ongoing

He was nine and lived an elementary school life of exciting weekends. A boring weekend did not exist because his father could not sit still. His father often scorned him for not having read enough Jules Verne, but what was the need of this literature when Saturdays and Sundays were more adventurous than anything his classmates could have concocted for their imaginary play in or around the house, or when their forty-hour work-week parents were up to the task of venturing to the neighborhood recreation grounds. He was perhaps less imaginative, and certainly less able to sit still than the other boys, like his father, and thus could not entertain himself with only his mind for any meaningful count of minutes. Alone time, instead, grew boring, and though he didn't like admitting it to himself, depressing. Only in his late teens did he turn his back on bright screens with contrived screams and fully embrace the world in independent exploration. He could entertain himself with a physical world at hand to work with, to engage with, but he was never a child of the imagination: his teddy-bears were always just that, had no names and were understood for their coziness, not personality.
He didn't quite understand until he grew older that his friends didn't spend the evenings of their weekdays breathing the fluffy dust of the garage, watching their fathers sort through cold-war era Georgian paintings and leftover frame bits to match. Holding staple guns and electric drills, fussing with old extension cords under tubes of barf-light, priming priming then painting painting coats and coats of colors on plywood to use as platforms for the ping-pong table his dad no doubt acquired at an auction on a whim when scouting for totaled cars. Set up in the backyard and promising themselves they would cover it with a tarpaulin in time for rains the table quickly turned to warped and soggy planks. This state of neglect continued undisturbed until the boys decided there was nothing more important than having a half-pipe in the backyard: the faded plywoods (after all those coats they faded but held their general idea of color) were angled on one side against the flabby green bench that came with the rented house in the avenues that his parents still come back to after dark and on the other against the stone-carved blocks that have slowly been wriggling and unlodging themselves from the little walls they were working as a team to sustain. Thus the half-pipe was really a half-hexagon which made every trip and its return a bumpy ride.
Neither did it occur to him that his friends didn't eat wholesome cooked grain for breakfast. Casha: buckwheat, millet, oats, farina, rice, all with sausage more often than not (needless to mention two pieces of thinly sliced dark bread with butter and a cup of black tea leaning on the bitter side for his mother espoused abstaining from sugar and he embraced this rather easily, learning to enjoy the dry throat that the bitterness left him with). In early elementary school it was revealed to him that his friends breakfasted on dry cereal with cold milk, sometimes sprinkling sugar atop. Sweets for breakfast? Never, he thought. When his cousins told him they too ate the unimaginable, he was sure of his being infinitely more Russian than they (they currently read, write, and speak better Russian than does he but he intends to go to Prague and take a Russian language class to remedy this). It made him hungry for his homemade cashas just to think about his close friend who did without breakfast in the mornings.
By friday mid-afternoon a weekend's worth of homework was squared away and he awaited with modest excitement the following days of passenger sights and talks in the front seat of jeeps and vans. He grew to know the city far better by sight than by map, but this afforded him only a disconnected mental perception of places in his city. When his dream of driving finally materialized, the arduous process of superimposing the city map onto his mental images began and continues. His childhood is understood by him in phases according to his father's undertakings of the time. When his father opened his first grocery store with two very Russian partners in leather jackets whose expensive cologne never put up a fight against the persistent cigarette stink that followed them around like a forcefield, the common sights from the moving window were Sunset Blvd, Lincoln Blvd, Beach Chalet's cold waves of every season (which is really just one season in San Francisco), the sprawling Safeway parking lot and the innards of the neat little Russian grocery store. He would hang out in the preparation room with the elderly meat-man, not what I would call a butcher because that makes me think of chopping raw flesh and heavy-duty meats, for this man toiled and caressed mainly bologna and mortadella and kielbasa. After an hour or so of this he became the cheese-man by only rinsing the foot-long stainless steel blade. In fact, he became so skilled at switching personalities that he need not even trade for clean gloves or wipe down his workstation. This, the boy understood, was the sign of a real master reaching his comfort zone. The old man's jurisdiction was the boy's haven for warm talk and fatty guilt-free foods. His faded little weak eyes and shrub-like eyebrows smiled along with his buoy of a belly behind that counter at the brown eyes that still greatly misunderstood the world. An occasional storm would clamor through with threatening shaky fists and quick-moving lips accompanied by uncontrollable spittle at the hands of another old man. This one was a grouchy anti-semite character, the father of the shorter leather donning tobacco reeking rough-man, perpetually seeking to disturb and put-down everyone from age eight to eighty. He would chase the boy out of the room of sharp knives and soft smiles into the boredom of all the other rooms. This was when the youngster would seek out his father and urge him to hurry hurry and get his things together so they could go on an adventure (these were adventures for him and on the surface, work for his father, though perhaps he had just as much fun with his son as his son did with him). He wasn't at all patient as soon as something he anticipated appeared on the horizon.
They would escape to Costco where the unnaturally oversized bottles of honey or mustard pleased him to no end. They would make their way systematically to every sample-table for a meal of snacks. On days when these little tables with the red and white checkered plastic coverings were absent, hotdogs and pizza-slices did the job, sometimes so well that he was obliged to regurgitate in a childish scene in the parking lot. He was an impatient eater, and his mother always accused him of not chewing thoroughly as an explanation for his constant hunger.
A common sight for him at this time was the shabby neighborhood by Alemany St (later all the street signs were taken down and replaced with Caesar Chavez St, obviously because the guy did something righteous) where behind the lazy farmer's market (in comparison with the infinitely energetic ones he's seen since in the city of New York, Accra, and Kumasi) his father rented a sprawling pallet-racketed warehouse. It was a depressing sort of place like most of the insides of the buildings he frequented, but being used to the emptiness indoors, the pale sickly glow of the fluorescent industrial lights, leftover rat-droppings and the proper accompaniment of foul smells left him unburdened by these things that trouble newcomers, enabling him to fully investigate the premises. Climbing the pallet-racks, carting and carrying boxes about, jumping from pallet to pallet, wielding the weighty pallet-jack grew on him like a natural tail if such a thing was to be expected.
Then the scenery of life changed when the pair of leather-men conspired against his father and weaseled him out of the business, out of years of work, out of his certainly well-deserved living wage. A few final visits to the warehouse in that crummy neighborhood and it was forgotten for some years. His father signed a contract forbidding him from entering retail or wholesale in the Russian market for three years, staged to expire come January 1st, 2004. The years in between were spent living off the settlement of the buy-out and the random minuscule-time business ventures his dad pursued, such as purchasing once pretty cars now crinkled like papier-machee and towing them to his Russian mechanics who performed miracles with cheap-labor to then sell the machines for a profit. This meant he was at times being driven to school in Jaguars with shiny wheels, a funny thought knowing now that this was perhaps the poorest they'd been in a while. One day some boys down the block showed him the Jaguar ornament, chrome, they had ripped off "some rich guy's car" and were going to sell for $10 at school, and he pretended that it wasn't from his dad's car. It's been many years, and he thinks he remembers divulging the secret to his mother but assuredly not to his father, and forever regrets not having erupted into a Russian rage with strong fists aimed at these swines' faces powered by the goodness of whole-hearty morning cashas and sausages.
Then his dad began the search for a new warehouse and storefront in preparation for D-Day, January 1st, 2004. A plot was rented in the more or less abandoned naval yard in the corner of the city, so driving through Hunter's Point became a recurrent procedure: his first exposure to the ghetto in the San Francisco sense. There, on the neglected pavement he learned to maneuver the propane-powered forklift to a passable degree, though occasionally mistaking gas for break and left for right. No serious injuries were sustained so the fun went on. Here they erected a pallet-rack perimeter enclosed by three forty-foot containers and a roof of metal rustier than anything he had seen before or after. Months of toiling ended in eviction and this meant many subsequent weekends spent driving about South San Francisco scouting industrial real-estate signs for a new suitable place to get evicted from. This new place they found on South Linden ave. was roomier and already half roofed. They plopped their containers down, labored with the pallet-racks and pallet-jacks once again, extended a complicated network of Home-Depot tarps to manage the second half of the roof, imported a small ship's worth of Russian cookies, sodas and juices, and put out a new ping pong table (must have also been an auction purchase) just in time to be ousted once again. It's not hard to guess that the process of packing up and packing out and moving over down the road and setting up camp in a new warehouse (to everyone's pleasure this one had a full roof and four walls: a building not an 'outdoor zone') was repeated. This place they set up camp in for good, though it too had a few exciting scares of ejection over rent and lease contracts.
In coordination with this messy relocating was the destruction and rebuilding of the inside of a building on Geary Blvd, meant to be the headquarters of his father's persistent good-natured and dignified rebuke directed at the fattening bellies of the smelly leather-men. The boy ran around mercilessly with a crowbar a third his weight and a sledge-hammer he could barely unglue from the ground. With his father and some hired Mongols they toppled the mezzanine floor into a dusty and no doubt asbestos ridden heap in the middle of the ground floor where his brother's foot befriended a rusty nail and could only be separated against their will at the hospital. They must have had so much in common. These tons of rubble were loaded into their sixteen-foot trailer-truck and sneaked on Sundays and isolated nights to that first warehouse near the lazy farmer's market he thought he would never see again. This incredible untidiness was crammed into a rickety container in the yard and bolted shut, hopefully forever. They attacked Home-Depot with an enormous line of credit and hauled a whole forest's worth of lumber to the little store, making careful preparations with columns, beams, joists, and supports. He spent days with sturdy screws, inserting them between the new second floor and the reassuring two-by-twelves beneath. In came Russian electricians and plumbers who did quick and quiet work rewiring and re-plumbing the bathroom upstairs from the ground floor. Then a vigilant building inspector on a casual outing noticed the freshly delivered lumber on the street and the United States Bureaucracy of The Building Department invited his father to explain himself and pay a polite $10,000 fine.
The boy escorted his father every step of the way, tripping where he tripped and cussing when he cussed. An inseparable team they were.
Familiar to him were the freeways and industrial neighborhoods his friends had never before seen. Mid-day would bring a detour by the home in the avenues. A neglected art collection littered every wall of the dim house, which bred a habitual relationship to works of art. Speaking with a friend later the boy espoused the necessity of being able to touch the art you experience. He did not see art as a sacred secret needing protection, but rather a very human creation, like food, meant to be handled, eaten, shown-off, meant to undergo the tough handling of life. So no, the paintings at home were not in good shape. In fact, in the fourth grade an impromptu sport he invented with a friend allotted a modest number of points for nailing certain living room paintings, and bonus points for knocking the big painted nipples. Necessarily the reigning in of bonus points birthed a series of young chuckles. Cereal and micro-waved leftover potato and meat for lunch and the team was back on the road.
He was not brave and easily scared until he spent many years breaking laws and cultivating insolence with his father all around the city. This taught him that there was no such thing as a rigid rule or a final answer. This also taught him that he could be his own boss if he chose to see the world as malleable and at his disposal, because it's simply there for the taking. The problem is most don't fully question or push through the awkwardness and impropriety. Somehow his father never feared not fitting in, instead doing his thing to the fullest in broad daylight. This too he learned: it is sometimes easiest to get away with things the bolder you set out to do them. He got wise to bureaucracy: it's all the same he understood. Whether in the SF Building Department or Business Bureau of his own high school, where in the latter by applying rules learned in the formers he made his way into the seats of the classes and hearts of the teachers he pleased.
Before he learned any of this, though, before driving his own van to high school and before riding public transportation alone in middle school and before being driven every morning to elementary school, he was a kindergardener. As a kindergardener, one night in the sea-blue Isuzu driving through the park, the city outside the window was illuminated solely by the will of the headlamps. Driving along, the car began to jerk softly, then more violently. "Wolves!" his father said, "they're chasing us and striking at the rear bumper." He was scared beyond peeing himself. Perhaps had it been a pack attack of coyotes, foxes or raccoons he could have relaxed enough to release a trickle down his pant-leg, but this was altogether too tense. The car came to a halt and the lights went off. This was before he had an idea of the moderate size of Golden Gate Park. They might as well have been in the isolated primordial forest of Belovezhskaya Pushcha on the Poland-Belarus border. Silence and Darkness reigned for a full minute perhaps, a serious moment of screams sweat and life and death for the scaredy-cat, until his father and older brother burst into laughter as the lights went on and the engine sounded its upstart. He probably cried in pathetic embarrassment and came home to seek comfort in his mother's arms, who too had a cute chuckle at his expense, but his mother's laughter was no humiliation. A mother always understands and is allowed to laugh at her creation.
With father there was much that was unspoken. With mother there was much that was unspoken, but they were different unspoken syllables. His mother was a haven of lovely smiles and sharp bites. His father cared more about him wearing a helmet and pads when skateboarding and playing roller hockey, whereas his mother cared more about him coming home to a homemade cup of carrot juice with celery and buttered bread. "Good for the eyesight," she explained. He had nothing against this as carrot juice really is divine. He will always remember the magician-act his teacher invited to the multi-purpose room in the third grade. He was one of the volunteers (since it was America though every child got the chance to be an exemplary volunteer) blindfolded and seated. He was handed cups of liquid to identify by smell and taste. He guessed none of them except for the carrot juice, which others only tasted tentatively and returned to the gloved hand of the magician. His he gulped down in its entirety and returned empty and satisfied to the man.
His mother took strides to ensure that his diet was cultured and healthy: salads with feta cheese, meat seared on the magic Zepter with no oil and so on. It was a while before he ventured much into the realm of real food being stuck too long on pizzas pastas and Oscar Meyer boloney. To her delight he finally took to the undeniably Russian ingredients of garlic, onion, eggplant, crab, and fish of different varieties (a range of species prepared in a range of ways: cold-smoked, hot-smoked, salted, cooked...).
She was a punctual female. Unlike his father, who loved empty promises and always managed to miss anything scheduled, she always rolled up in the car at the precise moment when his eyes began scanning the street for her car. He never much registered appreciation for this, only being able to unleash frustration on his father for his tardiness and self-involved attitude, but this was OK because the father was nearly a fun and laughy older brother. He was more often silly and immature in the best possible way while still very much retaining authority, intelligence, and respect. It's just that there was always some kid-energy in him.
She, though very much more certain in her adult role as a mother looked like a pretty and pale teenage girl. Always young, fresh and bright, older men and women often confused her for his sister when he was older. This always put all involved in good spirits though he never knew quite what to make of it.
Both parents were not just educated but smart in their own right, for more often than not education gives you things to know rather than ways of thinking. They knew how to think and how to count. They did not involve themselves in his schooling but he was not permitted to be stupid. In fact, they never needed to worry about his classes or grades because he always charmed his teachers and deserved the smiling grades he earned.