here
would stay here

i might stray beyond the lines

it's not as if i believe in a
judgment day
and anyway my crimes are not so great:

piled up across from me
they cannot weigh more than
an orange-beaked finch or a small hand grenade

comparable i assume
to the weight of the deeds
done by every girl in my bracket

ruled more be desire than duty,

these are after all the heady days of my youth meeting their technicolor demise

(high on a monument
all lined up to meet
some vibrantly plumed deity)

i only hope he does not physically pull out my beating heart,

mercy, mercy, from the age old tradition!

i prefer the quick blow, the scalding cacophonous explosion,

i'll go out singing,
disappear into the dissolving panorama...

life in lompoc?

life in lompoc refuses to thrill
these days


yet colorful characters linger

spoiled sons some, living alone in little houses downtown
payed for by their parents,
key bumps and cannabis plants,
white lines abundant, they try to get me
to vacuum the floor

but i cannot stand to vacuum
especially when high
the drone so loud it could strip paint with its volume,
always seems an angry monster
feared by cats and dogs alike

and so the carpet stays a dusty sea of blue synthetic
and paw prints

life in lompoc is boring as hell

most of the real thinkers have been sifted from the pot and now only the dregs remain
the smart kids either too lazy
fucked up indifferent addicted or disoriented to leave

and i do not count myself among them
but i am

until i go, until i go, until i go!
then i'll be gone then i'l be gone then i'll be gone
and you shant see and you shant see and you shant see
me around these parts no more

life in lompoc continues as if under a microscope's slide
sometimes we drive to the beach and then turn the car around and drive right back
it is a journey without a real destination, drive there turn around drive home
but the sense of direction comforts us

on the gray days with high wind
driving past union sugar avenue
toward the sea

life in lompoc is brutally slow but never fully stops
i wake early and wish i were still asleep
when the room is dark and everything very quiet
and my head pounds a pulsating beat

i make barely a sound

the tea bag is where i left it on the kitchen counter, a depressed transplant heart
leaking brown bile, still a
pillow for a child's head

and
not to seem rude--
but may i ask why you are allowed to be so happy?

what makes you so free and easy, so many exclamation points in even your most
thoughtless welcomes, as if your heart weighed no more than the feather
tattooed on my back

when even my heart weighs tons, heavy pewter in comparison to that falling feather?

why are you so free: when did he not do something similar to you?
and to that part of you that is no longer virginity but is neither reputation, that part
that can be taken and not returned but cannot fully vanish without your permission

although permission is eagerly sought and even for the most fragile of us
the ones hidden behind thoroughly obscuring mantillas, not just my scrap of veil
that became too easy to displace all too soon

we sometimes grant it so easily
doors after all being much easier to unlock than they are to lock
and lock-and-key being such a loved and petted notion to
us all

i wish i could make off with your joy and swallow it
until it was absorbed by my blue blood and became mine
heat and life!
some semblance of pink would perhaps return to my cheeks

finally to resemble a Klimt girl
as i always wished i could
as i've always secretly believed i do

but without the telling gush of
the phosphorescent stream of life fluid

that gives them that liquored glow,
their liquor being the only real kind
what i take to be liquor is really just
tomorrow's sickness and sorrow

replaced instead by exhausted tea bag,
still a pillow for a child's head

every morning i wake as if i were just born
and my chest aches with all the sadness of
everything i have yet to be left by
have yet to pay for
have yet to lose
and have already lost

every morning i wake the patient lying on the operating table:

force myself out of bed
seek my own ether
and tranquilize myself

relying crippled on that exhausted tea bag
a bowl or two of pot so that my head feels less like
it has been paved to the ground

morning, noon, and night my friends
and sometimes more
but try not to judge:

there is no ward for those of us who
cant remember happiness

no transfusion and i so wish i could have a transfusion--

heat and life!
finally to resemble a Klimt girl

i think that the truth is that my sadness is
the sort of thing that cannot be watched

no one wishes to be infected by this particularly debilitating blue and i harbor no blame

adjust your mantillas
enjoy your warm red blood and
sometime soon i hope
more than i hope for anything else

that i will be able to wake on mornings
with lightness again

no longer reliant on exhausted tea bag to soothe this
prevalent pain in my chest that shocks me
with its strength every time

and someday maybe to walk without
a train of thick smoke

held off the ground by the attendant incense and match fumes

i have no alibi:
caught pale handed in the bedroom
with the pipe
trying to steal your liveliness

only some you know, i would not take your entire store:

it is a terrible thing to do,
i wouldnt do it

morphine may

morphine May, you came like a lover from the ether
of everything i had yet to come to know

but once introduced i found you irresistible
a hot and sweating fever high and a delirious joy

in bed i would lay and sweat out my weight
until i was only one body made only of one thing and that thing

was all the elation for
life friends love the cosmos music mystery and the human heart
that had been gathered by my own hands as time
inconspicuously passed

and how when the day was warm and life was simple i
could morphine the hours away

i remember much
but little
i remember time falling like feathers


all around in a beautiful universe
as little as my bedroom and as big as

the constantly pulsing undercurrent of love
that i'm so tentative but faithful exists

now let me lay beneath that heavy air again
that air heavy with a sweet and reliable promise

dont worry darling you'll be alright
dont worry darling
see how right it already is?