The Apartment Fire 10/14/02 Crazy times. Chris Tsou, my beloved webmaster, taught me a bunch of HTML stuff so that I could work on this website. He is moving back to DC in a couple of weeks. That's five cool people of color moving out of this state in one month, y'all. Chris, brotherman, thank you so much, not just for the web design and teaching my cretin ass some technology, but also for all the things you've done for me and the support. Shaolin Soccer forever! Speaking of soccer, I'm sore from the People of Color championship soccer game yesterday. I'll post a pic in the gallery soon. Then I went to my parent's house to help them clean up, then I worked on this website till 3 a.m. This morning I went to see brother Truth Maze's trial. Some undercover police officers beat him with batons and threw him in jail over the weekend, for the apparent crime of being a Black man waiting for the city bus. We find out at noon whether they are actually going to charge him with anything. I've been working on my new CD. It's hard work, but it's good to be back in the studio. I think it will be hot, yo. Right now, I'm working on getting this website tightened up so that I can tell y'all that it exists. Sorry to those of you who felt offended that I didn't tell you about it, I just didn't think it was ready yet. But over the last couple of weeks it's been getting closer, close enough for me to tell everybody. But I wanted to get this one last essay written before I did that. I dunno why, I just thought it was a weird and funny story and wanted it to be on here. Two Fridays ago, I was feeling real low, for a number of reasons. So my good friend Chamindika, one of the few friends in my life that by some amazing grace is like a sister to me, came over to talk about art and politics - so that I would be using a different part of my brain. So we're sitting and talking, drinking Korean corn tea and brainstorming about a local Asian American arts nonprofit, an organization wherein I am a board member and wherein she was just hired as the director. I go into the kitchen to turn on my stove to heat up some more tea. It's about 12:50 am. Being that I have an electric stove (so you can't see where the flames pop up) and that I am a dumbass, I absentmindedly turned on the wrong burner - the one that has a large covered pot about ¼ full of vegetable oil. I was frying chicken the day before. So I go back into the living room and we continue our conversation. A few minutes later, Chamindika notices smoke billowing out of the kitchen. I jump up and run into the kitchen, turn off the burner, and turn on the overhead exhaust fan. The smoke is so bad that I double over coughing, dropping my glasses in the process. I run into the bathroom to turn on the exhaust there and also the exhaust fan I have in my window, and while I'm coughing and doing that, Cha doesn't know that the pot is full of oil so she lifts the lid. A huge fireball comes bursting out of the pot and slightly burns Cha's arm and she puts the lid back on the pot. The lid catches on fire. The smoke alarm starts singing. Cha is yelling at me to throw water on the fire, but in my head I remember that putting water on a grease fire is a bad idea so instead I slap the flames out with a t-shirt. By now the smoke is so bad that we are both coughing and in tears. We run out, coughing, and run into the basement laundry room to put water on Cha's arm. I soak my shirt in water so I can put it over my nose and mouth, and run back into my apartment to make sure there is no fire. There is no fire, but the smoke is so bad that I can't stay in the place for more than a minute before I am blinded by tears and coughing uncontrollably, even with the wet shirt as a shield. So by now, it's about 1 a.m. The other tenants in the building are waking up because they hear the alarm and they see smoke. I'm thinking, damn, my stupid ass is in trouble. But people were actually cool about it. Thank goodness I live in a building where everyone is a person of color. Otherwise I would have been yelled at or something. Instead, all of us stand in the front entryway, door open to the cold air to help get the smoke out of the hallways, waiting for the fire department to show up with their enormous fan machines. Three women from downstairs are getting ready to go to a club and get their drink on, and one of them is flirting with a new guy in the building. One of the women asks what ethnicity we are. When Chamindika answers, "Sri Lankan," the woman asks,"what does that mean?". After Cha tells her, the woman says, "You pretty." Another woman gives Cha butter to put on her burn. A woman who speaks very little English pats me on the back and chuckles, then laughs at the antics of the women who are trying to pull game on the new tenant. The new tenant is also amused by the bravado, then tells me that every thing is going to be okay and that I should look on the bright side, at least there wasn't a big fire that wiped out all my possessions (knock on wood). It's funny, my fellow apartment tenets and I are in some ways like my family was back in the day: walking in shared hallways, too familiar with one another to know each other. For some reason, that night as I drifted off to sleep, I felt better about things. There I was, a poet living in section 8 housing, whose shampoo cost more than a fair sixed bag of rice, a shampoo roughly the color and consistency of oatmeal that I use to wash hair that has never been shorter in my whole life. Surrounded by books, music, photos and letters from friends that did not burst into flame, just tasted smoke. Who had a horrible Friday, and was falling asleep in a smokey bedroom. I just had to laugh about it. Maybe cuz I realized that things could always be worse, in a very tangible sense. My microwave doesn't work now, for some reason. It wasn't burnt or anything. Dennis says it's probably cuz the microwave is scared. "Fuck this, I'm out," he joked, impersonating my microwave, "I could be next!"

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