Anna Molly Writing Insults in Her Notebook
Pure Blaze
Valentina Calvache
Anna Molly writing insults in her notebook.
Anna Molly chewing with her mouth open.
Anna Molly spitting through her front diastema.
Anna Molly shaking her pillbox like a maraca.
Anna Molly smoking with the limb of her finger.
Anna Molly talking tax deductions with her lawyer.
Anna Molly rolling her eyes at her grandmother’s wedding dress.
Anna Molly shouting, What’s wrong with you you fucking butch.
Anna Molly extending her arm to show a 11 Month Strong medallion.
Anna Molly on the floor, with her daisies’ dress, and plastic sandals, with her Malibu hair, Belair tan, Sunset Strip eyes.
Anna Molly with her hand spread out and her throat cut open.
*
If you raise your eyes you could see yourself with a wig on a billboard; Savana LavaGirl, they say, sometimes it’s your name and the ‘i’ is written without a dot but with a flame. If you walk into a house, any house, you will see the children in front of the TV, with their smiles illuminated by the recordings of your face, Savana. If you turn a magazine, you will find yourself printed there. You said, I’m more famous than The Beatles, and you were only 12; for sure they are going to quote that—word for word—in tomorrow’s obituary page. Right. You didn’t have an assistant to warn you that with death, blasphemy is paid.
You could recognize me in my mother for having a crucifix hanging in the living room and for saying hijo de puta to anyone getting in her way. She said grace before eating, and fed the strays with ground glass and meat. With this type of mother anything could happen. It could happen—for example—that they throw hot coffee on yousimply because you didn’t want to make your bed. Mother, I said, I’m going to art school. She just showed her I-don’t-wanna-know look and returned to the album of photographs that she was checking with her glasses on. You could have seen those same bifocal glasses on my father. The one that bequeathed me my 5’9”; the one that with promises left my mother; the one that she cut out of every family picture with the nose hair trimmer. Later we heard that in a flight he lost his life: such fear he had of turbulences, that one of them stopped his heart. That same day mother drank an aguardiente straight and lit a candle with the picture of her husband, the saint, the one that from that point, she decided, hadn’t deserted her. Her teeth stood out in a half-sided smile.
The day you appeared to me for the first time—girl with an Oscar since age nine—your mother Dina was also half-side smiling. From her West Hollywood condo she had landed on her face. Pum. Puf. Splash. People in the street breathed the smell of suicide. Blood, my little girl, never allows a clear sight of the significant—it didn’t let them see you, the folk haired child leaning against a white wall, chewing gum with an unleashed mouth. I aimed at you with my camera and your pupilless eyes looked at me. God exists because you existed, Savana.
The suicide pictures of your mother—that was your mother only by the hurried fact that she pushed you out of her vagina—paid for my rent for almost like a year complete. As you know, Dina didn’t die, but it would have been better if she had. From leaping into the malaise void, she inherited urgency for opioids and fake doctors.
For your picture—a tearless, soulless daughter—nobody offered a thing. I packed it up and left it at your agency. Anna Molly, I wrote with my number. A year passed and that year was like one of those in which you live in front of a screen; finger on the refresh button; waiting for the golden girl to come up off her pedestal just to reach out to you with her porcelain hand.
Elloooooo, sounded in the phone, the cadence of a prodigy child that didn’t talk like the others talked.
Right in front of you I watched you suck on the pink milkshake through the red and white paper straw. Eh! Nigger, you told the driver after you finished dinner. The politically correct people turned over at the word. You showed them your unapologetic diastema smile, and at the sound of your sympathy they got closer to ask you for photos, autographs, a piece of your flesh, a piece of your hair. Eh! Nigger—you resumed when everyone had left, happy with the souvenir of your being—, you can take a cab. You took some of the crumbled bills out of your Levi’s and threw the money on the ground.
If I saw you moving your mouth without saying a word I knew that you were accumulating saliva for an eventual discharge. Transparent, tepid, it dropped down my cheek. Savana LavaGirl cracked up with laughter; The Girl Nightmare. From that day we passed through people like billboards in the convertible we drove, to live like movies. We reached our hands to the sky like the palm trees we left behind on Hollywood Boulevard, on Sunset Boulevard, on the Santa Monica Boulevard. I listened to your fire: teec. Savana Nails of Tar.
Why do you smoke? I asked you. Why do you dress in black? You replied. You never answered questions; you waited for people to tell you first. In a restaurant on the road to Ensenada you took out a pillbox and started to sing, playing it like you were on a band. California Dreamin’: enter a restaurant through the kitchen door to a little room where sunset lobsters were served to us. In there you extended your arm and showed me an 11 Month Strong coin that hung from your wrist. Why do you talk like a chicana? She gave; she expected to receive. Aren’t you going to ask me about the pictures of your mom crashed into the pavement? No. Why do you talk like a chicana?
In your casino-colored notebook you wrote ‘sudaca’, and all the way back to L.A you dedicated yourself to mumbling zu-duh-cah. Zoo. Deh. Kah. In that notebook, ‘nigger’ was also engraved. The silence you applied when you wrote with gel pens and drew penises, tits, and flowers, talked about how, if you only could have decided what to do in the world, you would have chosen to collect bad words.
Ambidextrous you were for the lack of a half finger you lost thanks to your head hell. I looked at your face and then to the finger, because it was even stranger—your neon being—when I looked directly at what you lacked: a ghost limb that in fact could be seen because the rest of you was a shadow anyways. With the limb you held the cigarette and with your tilted face you listened to my talking: fables of parties in the third world where I had to take pictures of the illustrious, fat, greasy bright assistants. You straightened your head and lifted your chin and threw out the smoke to the stucco, to the sky.
Anna Molly was 13. Anna Molly was 14. You were 14 with your hand full of the birthday cake; you were 14 with the other hand that held the phone with the conversation about how much money in tax deductions it was worth having the Foundation Disappear Here. Your phantom finger on my whisky glass. You put it on your lips. You cleaned your tongue with your hand. You spat on the chair’s side; spat in the magazine Persian rug. Your children friends didn’t count their lives in years, but in the months clean; pats on their backs they received with each visit to their psychiatrists. Anna Molly was 10 months. Anna Molly was 11. Your therapist told you that when you reach the first year you will only have a coin when you turn another.
A dress as white as when you roll your eyes. You took it out of a bedroom of a house that was not yours but a lady’s with amusing hair. You raised your arms to say hello and curled them around her neck. She was the grandmother that wore that same dress to her wedding, just like her own mother and grandmother hanging in the melancholia wall. Never had a child existed with that many obligations before even being born. I touched the dress. You turned around perplexed that it could be touched. Your breath started to sing the now-it’s-your-turn. I placed a picture of a white man in your hand just so you could look at it very close, almost touching your nose. The body had stab wounds confetti-like. You spat a laugh like lava and threw yourself to the floor to imitate the dead man.
You got out of your trail with the longhaired wig, with the heroin-like bodysuit, with your face like a fist. You kicked the chair; screamed with void. You enlisted your notebook from heart to the one that tried to ask you what was going on. You rearranged the chair, brushed your hair. Sat down. You offered me the palm of your hand; I answered with a couple of more photographs. There are people that would like to watch you burn, Anna. We have to resume the shoot, they told her. But your pupilless eyes, Savana Super Girl, were focused on the picture of a police officer illuminating a torso without members in a park. I also liked seeing that photograph: at the back of it the summer sunset; at the front, the little man with the bulletproof vest, the green light in his hand, the long grass, the white flesh like your teeth, Savana, when you didn’t realize but had started to smile half-side.
I knew which cigarettes you smoked. How you signed. How many credit cards you had. What was the password of the bank. I knew beforehand whom you were going to insult. Which photographs you were going to like. I knew that you couldn’t sleep unless it was in the tub. I, myself, washed your hair in the early mornings after nightmare nights. Braids with four strands. Pink always with white. It’s fine, Anna, everything’s all right.
Anomaly I used to call you and you cried. Abnormally, you said back. But how couldn’t you be, star child, if you were fashioned from the thing that beyond the rainbow lies? I wanted to taste your tears. I got so close and you thought I was going to hold you. I took out my tongue and I licked your cheek, and you knew all that was wrong with me, Savana, with you or without you by my side.
Your kicks in my stomach were nothing but politeness. We both sat on the floor and started to laugh with fury in our lungs. No more ever again, you said in front of the mirror, and I thought you were talking about this. Us. You turned around with decision between your eyebrows. You brought the knife when you came back.