I don’t know why I thought it would be a good idea to work there. I needed a job so I could pay for car insurance and get a driver’s license. These were my mother’s conditions.

            I applied at three places and two offered me jobs. McDonalds offered me a job first. Although I did not eat meat, I thought a job is a job, and so I accepted.

            Two of us were trained together – two new hires. The other new hire was a tall blonde guy with an interesting arrangement of moles on his neck. There were hundreds of moles, like a field of beige poppies. I have since learned that his particular type of more is called a skin tag. It is flat and lifts up off the skin just like a tag on the back of a t-shirt. Like me, this guy was a teenager, but he was burdened by this poppy field of skin tags. The poppy field rose out of his left shoulder and crept toward his ear. I assume the mole cluster is the reason the boy was hired to work as a cook. As goofy as I may have looked, with my gap-toothed smile, long center-parted hair and mismatched clothes, I was to work the cash register.

            The manager was a fast talking Hispanic man who knew his greasy little store very well. He showed us where the burger patties were kept frozen, there the lettuce and onions were stacked inboxes and how to prep them. He showed Poppy field how to time the burgers on the grill and gave us both a chart of burger assemblage ingredients to memorize. He showed us the storage room for giant bags of milkshake glop and showed us how to change the glop bags on the milk and ice cream machines. His restaurant was a highly efficient machine with minimal human operators.

            The most challenging job in the place was the drive through. The drive through attendant needed to know the keyboard, a color coded controller for the cash register, like the back of his hand. He needed to talk with a steady stream of customers through a distorted speaker and then accurately enter their orders into his cash register. meanwhile, handing the previous orders out the window. An obese Hispanic man was handling the drive through when we were trained. He received and submitted burger orders simultaneously. Usledvovayoushaya peredacha- Bakhtin’s term for simultaneous appropriation and transmission of information. He received burgers and transmitted burgers. A small space in his brain was dedicatedly communicating in fast food.

            Out his little window, one car was replaced by another with amazing speed, in a train which seemed never ending. I suppose it should be never ending- the McDonald’s was located in a busy parking lot in a town made out of parking lots. 

            The sky is spitting rain from a big grey cloud as I drive. My father is directing me from the passenger seat. He complains about how they have changed the streets as we weave though one-ways. This neighborhood is old. The oak trees beside the modest houses are huge and thick. They tower over the houses, some of which are in need of paint. I like this neighborhood.

            My father is telling me that he used to shoot straight through this neighborhood. Now, the street that he took has been designated as a one-way, heading the wrong direction. We fold out of the nice, old neighborhood and merge onto a busy street, also littered with potholes. Each time I drive over a bump, my father winces and apologizes to the car.

            I am a small, dark-haired and dark-skinned. I am intently focused on driving and being kind to my father today, so I imagine my brow may be knitted and my mouth slightly pursed. My father is a portly gentleman with long, wavy, white hair and a thick set neck and shoulders. He is a kind man, but has been a rebel for a long time and tends to couch his conversation as such. I am not sure what he rebelled against. However, this city where I was born, does give off an ominous shadow, like an aura, made of asphalt. The chaotic layout of ill-maintained roads emits a strange resonance. This is why I left when I turned eighteen. 

            At last, we turn on Overhill, the street where I was born. The houses are small, and have been poorly painted with bright colors. We drive slowly past cars on blocks, windows emitting loud music, chain-linked fences containing muscular mean-looking dogs. It does not look like a nice neighborhood.

            My father says he thinks I was born in number 1904 or 1906. I locate the house number on two in pale yellow and pink. Several people are gathered in the front yard. They do not smile or wave as they stare at or ignore my rental car. I drive past.

            At the end of the block is my great grandfather’s log cabin.  I guess he build this cabin from logs covered with plaster. It is grey with the odd shape of a building that has had several additions over a number of years. Three chimneys jut randomly from the roof. Multi-colored wires run down the outside of the house, carrying electricity into different, oddly sized windows. No cars are in the driveway. No shadow of furniture is in the windows.

            “You want to go knock?” Dad asks.

            I do not. By this time, we have stopped the car and gotten out.

            “There’s the house I grew up in,” Dad says, pointing at the house next door. A slightly newer, but equally large house stands on a full lot. It has an oak tree shaped chimney and oak tree trunk gat posts. The concrete oaks were made by a builder who did similar work for a park down town.

            The sun breaks briefly through the clouds. From the street, Ryan offers to take a photograph of us. I stand by my father in front of the strange grey cabin and smile.

            As we drive to the restaurant, my father tells me about his life here.

            “This was a doctor’s house. He put in all those oak trees. We used to go hunt there.”

            “What did you hunt Dad?”

            “Birds, squirrels.”

            “Did you eat them?:

            “No, we just hunted them. I guess everyone moved out. They didn’t like the way the neighborhood was going.”

            This neighborhood is the stereotype of a “gang” neighborhood. That’s what my mother might say, anyway. Many people we pass are standing by souped up or beaten down cars with Hispanic names on them. Burly, uncut guard dogs pace the yards. The yards are sometimes clean and sometimes strewn with trash.

            “I don’t like coming down here.” Says my Dad.

            “Its kind of sad?

            Aromatic steam rises up from the saucepan and collects against the white stucco ceiling. Outside, above the ceiling, the pinkish brown roof rests under the star-spangled night.

            I am watching my mom cook Hamburger Helper. The first step is to fry a pound of hamburger meat in the skillet. Her luxurianltly curled black hair slips over her shoulder as she turns to me and grins.

            “How was your day at school?”

            She turns back to the pan, stirring red meat into brown with an orange spatula, breaking it up into large chunks and flipping them over.  I tell her it went well and which friends I saw. I don’t tell her that my plaid Scottie dog outfit gained a compliment and that I will go in the next day wearing double socks in colors that match my outfit.

            Our kitchen is long and narrow, like a hallway. To the left, it stretched to the front door, then angles back toward the doors to three bedrooms: my pink bedroom, my mother’s sea foam green bedroom and the off white music/ laundry pile room.

            The kitchen is long in the hallway direction and short in the other direction. If I am at the stove, and I turn around, I am in front of the dishwasher and the small white sink.

            My mom uses the dishwasher for drying only. She says it leaves soap on the dishes and makes people sick.

            The livingroom is beyond the dishwasher. Brown plaid couches squared around a television. The television is set atop a heavy, antique stereo in dark brown walnut. The stereo moved here with my Grandfather from Germany.

            The kitchen is comfortably filled with the smell of cooked beef. The hamburger is mostly all brown.  My mother tilts the pan to drain off the grease, then spoons it into the garbage disposal.

            “Measure out two cups of water.” She instructs me. I get the measuring cup off the counter and fill it at the white sink.

            She flashes her perfectly even, slightly stained grin again. “Carefully pour it into the pan.”

            The pan sizzles as a I pour. Mom adds the powdered mix from the hamburger helper box: a dusty pile of yellowish white. 

            “Would you like to stir?” she asks.

            I nod yes and take the spatula. I begin stirring the powder into the water and fully cooked ground beef. It becomes a creamy-looking white sauce. Circular slices of potato, just a bit too regular, float and sink as the mixture simmers.

            “ Smells good over there.” My mom’s boyfriend David is sitting at the kitchen table, reading a deer hunting magazine.

            My father’s name is also David. It seems odd to me that different people sometimes have the same names, but I suppose it happens all the time.

            My father never beat my mother. For all his faults, he was a gentle man. This David, who hunted whitetail and kept a blue bong above the kitchen cabinet, would later seriously beat on my mother. It happened only once, and then she left him.

            I don’t recall understanding exactly what all the yelling was about. I remember my mother telling me to go and hide. I ran into a closet, where the jumping spiders lived and sat on my white hamper.  I remember hearing her shriek, something like “Ow, stop it!” as he back her into a wall and punched her repeatedly.

            Later, she told me it was like he left his body. He forgot who he was and then began to realize what he was doing, and stopped. She told him calmly and certainly that he needed to leave.

            After he left, she called: “Alyssa, where are you?”

            I replied “I’m in here,” and I stayed in the closet until she came to get me.

            She laughed like I was playing a game.

            We went to stay at my Grandmother’s for a while, while my mother executed a distanced separation from David and filed a restraining order against him.

            When we finally returned to our house two weeks later, she was still so sore that I had to help her get dressed. A giant bruise extended from her stomach down her hip. She laughed as I handed her the waistband of her shorts so she could pull them on without bending at the waist.

            ”I can’t believe I’m so sore that you have to help me get dressed!” she laughed. 

Sometime in the Spring

I decided I wanted to form my handwritten memoirs into a novel length work. I decided to post the process on a blog, then forgot about that piece. I began showing flash nonfiction drafts as performance art, creating a sonic environment and movement vernacular to support each text as I moved through it. 

A short video of the first performance is here: http://tumblr.com/xck87mbxe

In hamburger dance, I explored my childhood obsession with fastfood hamburgers. At some point, most of my tissue was made out of transformed happymeals. 

The movement and sound translation became a critical part of the editing process for my handwritten work. 

Sometime Later

I wrote a project proposal about how my work is radical because I am a radicl artist, in the old sense of the term and in the sense that the work contains some flexibility of process and product.

Part of my intention came off like this:

I would like to share stories about my family. My family is different than yours. I am a dislocated Filipino, the daughter of a speed dealer, etc. My family is the same as yours: we live in the United States, we are addicted to or afraid of the internet, we eat food or avoid eating, we argue, we bore each other and love each other.