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July 19, 2007

Shorty & Mercy in NYC Part 2

You can blame my absence on wedding planning. For real.

Anyway, y’all are like enough of all your excuses. Where’s Shorty and Mercy Part 2?

Quit tripping. I was actually busy trying to execute three different wedding plans that all failed weeks into working them out so I've been totally depressed. I'm okay now. But for real, I was busy. I swear it. But here it is:

We left off where?

Oh yes.

The next day was the day of the cocktail party where J and I would introduce our closest friends to Mama B (his mom) and his dad and to Shorty and Mercy.

I decided not to go the engagement party route. It’s trite. It’s been done. I feel like engagement parties automatically put a formality on things that is entirely not necessary. Not to mention, Shorty already had his outfit planned and it was so not formal. This fool wanted to wear a Lil Jon shirt with his “dungarees” and his customized MO55BLU Nikes. He tucked the Lil Jon shirt in too. Twas a tall tee, as well! So the graphic at the bottom was all half tucked in. Ridiculous. The man is just ridiculous.

So people showed up to the cocktail party. I had to use an Evite. I know right. Who have I become?

So the Evite was entitled “Hallelujah Holla Back” so that those invited could understand the vibe. Basically, get crunk with Shorty and Mercy and Mama B and Mr. Beck.

The morning of, Shorty and I did a beer run. J insisted on getting the last minute things at this Asian supermarket he loves. I’m half Asian so I can say this. I was trying to go to Waldbaum’s. The “regular” supermarket. I was not trying to be up in the Asian supermarket. First of all, Mercy is a damn fool up in there. I don’t have time for this leisurely shopping. And I hope she knows she ain’t making no Sinigang. There will be no bagoong on any of my breakfast bananas. I have successfully avoided those smells for the 10 years I’ve been on my own and I intend to keep it this way.

Second of all, it’s way out there. All out of the way. But J insisted because he loves Mercy that much. He was like, “Babe, think out of the box. This is not for me. It’s for Mercy!” But the thing is, J loves an Asian market. He will bring home all kinds of shit I have never even seen before. And it will coagulate in my fridge for months before I think he’s forgotten about it enough to throw it out. Yes girl, I just throw his shit out with no permission. He hasn’t caught on yet. Why one man needs 28 different hot sauces and 18 cans of jackfruit – I don’t know.

But my biggest hesitation in going to the Asian supermarket is that it conjures up really crazy childhood memories.

We used to have to go every week when we lived on base. When you got a soda, it would have this insane fish smell on the can. So the fish smell combined with the Coke smell combined with the metal of the can would make me want to die. Sometimes we’d have to share the can of soda. My brother would whine and say, “But it has her breath on it! Ew!” And my dad would say, “You better be happy you have the breath to be sitting up here complaining!” And then we’d all get in trouble and either not get the soda at all or get pinched. One day, I threw a straight up fit. We got all loaded up into the Oldsmobile. I was in the middle seat, on the hump because we had to sit in birth order to prevent fighting over the window seat. It was a battle I’d never win based on biology which is so fucked up but whatever. My mom had gotten the first sip out of my soda and for real, her breath was on it.

I think I actually said, “I hate you!” and kicked the console of the seat between the driver and passenger seat. Keep in mind, I’m like 8. My daddy looked in the rearview mirror at me with this face that meant straight up business. I might have seen stars before I even got the beating. My mother snatched the soda out of my hand so fast not a drop fell from it. My brother started complaining because we were sharing it. Mercy snapped back and said, “I bang your head together!” and SHE DID. That shit hurt. And so that’s why I hate the Asian supermarket.

Shorty and I banded together and complained the whole time in the store. He was like, “See, that’s why I don’t like to take her nowhere with me. She up in here trying to make friends with e’rybody.” She was only talking to the produce man. Every couple of aisles, he’d go, “That’s why I don’t come up in here. Gotdamn! What the hell is that smell? Meleesa, you smell that?” or “Mercy, there go your cousin…”

J and Mercy ignored us, shaking their heads in shame that they had to be seen with us in this, this glorious conglomeration of all things ethnic. Mercy bought all kinds of oversized odd-smelling grapefruits. She bought a wok. A tool to flip the lumpia. J bought more hot sauce. These weird sesame candies and shrimp chips which he and my mother went off on in the car.

The preparation for the party is boring so I’ll spare you. It’s just my father cleaning things and saying “I don’t know when the last time you dusted these blinds girl, damn…” and Mercy went around putting everything that was on a real table surface on top of some kind of doily or placemat or wash cloth. The woman can’t just leave anything on the plain surface. Everything must be on top of something else. “Meleesa, protecting dis one! Iss not good if you don’t protecting it!”

Let’s just get to the party.

You know that little Chinese sculpture that I turned into an incense burner, the one I bought and told you about here. Well, to refresh, I got this lady sculpture. Her legs are wide open and there’s a hole where her vagina is. She even has the nerve to have hairs painted around the hole. She’s on her back. I got her at a discount because the man that was on top of her, humping, broke. But his penis broke off inside her. And so when you shake her, you can hear the little ceramic ding dong rattling around inside her.

The Gays were standing around the sculpture and talking about it, saying it was adorable to which I said, “yeah right, like you really like it” and we all started laughing. It’s a wonderful conversation piece so I started telling the story of how I found her. I get to the part where I bring the sculpture up to the story listeners’ ears and shake her. My father came around the corner, didn’t stop and enter the conversation, just shimmied by on his way to the food and said,

“And that’s what I call breaking a bitch off…”

The Gays were beside themselves. Red in the face. There was lots of “I love Shorty!” to follow.

Now, as far as the alcohol…

I already have in my mind what Shorty is allowed to have. He is allowed to have two beers per hour. Any more than this and we will have entered another realm of Shorty. He has layers, you know. Sometimes it’s performance. Fool will belt out some old school R & B hits and during the instrumentals, where there is no singing, he lectures us about how the face of music has changed so much and that "these young cats” don’t know shit about shit. “Lean back my mother fucking ass.” Sometimes it’s straight monster trucks with the furniture. RIP Bauhaus inspired tubular brass table with glass tops. Sometimes it’s a whispering to the children about how much he really loves us. “Can you hear me? I’m telling you, you are my favorite child. I love you!” Didn’t matter that all of us were right there when he’d tell one or the other. We were all told this same thing, but in front of each other. We’d just have to wait for our turn to hear it. Then sometimes, my personal favorite, there are war stories that never happened. You can understand how upset I was, at 23, to have discovered all those stories were alcohol fabrications. So, you didn’t jump out of a helicopter and land in a marsh in Vietnam? So, you’ve never seen a grenade?

How I plan on controlling his consumption is by making him do work.

“Daddy, can you fill that ice bucket?”

“Daddy, did you check to see if there are napkins in the bathroom?”

“Daddy, can you make sure mom isn’t confusing anyone?”

After awhile, Shorty wasn’t having it. “Girl, you need to relax. Ain’t nobody tripping off none of this bullshit. We all having a good time. You up in here bossing Jason around while he trying to kick it with his friends. It ain’t right. You setting yourself up with all that bossy shit. Don’t nobody like that!”

This actually hurt my feelings but it was totally true. I needed to relax but I couldn’t. The party doesn’t run smoothly by itself. Somebody’s gotta clear the trash. Somebody’s gotta keep the dumb ass pigs in a blanket hot. Somebody’s gotta make those cocktails for the arriving guests. And that somebody was me.

Shorty’s beer pick for the evening was MICHELOB ULTRA. Yes, I had that on ice all night. Not Stella. Not any of those prettier sounding beers. Michelob Ultra. And he kept that cooler stocked all night.

At one point, Shorty was at a table with a co-worker of mine and my boss. I heard him say, “A woman that wear mismatch lingerie is a ho.”

I said, “Daddy! What! What are you guys talking about?”

My boss was red in the face from laughing so hard. My co-worker was like, “It’s all good.”

So Shorty continued to expand upon this theory.

“You see. I done took the time up at Victoria’s to get you the matching set. I know your lazy ass ain’t coming down here all mismatched in a mother fucker.”

Mercy chimed in, “Yeah, I always hab dose matching one, you know?” Does she not realize that he’s talking about her? And if he’s not talking about her, who then, is he talking about going to Victoria’s for? Who is coming down “here” all mismatched?

Mama B was helping me clear the kitchen when Shorty decided to pop in and take a look around. A friend of mine asked him where he got his Lil Jon shirt. And he pretended not to hear him and said, “Whaaaaaaaat?” like Lil Jon does. Mama B had never seen or heard anything like this, so she said, “What?” like a regular person. And Shorty, mere inches from her face said, “Okaaaaaaaaaaaay!” and she looked stunned. I just did the smile face shrug and hoped this would all end soon but secretly I enjoyed the interaction.

The party started getting into that space where you care less about the pile of abused cocktail napkins and discarded bottle caps. I started to relax a little.

But it was oddly quiet. Where is Shorty?

I went down to the back of the house. We’d set up a little lounge area under some trees. He was sitting there talking to J and some of J’s childhood friends. One’s name is actually Jay and he’s in a heavy ass band called Unearthly Trance. The other’s name is Danny and Danny is a real actual crazy person. One time, while cleaning out J’s dresser, I found a photo of Danny’s genitalia wearing sunglasses and a small square moustache. I won’t go into further detail because it just gets more disturbing, but you understand. Wait, why is this in your dresser? And how does one discover how to do this with one’s balls?

Danny, Jay and Shorty were talking about music. Shorty said, “Y’all like Howling Wolf?” And Jay and Danny were like, “Fuck yeah!”

Shorty proceeded to get up. He just left. Um, okay?

He returned with his Apple laptop.

He brought it downstairs and started playing Howling Wolf, in the backyard, off of his computer. They were all feeling that shit. Nudging J and being like, “Dude, that’s your father-in-law!” and J would be like, “Shorty’s fucking sick.”

So then Shorty said they should all start a band. A grimy blues band. Shorty offered up his talents as a singer. And dead serious, he was like, “Let’s jam next time I come up here.” He then said he’d get to work on thinking of a name.

...

Shorty has always been the king of redundancies. Over Thanksgiving two years ago, he had dragged the speaker into the dining room so that he and J could listen to Baaba Maal. J was at one end of the table and Shorty was at the other. My mother wanted them to sit at the heads of the table as a “welcome to our family” kind of gesture. The music was loud so they were yelling to each other. Yes, this was Thanksgiving dinner. The menu included crabs and not turkey that year.

Shorty said, “Son, you like this shit?” as he air drummed to the beat, still chewing his food.

J was like, “Oh yeah.”

And they rattled off other albums and other like artists and they went on and on.

Shorty then said, “Yeah, he’s like the black James Brown.”

And J said, “James Brown is black” but he said it in a question mark.

And Shorty quickly responded with, “The black James Brown of Africa, I mean!”

Sure enough, three days after he got back to Tampa, he called me and said, “Meleesa, I got it. I been thinking long and hard about the band. I got a name. Want to hear it?”

Of course I said yes.

“Dead Fossils.”

Silence.

Dead Fossils. But…

“Dead Fossils. Hello? You heard me? Hello? Meleesa.”

“No, I’m here Daddy. Dead Fossils. Okay. That’s cool. Yeah.”

“Let e’rybody know so we can start putting some shit together.”

I said I would do just that.

And he hung up.

Danny myspace’d me with this message the following week:

i finished a weird passage of music, (with the thought of only your father dropping lyric over it), that will lead into a heavy as fuck blues ruler. i have it on mini disc and will pass it along to beck and newman for their shot of being part of the grimmest blues outfit ever. hands down. we'd puke on a priest. and slap his mother for not testifying to the realest of blues outfits, send out the black bird, send out the dove.

All right!

So, cool band. The most stunning part about the whole thing is they are all really serious. J’s got music for it. And Shorty’s got a voice. When J wakes up in the morning, he plays guitar. Just tinkers around, sitting on the edge of the bed. I hear parts he’s working on for his new record. Or I’ll hear songs I know already or songs he’s had floating in his head for YEARS now that have not moved forward with any more parts.

Shorty came into my bedroom on the day they were leaving while J was playing.

He just started singing. Something about “Maylene” and all the blues she’s been going through. “Oooh Maylene baaaaaaabaaaaaay…” and J continued to play as he sang. To see my father, standing in my bedroom in his pajamas singing his ass off as my future husband, sitting on the edge of our shared bed played guitar for him – that shit was on another level.

I’m in the right place. Shorty is supposed to be J's father-in-law. J is supposed to be Shorty's son-in-law. It really couldn't have worked out better. I brought them together. That was all me! Go girl.

Posted by melissah at July 19, 2007 11:25 AM