Pizza in the Holocene

SLICESLICE Tavarus

After the surgery I take my State Disability and go on a PIZZA & Zyprexa diet. I gain 70 lbs. in 30 days and spend the rest of my life gargling reflux.

Blackmon

©2020

I eat an all meat pizza by myself. It makes me pass-out. My daughter cries, “Daddy, wake up!” But I don’t hear in the pepperoni coma.

Mom orders a pizza. She is dying. I just got out of jail. It tastes like salvation di marinara.

The End

I puke onto the shiny pizza tray. I feel like a rotten kid. Sick and useless.

The Runner (digital from painting), acrylic, solid marker on black, faux leather, vinyl, 54 x 62 inches, 2015

I shit my pants looking for a clean bathroom and accidentally cure my OCD.

Mom’s Gotta Have It

Tavarus Blackmon ©2020

With many things that can be said about the relationship with my mother, one certainty is that it is complicated. As a beautiful woman, she is married three, maybe four, times and courts many lovers when I am young. I say ‘maybe,’ because she doesn’t talk much about her relationships but I find a marraige liscence online, in addition to the confirmed husbands. As a professional she never settles, working long hours, a Doctor of Education and, carves out a place for herself as an advocate of Special Education. It is this notion of never settling that creeps into her love life, no partner lasting for more than a few years. The time with her children and grand-children is the one constant that can be suffered.

Find her with a long, cigarette, pursed lips, hair-did, make-up tight and wearing a sharp dress. She adorns an ethnic wardrobe, though is Irish-Italian and, must dress business chic for work. That’s Liberal bullshit, she says confounding me, the woman who flip-flops from Gospel Rap to Reggae to suit her lover’s taste, rattles anti-government dialect and practices Bi-Sexuality with a Commie Dyke bumber sticker in her office. But she is not only complicated, she is rife with contradiction. I learn duality from a woman who drops out of high-school, employs herself as a Madamé, serves time for Pimping and Pandering and goes on to become the Special Education Administrator of the Washington Unified School District.

She is a mother who, face-deep and off-and-on in cocaine, expects the best from a son who isn’t born with the luxury she has been afforded. We would go to NA meetings, shopping sprees, movies at the Art House Theatre and, we often volunteered during the holidays for toy and food drives. She quotes Einstein, Jimi Hendrix and the bible, whenever there is metion of marijuana in the holy text. Life in her home is interesting though, I can’t help but to want more from a woman who demands so much from me.

I have not been afforded the same priveledge as my mother, her, a white woman and myself, a multi-racial child in America. Despite her politics she is able to slide freely through society where sometimes I feel the first thing people notice about me is that I am non-normative in a histrorically, patriarchal sense. I do not have her credit score, her ability to appear complicit with White America. Her son, both cradled and cultured by Marx and Malcom X, is a subject of identity-politics where agenda meets the body, putting doubt in my mind as a child when I look to the woman who used-to change my diapers.

“Is she really my mother?” I wonder, questioning not the care in her wrist but the way the lips hold the face, the way a Sicilian nose juts softly from the brow and, the way her white skin scorns those who hate but virtues in the benefits of power.

But at every turn of racist hatred she is there, guiding me toward resistance, putting power in my hands to be a man of virtue and to assume a rightful place of respect in society.

You can do anything, be anything, you set your mind to,

She tells me, condoning my fist on intollerance and paying my predatory debts; working ten hours a day and studying at night, volunteering at the Women’s Center, she nurtures my love and respect for women.

She confides in me about her lovers; she asks me,

“Should I choose the young and wild one or the wise and boring man?”

I tell her to be sensible and, when she is old enough to head her young child’s insight, she takes my advice. But it is her advice that, had I headed in my youth, I might have avoided alot of trouble and pain. I took to her drugs, well, meth not coke, but when I went crazy instead of simply getting off, she did not understand how my mind can go sideways, instead of simply, up-and-down.

But mothers and sons do not always see eye-to-eye. Like a fool, when I could have leaned on her more I pulled away. But even when I come back around she is still there to help lift me up, dust of my pants and point me in a lean direction.

Maybe I too, will grow up to be a middle-aged, smoking, white woman?

I hold a cigarette in my mouth. I feign middle-class attributes. In the long shadow of better judgement I listen to the words she tells me when I am in need of knowing. After her trip to Italy she comes home more proud of her heritage. She talks to me about Pinocchio, migration.

“See, we have always been Black,” she says, referencing the Mor conquest.

But I am the Black one, mother, I would like to tell her but somehow only muster a poised silence. I don’t think hard to know that it is her disavowal of everything white that makes her align with a struggle. Something in a past, she never shares with me, colors her resolve into a purple, anti-establishment. She never, ever, even mentions the Beatles.

Now who is this mother? She looks like Mom’s from television, those from social knowledge. But there is no context for her true identity. Except to say that she is my Mom, ripe with Marlboro smell, cooking up Stir-Fry every night after a long day, buying me a Cadillac and teaching me how to put on a condom, using a banana, awkwardly role playing with a blushing, embarrassed, teenage son. Too blind in my youth to see how she looks like me: out into a world with questions for authority, ingrained doubt and, the courage to expect more from a world where people must look alike to love each other.

Gasp

Mom slaps me. Dad spanks me. Fuck them. They can’t remember being a kid.

Mi Libro Es Tu Historia (digital from painting), acrylic, solid marker, cel vinyl on canvas, 48 x 90 inches, 2015

They call me a “ faggot, ” because I wear my backpack with both straps. Welcome to third grade, Pussy Boy.

1. She looks at me and rolls her eyes. I know what that means, her face so telling. In intervals she grabs my fat. It is not accurate to call them “love,” but “handles,” is apropos. It hurts my feelings, I become saddened. Not because I feel she prefers a not fat, me, but because I fight accepting how I have let myself slip into the Big of big and tall. When I court her, court seems fitting, I lose

Woe is Me

60 lbs. This game is relationship building; sweating, then making love on her days off. It seems I turn a corner but

USE ME

after she finds out I cheat on her - after we sign a lease on an apartment - she stabs me. Getting stabbed is probably the only time being fat is a good thing, the knife incising an inch into my back, making me bleed like a brown pig but not at all life threatening.

I call it a flesh wound, but really it is the first time our love is tested. I lie to the police and tell them I “fell,” on my knife. Something every man who cheats should consider.

What actually happens is, even though she feels obliged to give me a second chance and, even though I feel obliged to make amends and treat her right, I will go back on the pizza diet, back on the super burrito regimen and stop using the gym.

If she agrees to keep with me then she will suffer my appetite, a ravenous habit born of psych meds and poor impulses, causing me to involuntarily shut off my “off switch,” always hungry, needing to be full. The weight comes back like a bad relative, wraping around my waist, stuck around my neck. She often thinks back to how I lost all those useless inches, thinking that it was my way to make her love me.

See what I can give up, half of me!

Now when I am eating out I am eating out and eating her cooking. “Are you hungry?” She asks. Me, not wanting to miss out on her good food, always able. But now I am eating double. Lying to not abandon a good meal, but too damned piggy to not wait for it in the first place.

One time after she goes to sleep I buy Taco Bell. I am eating cheap tacos in front of my computer. But when she comes out of the room I quickly throw the food under my desk, hard-shells tumble aleaf with shredded lettuce in the corner of her eye. In her kind way she laughs about my behavior, probably because when she was a kid she was fat and, would save her allowance to buy pizza, chicken strips and treats when no one was looking.

But now that I am found out, she comes up with a solution to deal with my food doubt.

My food drought goes on for weeks. I am so hurt and pissed off I make a triptych, three painted panels of bleeding ovens drowning in a vast sea. It isn’t funny to her.

2. She cultivates an organic garden: heirloom tomatoes, broccoli, lemon cucumbers, zucchini, squash. Our back yard smells like a salad bar, but my palate is pepperoni.

I do my part digging holes, hoeing dirt, watering the fruit and vegetable babies and keeping the dog out of the crop. So many wonderfull meals are culled from our urban market, she like an alchemist, turning prickly earth-meal into delicious dinners I am too stubborn or, deserving, to enjoy.

“I am not cooking for you anymore.” She tells me with conviction.

“I’ll go on a diet,” I lie to her and myself.

My diet is made of granola bars and cereal. Not healthy at all. I have not even brought myself to cut an avocado, eat a carrot or drink more than two glasses of water in a day. Her food contains the only veggies I allow myself and without them, without her tender-judgy tone and seemingly vicious criticism, what will become of me?

Fuck, now I’ll never choke down a spicy salad!

3. She prepares food for the children with love. Carefully trimming unwanted crust, removing the pitch from the orange, the seed from the sweet body, each item on their plate is painstakingkly curated. Like a bastard toddler I can’t help but to be jealous of her service, the unwavering love.

I remember how my mom usedto cut my father’s meat. This is an act that infantilizes him in my mind. And I am in no way wanting to be babied, but I work long hours, I make her dentist appointments and sometimes I need my fucking fruit cut like a child. Me, the knuckle dragging bafoon, too damn brut to not grotesquely, ravage an orange peel.

My food insecurities are born out of habit but also design. My siblings and I fight over the last Dairy Queen, Dilly Bar; Mom makes a game out of it.

“Whomever is the first to eat all their broccoli gets the ice cream.”

We hesitate but force bites down our throat, my step-sister gorges on over-cooked vegetables, her mouth a receptacle. By the time the contest is over, she has puked green slime all over the kitchen walls, wretched and foul. She retires with the last ice cream and, we learn that vomit is a fundamental part of “good,” health.

4. Why can’t I just be bulimic?

I quip to myself. Pizza, tacos, fried rice, cinnamon rolls; they don’t just go down, they come back. It might solve some of my problems. True, I would have a new problem on my hands but at least I wouldn’t be fat, I’d be invested.

In a baking frenzy: 3 dozen chocolate chip, gingerbread cookies; I eat 14. They are probably the best, most spicy confection I make. Later that night I have a few shots of Vodka. I’ve put it to myself to enjoy as much of the simple pleasures as possible. Like a child the night before a dentist appointment, I go to bed quite weary. My bad food habits and doses of Vodka are brutal on the rebound.

The next morning I wake to the most painful vomit fit I’ve ever known. Slobbery, violent, earned.

5. Cookies aside, I’ve been throwing-up alot lately. Good food, bad food, anything mixed with too much spirit has got me in a rough way. I take all of the up-chuck, all of the fast food neurosis and erect a monument to my wretching, vile, sorrow. This 17 foot painitng, ripe and rainbow, expresses me vomiting behind an oven in a hoard of fast food trappings, organic garden in the background, hand of God dragging fingers in the soil.

I mount the painting at my Advancement to Candidacy Exhibit, Dinner Theatre, at Sacramento State University. I don’t tell my cohort, who are enraptured with the allure of spectacle and Abstraction’s commodity, that my work is not a fantasy, not a cartoon. I have lived the life of the sitter, encraoched by my own refuse, pained by my own troubled way of eating my problems. And it hurts.

6. She wants me to change, to find a way out of my urge, a way out of the gutter. She offers a hand, cooks a vegan meal, a vegetarian meal, Soyrizo tacos so good they’d be unrecognizable as tacos.

You want a salad? She offers.

Spicy onion, juicy tomatoes, cucumber, hardboiled egg, orange, red and yellow sweet peppers, crunchy crutons, nutty sunflower seeds and creamy ranch dressing. Her plate is heavenly, spiritual, elongating.

I eat the food she prepares like it is a last meal, scraping the plate. I want to be the man who cut his weight when we first dated, lost his superfluous gearth like a Samurai cuts away the fat to save the lean.

I do not acquiesce. I do not quit. I am learning and still growing. But not in the way socks and underpants stretch when you are over-weight. In the way a sensitive man can grow from learning a better way to be whole. A way not too hard but, not exactly easy when your hunger is alive, wild and recalcitrant.

Grant me the serenity to eat an apple.

I’m Not Cooking For You Anymore, triptych (digital from painting), on watercolor paper,

painting), acrylic, solid marker, cel vinyl, charcoal, spray paint

120 x 72 inches, 2014

Can I go down on you?

Why Me ?

The Wrong Pie (digital from painting), oil, oil stick, solid marker, collage on canvas over wood panel, 48 x 48 inches, 2014

Greener Gardens (digital from painting), 17 x 6 feet,

feet, acrylic, spray paint, cel vinyl on canvas, 2014

Your Whore is my Mother (digital from painting), oil, acrylic, solid marker, oil stick on canvas over panel, 48 x 48 inches, 2014