{"id":2121,"date":"2016-11-27T12:10:52","date_gmt":"2016-11-27T19:10:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/underthetablebooks.com\/blog\/?p=2121"},"modified":"2016-11-27T12:14:03","modified_gmt":"2016-11-27T19:14:03","slug":"two-love-stories","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/underthetablebooks.com\/blog\/archives\/2121","title":{"rendered":"Two Love Stories"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"love<\/a><\/p>\n

love story<\/em> photo by Todd<\/p>\n

Here are two brief love stories from my new novel Magenta<\/em>.<\/a><\/p>\n

Henry\u2019s Story<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

When I was a senior in high school at Fort Orford High and causing my God-fearing parents great distress by playing the guitar, I fell in love with Iriana Ceja, a beautiful Mexican woman three years older than I.<\/p>\n

Iriana was a waitress at the North End Caf\u00e9, now Dave\u2019s Donuts, and believe me, Iriana was the only reason anyone knowingly went to the North End Caf\u00e9. The food was bad, the coffee uniformly bitter, the d\u00e9cor ugly and uncomfortable. But Iriana was so lovely, so friendly, and such a sparkling conversationalist, hundreds of people made the North End Caf\u00e9 a daily part of their lives, and I was one of those people.<\/p>\n

I went there after school to gawk at Iriana and listen to her talk and laugh. I would buy a stale cookie and a cup of bitter coffee and stay for hours, supposedly doing my homework, but really just reveling in Iriana. My life at home was torture because my parents were so fiercely opposed to everything I loved, especially my playing the guitar and writing songs. School was drudgery and my peers were largely disinterested in the poets and artists I admired.<\/p>\n

Iriana was my solace.<\/p>\n

She called me Hank\u2014no one else did\u2014and when I finally got up the courage to ask her why she called me Hank, she gave me one of her darling smiles and said, \u201cComo Hank Williams, por supuesto. I heard you playing your guitar at the beach. I love your music. Why don\u2019t you bring your guitar here and play for us?\u201d<\/p>\n

Us<\/i> meant Iriana<\/i> to me, so I started bringing my guitar to the caf\u00e9 and playing for her when she took her breaks. She would sit at the picnic table under the oak tree behind the caf\u00e9, smoke a cigarette, and listen to me play. She sang harmony if she knew the song and hummed harmony if she didn\u2019t know the words.<\/p>\n

After every song, she would say, \u201cSo beautiful, Hank,\u201d or \u201cI love that song, Hank,\u201d or \u201cYou\u2019re so good, Hank. Bueno bueno.\u201d<\/p>\n

So of course I wrote songs for her, and after I played her the third song I\u2019d written for her, she kissed me and we were officially a dyad.<\/p>\n

We had a hundred passionate tussles under that oak tree and at the beach, but whenever I asked her to make love with me, she would say so sweetly, \u201cWhen we are married, I will make love with you every day.\u201d So I vowed to her that when I turned twenty-one, if she hadn\u2019t found someone else, I would marry her.<\/p>\n

My parents were terrified I would fulfill my vow to marry Iriana. They were racists, not violently so, but they wanted me to marry a white woman, not a Mexican. I graduated from high school, turned nineteen, and went on a hitchhiking trip to Canada with my pal Gunnar Digs. Not long after we got back, I joined the Army.<\/p>\n

When I came home from Germany two years later, the North End Caf\u00e9 had turned into Dave\u2019s Donuts and Iriana was married to Fernando Viramontes and pregnant with the first of their two kids. She was working at Stuyvesant\u2019s by then and would work there for the next forty years. It was Iriana who encouraged me to go to Nashville and try to sell my songs.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou have to go and try, Hank,\u201d she said, sitting across the table from me at Stuyvesant\u2019s, just a few weeks before she gave birth to her daughter Veronica. \u201cGod gave you a special gift. Maybe you won\u2019t succeed, but you will never be happy if you don\u2019t try.\u201d<\/p>\n

When I came home from Nashville three years later and hid my guitar away and took up the chainsaw, I ate at Stuyvesant\u2019s three or four times a week. The food was good, but that\u2019s not why I went there.<\/p>\n

I went to be in the presence of Iriana, my dear friend who never stopped believing my music was beautiful.<\/p>\n

Theodore\u2019s Story<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

When I was living in Santa Cruz and working in a bookstore, my greatest joy was attending poetry readings in San Francisco. I enjoyed the adventure of hitchhiking up the coast to that great metropolis, but more than the journey, I loved the atmosphere of those readings and how everyone was so curious about new and original ways of using words to convey feelings and ideas. And I was most intrigued by the couples who came to these readings, for they often seemed, at first glance, to be fantastically mismatched.<\/p>\n

One such couple was Janice Cleveland and Rufus Borenstein. Janice was a buxom black woman in her forties with short hair and red glasses perched on the tip of her nose. She wore blouses made of colorful fabric from Nigeria, tight slacks, and high heels. Rufus was a tall slender white guy in his fifties with a pointy white goatee and a monocle that was forever falling out of his eye. He wore a gray tweed jacket over a black T-shirt, faded blue jeans, and white high-top tennis shoes decorated with red and yellow polka dots.<\/p>\n

I first met Janice and Rufus at the intermission of a poetry reading starring two of my idols, Kate Fetherston and D.R. Wagner. Janice came up to me and said, \u201cWe heard you read at the open mike after Jane Blue\u2019s reading last month. We totally dug your poems. You gonna read tonight?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI am,\u201d I said gleefully. \u201cAnd I want to kiss you.\u201d<\/p>\n

So she puckered up and we kissed.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat\u2019s going on here?\u201d asked Rufus, joining us with two glasses of cheap white wine, one for him and one for Janice. \u201cHey, it\u2019s you. Your poem about waiting for a ride on the coast highway. Brilliant. Can we get a copy?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cOf course,\u201d I said, giddy from their flattery. \u201cWhere do I send it?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cYou got one of our cards, Rufe?\u201d said Janice to Rufus.<\/p>\n

He fished in the pocket of his tweed jacket and brought forth two volumes of poetry\u2014Robert Duncan and Kenneth Rexroth\u2014a rubber band, three small crystals, and a somewhat banged up business card:<\/p>\n

Janice Cleveland & Rufus Borenstein<\/em> \u00a0Tarot & Psychotherapy<\/em><\/p>\n

I took the card and said, \u201cIf only I could afford you.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cYou can,\u201d said Janice, laughing. \u201cYou give us some poems, we give you tarot and psychotherapy.\u201d<\/p>\n

So I sent them some poems and the next time I was in San Francisco, I had a fantastic tarot reading from Rufus and some incredibly helpful talk therapy with Janice, after which we went out for spaghetti. They became my good friends and remain my friends to this day, though sadly they got priced out of San Francisco and moved to Victoria, Canada five years ago.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

love story photo by Todd Here are two brief love stories from my new novel Magenta. Henry\u2019s Story When I was a senior in high school at Fort Orford High and causing my God-fearing parents great distress by playing the guitar, I fell in love with Iriana Ceja, a beautiful Mexican woman three years older […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[3607,3972,3971,3878,844,9,33],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/underthetablebooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2121"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/underthetablebooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/underthetablebooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/underthetablebooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/underthetablebooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2121"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/underthetablebooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2121\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2125,"href":"https:\/\/underthetablebooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2121\/revisions\/2125"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/underthetablebooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2121"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/underthetablebooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2121"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/underthetablebooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2121"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}