The Red Couch
by K. Zen’obia
The red couch looked like something that burst out of a tarnished lamp, or a genie's psyche, like a wavering third eye, when the number 1970 bubbles up on a Ouija. Not like a red Ikea in a dorm room, where two college girls, one Black, one white, are painting walls, and trying to out-dance each other, freestyling, during a Calabria voiceover commercial.
No.
Just a plain old, throwback, $200 red velour sofa from Walmart, and it looked like the only thing missing was a pair of pink plastic go-go boots, Boones Farm apple wine, a hi-fi playing an endless loop of Tower of Power’s “So Very Hard To Go,” or Mungo Jerry’s “In the Summertime.”
You got wmen you got wmen on your mind, that, and a pair of bell-bottoms. But I was a throwback too, always wandering in the past, to find some reason for the present.
Remember when hard porn in the 70s was nothing but soft-voiced girls drifting in grayed-out negligees featured on Playboy at Night on black-and-white TV sets. Why else would I move to Woodstock, a place where no one realizes that the Peace & Love Concert is over.
Where premier brownies sold in the Village are named after funk, soul, and 70s song artists. The best is the Sun Ra —a mocha chocolate double brownie with espresso frosting. There used to be another brownie named after a different Black musician, which evidently upset someone from his family and, so, it was pulled. Switched out for a Lauro Nyro.
And yea-yeah, with all the psychedelia, you could swim in a kaleidoscope. Close your eyes: You are on a corner in the Upper Haight. Before Betsy Johnson. Before the Starbucks revolution. Before the string of vegan taco joints. You could be at Fillmore West, you could even be in Monterey, on Steppenwolf’s “Magic Carpet Ride”…
Well, I have bell-bottoms but no pink plastic boots, no apple wine.
Just this red couch.
I am a vegan, a dry vegan, a vegan who eats fish, and sometimes Häagen-Dazs, and so I’m a cheatin’ vegan, okay, so I’m not really vegan at all. But I got this red couch that I sleep on in my writing studio in a rented cottage, because it's my cottage, but it's really my writing studio because I cannot afford both a house and a writing studio and, since I would rather write than live, it was nothing to rent a writing studio and live in it. I do not have a bedroom, I have a writing studio that was really meant to be a bedroom and instead of a bedroom, well, I have a red couch where I eat fried fish sandwiches with stale white bread and hot sauce because it reminds me of my Louisiana-bred mother, who I love so much I must live 3,000 miles away to realize it.
On the red couch, I sleep alone: It’s not really big enough for two, and the TV stays on throughout the night, so that shows from the 1970s lull the senses. Not that That ’70s Show, but Perry Mason, Night Gallery, 77 Sunset Strip, Mannix. Gail Fisher is cultured and beautiful with pale pink lipstick and a lime-green tailored suit. I wish I could be Gail Fisher, a breathy contralto, so I can forget I am lonely, except for the fevered pitch of fingers, dashing the keyboard into something that might be a poem, one day, maybe.
I imagined you there, on top of me on the red couch, gathering me in, drinking me in, crushing my nose underneath your leather coat.
I asked you, “Are you planning to fuck me?”
You grinned and said “Imminently.”
But you are way too tall for that red couch, and now it's musty and there's dirt on it, and mice have tiptoed on it, and scratched their asses on it, and I am certain random NYC city friends invited their travelling bed bugs to lounge on it—as the red couch converts to a bed, its coiled springs kick me in the small of my back.
I get thrown back into the soul band of the 70s, Alive & Kicking.
Hold on—just a little bit tighter now baby, I love you so much that I can’t let go.
Time is on loan, Sidney Poiter called it skint, this week I been skint and refuse to turn to food stamps, and I peer into my bank account to see how far $11 could go to buy groceries that must last, like forever, and when it runs out, I decide, okay, no problem, I am long overdue for a cleansing water fast anyway, and I ration heat in the winter, fuel for the propane tank, though I wake up crying huddled on the red couch, it is cold-cold, but you know this year I got smart, I bought an electric blanket with my book advance and now I turn off the heat at night, and on my red couch in that electric blanket I feel almost safe, and the red couch is where I lay on my back and write in my head, knees to my chest, I don’t cry nearly as much as I did when I owned a gray couch in a Manhattan high-rise, I did not want to die in a box that’s what that high-rise apartment was, an open coffin box and I wept on the gray couch nightly, but now I live in the country, and rabbits hop over the dying magnolia blossoms that scatter from the tree, and, though it’s been years since I bled into the rise and fall of the moon, it was natural to choose red as the colour for the new couch and I easily roll off the red couch onto the floor, and crawl halfway to my desk on my knees to where the computer is always on and waiting, for I think of nothing else but to write, and the man I love, I have not spoken to in years, and because once I do, that’s it, it will be as if someone lit a match to the lower chakra so I, the vegan, eat chocolate Häagen-Dazs, that my two male friends brought me from the City, and write of death by chocolate.My baldheaded friend Jules, and goateed friend Claudio, both poets from the city, come up to visit, the sun moves into my office again, no deeper than that red couch, and the five floor-to-ceiling windows, reflecting new heat, rise like leavened bread. I am so happy to be in their circle. We stay up all night, excoriating each other’s faults: a rogue sexiness between the three of us, uninvited, crashing our ménage-à-bitch session and we all turn in and I sleep on the couch in the living room, it is a neutral tan, as if I am tumbling in my own skin and the guys bunk on the red couch and I wake up to Claudio, opening the cottage door at 8 a.m., bare-chested in his black jean shorts, Brazilian afro thriving in the sun, shoeless, the green grass parting as he practices a rotation of asanas, beginning with Sun Salutation, Downward Dog, and Child’s Pose, on the back lawn, where a reclusive woman who rarely speaks, hair perpetually wet, tucked behind her ears, and speakers in the open windows, bleating talk radio, from her bedroom upstairs, day and night as loud as possible, so loud it can be heard in the street in the store down by the corner, while she wears ear plugs, and bangs her outdoor waste buckets together as if a child’s plastic hand drums.
Claudio shouts cheerily to her, “Hey, how you doing this fine morning?”
And inside I am listening, pleading silently—no no no, don’t do that Claudio.
Then we eat at Bread Alone, muffins and coffee and avocado toast, attend an open mic, in a suffocating upper room, where Claudio concocts a poem out of thin air, by threading together stolen lines from each of the poets who had gone before him, parodying their poems in the most concerted and serious manner, so they never know, and then we sit in on the outdoor drum circle where the mamas, daddies, girls, and elderly white men alike gyrate to some fabricated Africana from a different universe.
Heading back home to my house, we eat a quiche and my homemade sangria, with strawberries, grapes, red wine and brandy, and orange slices—and then they go out to hear the hillbilly bands yodel 70s covers at an all-night pizza place, and I, once again, curl up on the front room beige couch, dream of disappearing butterflies while they tiptoe in past midnight, and take the red couch in the other room, my studio—the red couch which pulls out into a bed, which I never bother with because I am too busy writing to sleep, but they pull it out and are very silent, and months later, I found out they had made intense, despairing, quiet, and protracted love on that red couch,
one asked the other,
it could have been Claudio, who we secretly nicknamed flamboyant from the trees that dotted his native land,
it could have been baldheaded Jules, with skin I envied, the husk of midnight, after the waned moon, Jules who once dated me, we even kissed without tongues, it was a basic bumping of closed lips for a minute or two, while squeezing each other’s forearms and I distinctly remembered more emotion when hugging a tree under a full moon, and so that was that.
But on the red couch, one says to the other, “Do you want to be the husband tonight?”
Though they are not married, though one wants this so badly, he goes into the bars, where he disappears to find the hookah smoking caterpillar, instead of Alice, and his eyes are red-rimmed, as the couch,
and it is not the flamboyant drowning a fountain of rum, a fine mist, sitting hunched over his shot glass, stone-faced, in a plethora of bars, absent of light, cupping restless boys with smooth bodies, deep into his groin, wallet emptied the next morning,
but the silken-headed one,
and it pleases me, makes me very happy that though I am fucking no one—my red couch got some love, but still, it is time to think about banishing the red couch
old battered, and stained and relentlessly red—though faded with places where I sobbed into it, and scratched and beat it, and wiped my nose on it and if I were in my 20s, where I would have found my period on it, this red couch that stands there like old religion, needs to be replaced, but that won’t be for a while.
Where else would I find that summer had arrived, had never left, Camus's eternal summer that would pull me back into the 1970s with the soul band, Alive & Kicking.
Hold on, just a little bit tighter now, baby.
ABOUT THE CREATOR
K. Zen’obia is a recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry. She's a MacDowell, Hedgebrook and Edward Albee Literature Fellow, a recipient of Archie & Bertha Walker Poetry Fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center Provincetown. Recent work was published by Cincinnati Review, Pleiades, and Prairie Schooner.