i know a bet a gambler wouldn't take
"i wasn’t much of a petty thief. i wanted the whole world or nothing."
My heart is a racehorse losing in the morning, and a gambler betting at night. If only I could win one of these days. If only I could win on a Sunday night, so that I’d feel good going into Monday morning. If only I could gambol into June like how I gamboled onto the race track. What they didn’t tell me early on was that it was already too late. A bad bet, they say. A starting gun will go off and it takes. Dust kicks up in front of my face. I’m not sure what I’m chasing but I’ll be treading through the muck of my bad bets. It leads me high up on the cliff overlooking those waters. A horse in deep water.
Tell me, what is it like to look like a winner? Tell me what it is like for the likes of men, strong men, a strong man like John Wayne and all those other cowboys to ride you. Do you spook easy? Does he tame you? Does he click his tongue and spur you on? Do you flush your soft lips against his palm? Does he ever ride bareback—is he on rhythm, is he on time? Do you buck or bite? Do you ever feel hungry for a fight?
These are the dog days of summer. Sultry heat and droughts, mad dogs and madder men. Look on from the stands, look at these men’s bodies, how they sweat and how they pant. How we cheer. How they run. Nobody knows the difference between bad luck and a bad play. A bad bet. Nobody ever bets enough on a winning horse, anyways.
I was watching an episode of Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown. It was the infamous Sicily episode, but I’m not here to talk about the dead cuttlefish in the water and Bourdain’s nervous breakdown. The show was playing in the background and my ears latch onto this particular conversation:
So right over there you can bet on a horse?
— Bet on horses, yes. Bet horses and here you eat the one that loses. The loser goes on the fire.
I don’t remember what I was doing at that moment. I don’t know why it made me so sad. I know that this misses the entire point of the episode but whatever, I am here and I am going to talk about the damn horse on the fire.
Susan Cain had said that longing is momentum in disguise. We reach for it and move toward it. I think we move towards it in different ways. I tirelessly gallop towards it, I huff and my steps are rhythmic and forceful like the hoofs on a racetrack. The noise scares others off. But I keep on the chase, it makes me feel alive. But I think I’d like to feel relaxed too. I’d like to feel my heart slow its rate along with my gait. No more thunderbirds in my chest, please. I’d like for anyone to call me, calm me, I’d like to talk about anything with anyone. I mean, really talk. A conversation, words that make you feel relaxed. Not the barely unintelligible words that I push out in the midst of thunderous steps and deep breaths. I don’t want to say things to feel like I exist. I want to talk to relax.
Maybe I walk the wrong way. I think I’m too soft spoken, or maybe I’m too loud. Or I talk too much, or not enough. I think I don’t say enough bad things. Maybe I don’t do enough bad things—maybe I should smoke, maybe I should learn how to play poker. I don’t know. I don’t understand. The summer confuses things. There’s a chaos in summer. I miss how harsh and blue and blunt the winter was. When it had been days since the sun came out, and when it finally did, albeit for a few moments, it felt like the world was new again. I would see the walls that were tinged grey grow warm and yellow. You would forget that they ever looked like that.
This is the problem with spending too much time by myself. This is the problem of summer. The problem of a horse on the fire. I start getting so insecure about features and facets of myself that felt normal when I was with another person. I was tinged grey and I grew warm and yellow, and I forget I ever looked like that. I read an old journal entry of mine that went, “Recently I started feeling like I had incredibly long teeth, because I could see too much of it when I talked or opened my mouth.” What does this even mean? Is this some coded message only teenage girls can decipher? I don’t understand why I abandoned myself like that. I don’t understand why yearning makes so much sense to me. I don’t understand why I can’t base my worth in what I can give to others. I don’t understand why I can’t give everything away. I don’t understand why others don’t want everything I can give away. I don’t understand love before you know someone and after you know someone. I don’t understand the performance of love. I don’t understand the subtlety of making it seem effortless when it’s effortful. I don’t understand why I can’t huff and run. I don’t understand why no one will bet on me when I’m making so much noise. Look at me. Look at me. Look at me. Look at me.
I remember this one time my grandmother telling me that an angel had passed by. My family and I were all piled into one car, and I was being pushed into the left side of my grandmother’s soft body. Everyone was talking, all at once. Then suddenly, as it is known in English, a pregnant pause. Un ange passe. An angel passes. Maybe it’s because my grandmother is both a superstitious person and a devout Catholic that when she had said this, I took it seriously. Just like when she told me “Mag dilang anghel ka sana”—may you have the tongue of an angel. It’s always angels with her.
This time I’m sitting in a Chinese restaurant. It was a Friday so my ma had come home from work earlier than she usually does. There’s never food at home on Fridays. I get too busy with the laundry. So we find ourselves sliding into the sticky red booth, made even stickier with the sweat from our thighs. We settle our arms onto the sticky wooden tables and hold up the sticky menus to our sticky faces. General Tso Chicken. Hunan Chicken. Hot and Sour Soup. Happy Family. Peking Spareribs. House Chow Mein. The stickier everything is, the better the food will taste. I look to my right, out the window, and I see a man in his late-30s to early-40’s standing on the curb. He’s got an average build, average height. He’s wearing loose jeans and one of those wife-beater tank tops—don’t ask me why they’re called that. He’s smoking a cigarette. He stubs it out and comes back inside. Though I wish he wouldn’t. Every time someone opens the door to this restaurant, all the sweltering heat from outside rushes in. Hot air drawn to cold. Convection, and all that stuff from 6th grade. Though I wouldn’t call the air in here cold. The owners are too cheap to turn on the air conditioner, but at least they’ve got the ceiling fan in here going at a futile speed of 1. The wife-beater, as I call him in my mind albeit politically incorrect, sits in the booth behind me. He’s not alone. I didn’t notice it before, but I’m back-to-back with a lady in the booth behind me. I never get to see what she looks like. The two get to talking. They must be on a first date or something. Their conversation sounds a bit too awkward for them to have been together long. Maybe they met through work or a mutual friend. It sounds like that kind of relationship. Then one of them must’ve suggested this date. This all goes through my head while I slurp my hot and sour soup on this hot and sour day. My ma and I have our own conversations going, but sometimes we suddenly fall quiet to eavesdrop on the booth behind me. I find that so funny when this happens. It’s like you know the person you’re eating with so well that you’ve exhausted all interesting conversation, so that when you overhear something more interesting going on at the next table, you both go quiet at the same time without even having to count to 3. Un ange passe. A more mischievous angel, perhaps.
The woman is out to impress. But it’s all a bit awkward. My stomach is at a crossroads at whether it should digest this food or push it back up again. (God, she reminds me of me.) She asks the wife-beater what his zodiac sign is. The wife-beater says Aquarius. She says that her moon sign is Aquarius. The wife-beater says Oh really with a tone that indicates just enough courteous interest and asks what that means. It’s enough for her and she goes on to say that It’s great because it means we’re both intelligent people and Your sun sign is your outward personality and the moon sign is your inner and subconscious personality. The woman brings up her chiropractor. The conversation after that becomes a bit stilted. Then the waitress arrives at their table with food and saves them. Never mind. She brings up her chiropractor again. The wife-beater doesn’t respond. He must have some complex against chiropractors. Maybe he had an ex who was a chiropractor. I go back to my General Chicken and Rice. She goes back to more spiritual topics: her crystals. Her crystal necklace. The wife-beater perks up at this and talks about necklace clasps. She responds in kind and says that Yes she recently had to change the clasp on hers as well and that It’s a bit tricky you know. I eat the last of my Chow Mein and my ma flags down the waitress for the bill. I calculate the 15% tip in my head. Mental arithmetic, 6th grade and all that. Neither my sun sign nor moon sign is in Aquarius.
The last bit of conversation my ma and I overhear while we wait for the to-go boxes perks me up a bit. The woman starts talking about the metamorphosis of caterpillars. She sounds really enthusiastic describing chrysalis. She says Did you know that when caterpillars are in their cocoons they turn entirely into liquid before becoming a butterfly? No I didn’t know that, is what I think the wife-beater responded but at this point I’m trying to unstick my thighs from where it melded with the sticky red seats. It’s impossible to slide out from these booths gracefully. I felt a bit disappointed that I would never be able to know how the date ends. I was against the woman until I heard her talk about those damn caterpillars. That’s what got me. I hadn’t met anyone that knew that if you cut open a cocoon before its metamorphosis was complete, you’d just see liquid. No caterpillar, no butterfly. It’s a result of the caterpillar digesting itself. Autosarcophagy. Self-cannibalism. Ouroboros. Maybe I’m reading too much into it. While in the parking lot I ask my ma if butterflies remember anything from their caterpillar days. I’m standing on the curb the man was standing on earlier. Or maybe they digested their memories too? I wonder if the woman asked the man this question.
I got home and read these articles—the date at the Chinese restaurant completely forgotten—then I learned recently that the tails on a swallowtail butterfly serve no aerodynamic purpose. They’re there because birds need something to grab onto when they’re trying to kill a butterfly. They are designed to capture the attention of a bird. And that bird will grab onto that tail and it will break off. And the butterfly will be free.
What are the chances that I am the butterfly or the bird?
The butterfly without its tail marks the end of an era and the beginning of a new one. As with all things, there are going to be things I lose and things I gain. I think I’ve never really learned how to deal with this. I am not the butterfly.
A part of me knew this was going to happen. It seems like everyone else is better at living than I am. But I have this sense—get up, go! I am on their tail again, and I am going to keep chasing. There is a sadistic pleasure in the dealings of survival. I am not the bird.
I am not sure where this leaves me. Maybe I am the tail. Maybe I’m just the woman that left a 15% tip.
We were driving on the backroad through Wheatland. Wheat Land. Colloquially named. I always hated the hot, arid desert-like landscapes that are everywhere in California. Everywhere that doesn’t matter, at least. When people think of California, this is the last thing they think of. The tall, dead, yellow grass that the cows can’t seem to get enough of. Broken chain-link fences. The asphalt so hot that it makes the air above it jiggle like jello. It hypnotizes you while you drive. You see a white-washed house every 10 or so minutes if you’re lucky. An abandoned school bus from the 70s. Empty RVs. A “tree of life” all by its lonesome in a sandy wasteland. Rice dryers. Silos. No one thinks about it. They think about San Francisco or LA. They don’t think about the in-between stuff. The shitty stuff you have to drive through to get to the good-good. I never liked to think about it either. But recently, I found myself changing my mind. We’re in the dog days of summer and we’re driving through the backroads of Wheatland and I’m liking it. It has its own charm, I’m realizing. Maybe this is the real California, I’m thinking. There’s way too much of it to not be the real California. But you don’t see this on a postcard. Greetings! Instead, you get the Hollywood sign, the Griffin Observatory, or the Golden Gate Bridge. Maybe the Capitol building in Sacramento if you’re feeling a bit political.
We came to Wheatland to gamble. I wanted to see what the new Hard Rock casino was all about. Would it be Rock n’ Roll utopia? By that I mean, would it be as sleazy as I think? Turns out it’s not that sleazy—the air filters still work so the smell of cigarettes don’t hang so heavy unlike other casinos—but the interior was as random as its chosen location. When we spotted the casino while driving on the freeway, my aunt said that it sprouted out of nowhere, in the middle of nowhere, like a mushroom. I corrected her and said it was more like a cactus, since we’re basically in the desert. Mushrooms grow in humidity. And it’s dry as it is scorching out here. When we arrived—on a quiet Monday afternoon, no less—we see the most random music memorabilia you can imagine scattered everywhere. Cher’s robe. Slash’s guitar. The suit John Lennon wore to an immigration hearing when Nixon was trying to get him deported from the States. Kesha’s sneakers. Nicki Minaj’s boots. Elvis’ karate gi with the American flag printed all over it. Again: random.
I win 127 bucks on a slot machine. Random. (But don’t ask me how much I lost.) And we set out to leave. We quickly caffeinate ourselves at their overpriced café that’s set across the display of Elton John’s jacket. We pull out of the Hard Rock parking lot and drive past the Toyota Amphitheater. The Smashing Pumpkins and Stone Temple Pilots are performing there later today at 6:30 and people are already lining up. (I guess Hard Rock’s very own concert venue wasn’t rock n’ roll enough that they had to choose this other venue only 3 minutes away.) They picked a good day. A good summer day. Sweltering hot, don’t get me wrong. There’s definitely going to be a lot of people passing out from heat stroke. But it’s a good day to blast some interstate love songs and siamese dreams out in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of Wheatland, where it’s so hot that even the ubiquitous cows are nowhere to be seen, all of them hiding from the heat. It doesn’t get more Americana than this. It’s like Woodstock all over again. (Whether it’s Woodstock ‘69 or ‘99 is up to your imagination.)
I tell my aunt, the one who likened Hard Rock Casino to a mushroom, that driving through this place makes me feel like I’m in some film set in the 1970s. Maybe Dazed and Confused. Maybe Texas Chainsaw. Badlands. Over the Edge. Corvette Summer, but instead of a fancy red Corvette it’s a dull blue Toyota Camry.
Maybe it’s none of those things. All I know is that I keep on singing Tia Blake’s version of “Plastic Jesus”. Something about the song seems appropriate right now. Coming back from the casino while the white rosary on the dashboard of my car glints and reflects the high noon sun back into my eyes. At least there’s nothing to crash into out here.
:postscript: i’ll leave you off here, vignettes of the height of summer. plastic jesus sittin on the dashboard of my car. who knows when i’ll be back. how did that poem go? “everyone writes poems about august. i keep thinking it's july.” august is almost over and there’s a hurricane nearby. soon the winds will be biting and cold but right now they are warm and humid and you’ll forget they were ever like that.
loved this! all of it was so amazing! the vignettes were so vivid and so interesting to me... thank you for writing this