Tamarind
Tam. arind. TAm. Arind. Tam. arind (to the tune of Sage the gemini’s gas pedal)
In my memory, the tamarindo raspa I hold in my hand is the color of Neutrogena’s T Gel shampoo, a shampoo designed to treat “Scalp Psoriasis, Seborrheic Dermatitis, and even common Dandruff.” I know that it is the color of T Gel shampoo because I used T Gel shampoo on a regular basis for fourteen years.
My mom introduced me to T Gel when I was a kid. Because she didn’t trust me to wash my hair properly, every morning—every single morning—before school, I’d take off my shirt and press my bare chest to the cold porcelain edge of her bathroom sink. She’d run warm water over my head, spurt the gooey brown tar shampoo onto her hand, and rub it into my scalp until she formed a yellowy lather atop my head.
A minute or two later, she’d rinse it off. Inevitably, some of the rinse would run into my eyes or down my back or across my chest.
I’d get angry. She’d get angry. I’d storm off, hair sometimes still dripping with soap. She’d raise her voice after I’d raised mine: She was only trying to help.
It was love; I hated every minute of it.
***
Psoriasis is an auto-immune disease. In my case, it is hereditary. The pink and red patches and spots characteristic of psoriasis present themselves across my body, from the top of my scalp to the sole of my left foot. This largely, for me, cosmetic annoyance hinges on the HLA-C gene locus, itself found on the short arm of Chromosome 6. How sad, that something so ugly hinges on something so small.
***
I’ve been thinking about hinges.
(Hinge, “A central point or principle on which everything depends.”)
Sentences, combinations of words, words by themselves, really, are hinges.
They
They died.
They died as they lived.
They died as they lived: pitifully, with no one caring that they were gone.
They shrugged.
They shrugged off their responsibilities.
They shrugged off their responsibilities for the afternoon and went fishing.
They sang.
They sang the song.
They sang the song that had been sung to them.
They sang the song that had been sung to them when to sing was still to commit a crime.
They need not die, need not shrug, need not sing: “They” could a million things, needing to do nothing.
A hinge: I’ve been thinking.
The heart of the hinge above: I’ve.
A vein of the aforementioned heart: I’ve been.
I’ve been
I’ve been thinkin’ I’ve been thinkin’
about the distance between people.
I’ve been thinking about hinges.
I’ve been thinking about tamarind.
I’ve been thinking about hinges and I’ve been thinking about tamarind because tamarind, to me, contains within it, the word tamarind does, a hinge.
Tam-
-iflu, -era Mowry, -erlane, -U, -bourine, -alpais, -ale, año, -aulipas, -pax, -pons, -my Wynette, -pa Bay, -per, -p [down], -e Impala, -arind.
I’ve never taken it, Sister Sister and Twitches, heads on pikes and mongolian grills. Texas A&M University, a reference I made in a previous post and an Eastern European bop I tap along to to this day, a mountain I first read about in Rick Riordan’s The Titan’s Curse. Pork, corn, and Christmas, a word I hear when I order my raspas. A place I’ve never been, a name I see often when I’m home. Purchased for my ex-girlfriend with a meal swipe, the woman at the counter saying I was so nice, “are for whores” (not my own opinion, misogyny I’m aware of), mean: “I don’t want to live a life of regret, I don’t want to end up like _____ _______.” Buccaneers, etymology of the word sabotage, reminds me of calm down simmer down pipe down quiet down, four songs—Let It Happen, Eventually, The Less I Know the Better, New Person Same Old Mistakes—on repeat on the DC Metro the summer of 2018.
Tamarind. Tam-a-rind: the tip of the tongue ticks against the top of the mouth, a rest, a retreat, a return to tick behind the teeth; Tam. A. Rind. (Nabokov I am not.)
So: a hinge. Hinges: rabbit holes, wormholes, K-holes that lead to associations, memories, words whispered in the mind's ear, visions of faces, places, and things seen before and never before seen. Possibilities, beginnings, dawnings, things on which everything consequent depends.
***
Another hinge: Just.
When I think, for more than a few seconds, about the word “just” as a hinge, I see a shape that looks something like this.
——’
All is going well (——). But something comes up (——’).
It was a good play, I just
We’re great together, I just
I’m happy, I just
——’, ——’, ——’
I used to play percussion (drums, etc.,) and in the course of playing percussion, I learned about ghost notes. Ghost notes, in the context of percussion playing, “indicate a note played softly between accented beats.” Other names for ghost notes include ‘false notes,’ ‘dead notes,’ and ‘muted notes.’”
Ghost notes are there; ghost notes aren’t there. “Just,” if treated as a hinge, is like a ghost note.
“Love me, love me, love me, just say you do.”
“Love me, love me, love me, —’ say you do.”
These lines, from Nina Simone’s Wild is the Wind, are what I heard, what I saw, the first time I encountered them. They are still what I hear, what I see, when I listen to that song.
But those aren’t the lyrics. Not exactly, anyway.
Really, she sings “Love me, love me, love me, say you do.”
No hinge, no ghost note, no “just.” Not explicitly, anyway.
It’s there; it isn’t there.
See, I can feel it: the hinge in the space between “love me” and “say you do.” Just—a tuxedoed conductor folds violently at the waist—say—the torso recovers, slowly returns tall—you do—and the right arm raises the ivory baton into the pregnant air.
Love me love me love me
say you do.
It isn't there;
***
I’ve been working on this essay since December. I thought, then, that I’d begin this essay by talking about Food Network’s Chopped, the first time I ever heard of a thing called tamarind. At some point, I thought I’d mention tamarind pods, which remind me of Texas Mountain Laurel pods, which hung from the Texas Mountain Laurel outside my bedroom window until the tree died, taking the seed pods with it. I wondered sometime later if I’d be doing a disservice to this essay, to my memory, to myself, if I didn’t discuss tamarindo candies and chamoy and the sticky red fingers of my elementary school days; I wondered how I’d write about why it took me twenty-two years to try something that was all around me growing up.
It’s May now. In between December and May, I turned twenty-three. I moved to New York for five months and am starting a new job there in less than three weeks. I signed a lease on an apartment, put down a deposit on a pair of petite Siberian cats. I became a Moderna mamí.
The words I could have written, the changes that have come, that are coming: they hinged on me. There were more words and then there were no words, there were less words and then there were no words again. There are words again, the words above being the words I went with. There was my life in December, and there is my life today, the life that will be tomorrow. It was the life I went with, whether I consciously chose it or not, whether I chose it at all.
Whether I chose at it all: my choices, of course, hinged on decisions made by other people, whose decisions hinged on other people and other circumstances, whose decisions hinged on other people and other circumstances and the randomness of life that makes hinges out of all. I hinge on all and all hinge on me, Raspa Theory put differently.
Here’s to hinges. Here’s to you and me. Here’s to Raspa Theory.
