"[The Divine] God is the ground of being."
- Paul Tillich
"I do a lot more walkin' since I wrecked my car"
- Tony Scalzo
"He made a pit, and digged it, and is fallen into the ditch which he made."
- Psalm 7:15
"we seldom ate. we drank"
-Bukowski
Perhaps
it was the bad haircut that started it. I've been sitting placidly in
the bleached western patio baking like a orange sweet potato in a
sweltering progression of sunsets, watching myself morph in the mirror
each morning, a fomentation as if in a stop motion animation of the
Covid nineteen turning into the 2020 twenty, and now a swell quarantine
forty. I don't ever know what day it is. I am staying in the spare room
at Quarter's, which is an old ranch house on a fenced-in
two-and-a-half-acre lot enveloped in three cardinal directions by
"desert," by which I mean fetid cholla and clusters of grass stalks gone
crisp and long ago sunbleached of any chlorophyll green by the 105°+
days alongside some stately cauterized saguaros and nothing much else
unless you count the red snake holes of which there are many, and the
red ant holes, of which there are many more.
Staying at Quarter's
is nice because there is always lots of time for doing nothing like
texting people I haven't been in touch with since school. Things like
you should come out here, or
if you come out here you can crash with me, I'm close to the airport.
Close
to the airport is, of course, a kind of euphemism for " a 35 minute
drive outside of town" but it's nice here. It's quiet, except for Kara,
she's been staying the other spare room on the other side of the kitchen
and has a tendency to hold loud and increasingly crowded get-togethers
two or three nights a week. But most of the time it's quiet. Sometimes
Jen comes by. I stopped going over to her place because her little
sister is pregnant and her mom is both imuno-compromised and doesn't
approve of my family generally or me specifically, so this arrangement
suits us distinctly. Except, I think Jen doesn't like it. She'll call
or text to say she's coming and I put on my garden shoes and wait until
the second text arrives to say that she's at the gate and then I walk
the long baked dirt path down from the house to the road to unlock
Quarter's padlock and heave-ho the old iron gate. She's been calling
less and less.
If you're coming this week could you bring some water? I texted her last Tuesday. She left me unread.
Last
Wednesday my sister surprised me with a phone call to ask if I could
watch over my nephew on Monday as a favor. "He needs a haircut, and I
have a job interview, and I can't leave him alone." Flattered by the
advance notice I immediately agreed. Didn't give it any thought at all
and would have immediately forgotten all about it and returned to my
sorting had she not thrown me a curveball and asked if I'd talked to Dad
at all recently.
"No. Why? Is he alright?"
"Yeah, just asking. You should call."
It
gets my attention, but I am not about to call my Dad out of the blue
without first giving that some thought so I throw myself
deterministically right back into my sorting. Quarter's has great
accumulated assemblages of stuff everywhichway you look. The cars, of
course, were in the yard. Mostly. Some pieces live in the house. Then
there are the industrial kitchen parts, jumbled haphazardly within the
otherwise underutilized car port. How he came about acquiring these I do
not know yet, although I
am looking forward to the story when he
is around to tell it. There is a prodigious afrofuturist-centric
record collection in the room with the leaky roof, it's directly under
the swamp cooler. A kitchen sink overflowing with flowering mold covered
dishes. Mildewy crates filled with pages and pages of god knows what. I
joked to Kara that we were placeholders lending credibility to
Quarter's drophouse and when she didn't correct me I had that desperate
gasping panic that one has when one stumbles a little too close to the
truth and I decided that the solution was to get lit.
It's the
most viable and easiest of all solutions and after all, I justify to
myself, I'm not working. I mean I am, but not really. Three
teleconferences a month to straighten the arrow on the freelance compass
and then I compile and submit the final reports to a blinko file that
goes into a server that no one accesses and no one will ever read and it
earns me a bi-weekly deposit dropped directly into my bank account with
enough dough to score exactly four weeks' worth of liquor at current
levels of consumption, or 3.5 weeks' worth if you added in food, 2.5
weeks' worth even with gas money and "rent." Quarter's rules are pretty
lenient on rent, judging as we hadn't discussed it and he'd been largely
desparace in Mexico or wherever since Christmas. He stopped in
mid-March to pick up some boxes and drop off a truck with no wheels. He
was there for less than an hour. Nice to see you, man.
When I am
working
working I am working on writing a longform narrative poem about an
impending disaster, a kind metaphor for the virus, one picks up hints
and implications that there is a planet in the sky getting closer closer
and closer, and although I started off briskly enough the more I plug
away at it the more it becomes apparent that the pacing is all off and
now re-reading what I've done it's starting to feel like less a nuanced
explosive-set-piece-laden action-adventure than a real time documentary
about a glacial advance on midwinter Nuuk.
Like most people I've
largely given up on wearing pants. Kara's too perpetually stoned to
mind. In June I declined to attend any virtual events on zoom, citing
webcam trouble, and since no one said anything I now only join by phone
and listen listlessly to the world at large whence pressed solemnly and
deliberately on mute.
BUT last Thursday we had a party. Not one
of Kara's regular parties, with the three or four regulars, angry and
powerful well-meaning drunks with a blunt each, it was one of those
throw-down knock-out parties. It seemed like everybody came. Jen came,
only I didn't know that until later. I largely stay holed up in my room
working on the beer and the poem well into the afternoon until the beer
eventually wins out as it is always fated to do in the see-saw of
writerly vs fraternal priorities, and when I enter the fray and join
some kids in the hallway between the broken casement window and the
slate grey settee with the stacks of lavender Motherhood Monthlys they
are talking Tik Tok and not looking out the broken window so I take
position there, always the guy in the mask of mystery standing at too
much of a social distance me. The trees glow gold in the blaze of the
sunset.
"I wish I knew the names of the trees," I confess to Kara's
friend Drew who worked as a pizza chef over on 13th Avenue until they
closed their doors. His girlfriend responds because Drew is out of it
already.
"Can't be hard to learn. What are there? Elm, Maple... Ficus?"
"Sumac."
"Sumac, Eucalyptus..."
There
are already, I count, sixteen or seventeen cars outside and a bunch of
guys and girls I don't know inside sitting and standing elbow to elbow
when Jen texts that she is out front and could I open the gate? There
are four other cars in queue by the gate waiting to get in when I go
down and up the ditch at the end of the long drive, heave open the gate
and let the cars pass. I close the gate and put on my mask to greet Jen
who has brought two big 5 gallon jugs in the back of her Dad's truck.
"What's with the mask?"
"What mask?"
"Hide not thy face from me."
"I always wear a mask."
"Not with me you don't, Mister." She leans in for a kiss and I oblige cloyingly.
"Are you aware there's this pandemic going around?"
"I'm
not talking about that," Jen says, "not tonight." She puts her hands on
her hips and arches to crack her back. "Dueces wild! Look at those
stars." I do. It feels a bit in times like this like meditating
underwater, to turn your head and suddenly find yourself having been,
all along it turns out, in a universe without air or words or symbols.
The night-black knowledge of impermanence permeates the nothingness. A
knowledge that, mixed with the right drugs can manifest itself as dread
and more than match my sufficience of constitution. We hold hands and go
into the party via the back door to get the water in by the kitchen
sink.
The stars are brighter around back. The stars are one of
the best things about this place. You can see the mountains by day, of
course, but the nights here are lit. It would be nicer if we had
running water but after a few weeks you hardly miss it.
Keeping
the garden alive has been an issue. In April I planted a small vegetable
garden in a spot of land cleared of car parts around back by the three
trees I don't know the names of, it was only after I realized I didn't
have running water that this endeavor became troublesome. I didn't want
my vegetables to die before getting a fighting chance.
"Palm, Fir..."
"Redwood?"
I walk into the kitchen to get a drink. The following are snippets of
conversations I overhear at the party at around this point in the night
and jotted down in my moleskin, presented here, as there, without
context:
—a flashy cop and and international odyssey of datam aggregates
—unruly and mysterious
—don't he bite?
—Chess.
But the pieces on the board can change color and identity. Because
instability and shifting allegiances are also essential to the game.
—acknowledged and advised
—fueled by spit tests
—retaliated fairly with an inherent contradiction
—metal bleachers, hot popcorn, the game itself of course
—Beginner's Duck. Beginner in the truck, frustrated
— $13, $19, $17.40, no fifty, actually twenty's good.
—That's it. It was pie or death so the key lime piegrimage was cancelled
—Saprophytic Fungi
—Look at that egg, all heart
—without
AC sprawled spread eagle on the couch with the fan pointed up her cooch
while I'm sit there on the couch in a kind of menstrual breeze
—he offered me a grape and I was like no gremlin.
—operating under the assumption that vowels are weakness
The
sequence of events is sped up like time lapse photography in my memory.
It was day and then it was midnight and it was happening and I was
sober and happy and then reality broke into the kind of blisteringly
drunkenness that makes world appear to be comprised entirely of a series
of geometric color patterns like you might see on a church basement
quilt.
Hungover days are largely squandered, evaporated, as if by
dehydration but mostly in guilt. Jen is not pleased to observe upon my
waking that I am curled into the corner futon with a girl named Emma,
fully dressed, I protested, hungoverly, but still, it created a
headsplitting momentary scene which was interrupted by Quarter's men
showing up, what is that, Murphy's Law or whatever, anyway it's exactly
what happened. Two of them at the door, at least two more outside by the
truck but I don't hold the door open long enough to tally, the daylight
stings my brain. Jen storms out before the door is fully closed.
Quarter's men set to work picking up some bags of stuff of Quarter's in
the back and I would have set to work brushing my teeth but the bristles
hurt my gums so I settle in on a nine volume compendium of Christian
mysticism in spanish that I find leaning lopsidedly in the dusty innards
of a cracked and disused terrarium.
When I wake up later the sun
is setting and I saunter into a living room smelling of wet laundry and
menthols. Just Kara and her sister, and Jobi, the uber driver nee
actor, playing Xbox. They offer me some spicy chicken.
"Is a cactus a tree?"
Jubi
says "a cactus stores up all this water in its trunk or whatever as
soon as it rains and holds it there all summer until the monsoons come
and then it sucks up all the water of the monsoon and uses that flush to
flourish and make new cactuses that do it all over again."
"Cacti." I correct him.
"Cacti." Jubi affirms.
"They're also," I add, "prickly and painful as fuck to get close to."
"Remind you of anyone?"
I
go outside to kicking some trash around the horse nettles and water the
garden soil under the three trees I don't know the names of. It
doesn't look good. Inside again I crack a beer and on impulse call my
Dad out in the 505. It rings four times and then goes to voicemail. I
hang up. Within seconds my phone is buzzing as he is calling back but I
can't do it.
On Saturday Kara and her sister and I and Kara's new
boyfriend Dionysis go into town for a supply & water run. At the
Salvation Army they don't have any books on trees. The library has them
in stock, it shows this in the online inventory, but the hyper localized
variety guide was a book meant for kids and the North America Guide
seems too broad to be useful. Plus, the library is closed except for
curbside pickup. "I don't think these trees are local anyway" I tell
Kara's sister. She ignores me. She is busy picking at a large band aid
on her sickly pink inner arm. Kara and Dionysis start getting dramatic
and it's hot enough in the car to roast a turkey so I text Jen asking if
she wants to meet up at the park to talk and she texts right back be
right there so I get out of the car and walk to the park and meet her in
front of a bench that's cordoned off from sitters with police tape,
thanks covid, and while Jen's mom's dog runs around collar-less we sit a
little less than six feet away from each other in the white landscaping
rocks and watch instructional videos on arboreal care on my phone and
that leads to a music video of the song that plays during the tree care
video, and that leads to Uptown Funk.
"He makes it look so easy," I say.
"Yes,"
she sighs in agreement. I remember about the haircut, and my nephew,
and ask how she thinks I should get it cut. She sighs again, for
emphasis apparently. "You're a mess," she says.
I take this as a
compliment. To be honest I had actually started to think I was blending
in out here in the desert, but feigning ignorance I respond "I don't
know what that means."
"I'm sorry. The haircut would be a nice start."
"A nice start? A nice start toward what?"
She sighs a third time. "Nevermind."
"No, I want to know. Whaddaya mean?"
"It's
just... I don't want to talk right now. It's... don't you think you
could be doing so much... I don't know ... more? I don't think you know
how much potential you have. I don't know what you're waiting around
here like this for."
Dangling participle. "Do you mean at the
park?" She sighs again forcibly this time and gets up to walk back to
the car so I walk with her.
"Did you know," I ask, "that when Parliament went on tour in support of Motor Booty Affair the guy who
designed their road costumes based them on the cartoon illustrations
that he himself had made for the album cover?"
"I'm more into country," she says "you know that. And Kelly Clarkson. And Bruno Mars of course."
"Your undifferentiated aesthetic continuum is a swampy jungle to me."
We
reach her mom's car and I lean in for a kiss but she demurs and looks
wounded. "I'm serious," she says " You are just surfing this, this
curlicue current of energy that you could do so so much with if only..."
"If only there weren't this virus."
"I'm not talking about that."
"What are you talking about?"
Sundays
are religiously boring and filled with the quotidian routines of
domesticity. I take a walk around early in the morning and imagine how
high the waters will mark upside the embankment when the rains finally
come. I buy the paper for the sports page because since March it's been
little more than a history page. I listen to a sermon online and light
some Turkish incense to mingle in the mystery of its wavery whispery
smoke. The swamp cooler snarls. I stare at the wall, pondering.
Plotinus wrote that the highest possible accomplishment of man is the
tabula rasa, the blank state where the individual may grasp the source,
merge with the One, dissolve one's personhood and become absorbed back
into the primordial substance which is the substance of all things, the
uncaused cause. We live within the confines of rules we never made. My
fingers faintly register a declining volume of toothpaste in the tube.
Settling in, my unfinished poem blinks despondently on the computer
screen as the day persists unto purple ochres that drop ominously into
the simple dark tone of midnight. I decide to try my Dad again and this
time he answers on the first try.
"Well hello sorry I missed you the
other day I was just coming back from the doctor's and I didn't make it
to the phone in time."
"It's okay."
"What's new? Written anything good lately?"
"All roads lead to Rome," I say.
"It's
good. Not original tho." I can hear the fan he keeps at the foot of his
recliner rustling unremittingly in the background. "How's the weather?"
"Holding
up. Guy took me out to the ranch on Tuesday. Corn's coming along." I
don't know what to say to this so I say nothing and listen to his fan.
He continues, "how's the weather there?"
"No rain yet."
"It'll come. Always has done. You alright for money?"
"Sure. Just checking in."
"I appreciate it. Your sister says you're doing well."
"She's got an interview tomorrow."
"So I heard. You mean later today."
"Oh yeah I guess that's right. I'd best be getting to bed. I'm in charge of the little man tomor- later today."
"Get some rest. Give him my best. Thanks."
"For?"
"Checking in."
Two
days in town in a week. Time has really all begun to run together, past
and possible futures and intolerable present, before eight A.M. is a
bit early for me but my ten year old nephew is the bright eyed wunderkid
genius of the morning when he runs to Quarter's door, my anxiety-ridden
sister honking goodbye from the road as she peels out. My nephew says
he gets up every day between 6 AM to 6:15 AM and then asks me to retie
his shoelace, smells our green refrigerator bread and proceeds to tell
me about 262 different Pokemon varieties, their strengths, weaknesses,
and revolutions. This lasts throughout my getting dressed, nuking and
scarfing some breakfast hot pockets, and making the drive into town,
despite even a brief attempt to drown him out with a new Killers song on
the radio that I immediately dislike and turn down as I catch his
unspoken reproach in the review, "and and then Arbok evolves from the
Ekans and and it can, it can coil its body and squeeze it's opponents in
battle."
He wears chino shorts and a striped Oakley sweater even
though it is already over 90° outside, a burgeoning mullet testifies to
his need for the haircut and I note, not without a surprising amount of
felicitous joy, that he smells like milk cinnamon cereal and Johnson
& Johnson soap. When we get off at 22nd we take off our hats, put
on our masks and enter the Fast Cutz. I pick out the picture on the
wall of the stylization I am looking for, short sides and back, and my
nephew announces he wants one too. They call him first. There are four
on shift even though the room has eight stations. Gotta keep six feet
apart. One of the girls, a real looker, about 5'5" curly gunpowder black
hair dyed in stages to blonde at the ends, all perfectly coifed and
dressed in a tenebrously bohemian patterned blouse and ripped jeans
beneath her black company apron, finishes with some grandma and
approaches the dais to read off my name. She's an alto. I like that.
When I stand her eyes widen and she greets me and escorts me back to the
perch. I like the way she is attractive and eager. Attractively eager?
"Hows it gunna be?" she asks. Is that a challenge?
"You tell me sweetheart."
She
suppresses a giggle and makes eyes in the mirror at one of her cohorts
who had immediately looks up to catch our reflection. "Oho! So yr a risk
taker, huh?"
"You know it." I grin big but beneath the face mask it doesn't show. "Short sides and back."
"Like a Number 1 short?" she holds up an attachment "close to the skin short or..."
"Surprise
me." Her cosmetology school certificate is propped against the
hairspray and mousse at the workstation in front of me but I can't quite
make out her name, font too small. Amber? Alma? Derbyn? Hard to
tell. I wondered what her face looks like beneath her mask.
As
a habitual rule of thumb I always tend to imagine the worst of all
possible facial deformities are being concealed by those wearing
facemasks, an imaginative predisposition that has been hard to reconcile
with our current reality. I can imagine her chiseled cheekbones coming
in for a bright tapered ovoid incisor margin smile, a slight dimpled
chin perhaps, maybe a beauty mark...
She asks "y'think we're gonna get that rain?"
"Not yet.
"I heard there was a 10% chance tonight."
"That's
a 90% chance it'll be dry." She laughs but it is a fake laugh. God
she's beautiful. The unattainable kind. Barler? Helen? Ennisa? I
watch in the mirror as she cuts off more and more hair, realizing too
late that I probably should have been a bit more specific, a bit less
cavalier. This realization comes too late for my hair, as just then she
terses without warning and sneezes. I feel a sharp concise sting.
"Oh
fuck." she scoffs. "I am. so. sorry." The room holds it's breath, the
ambient noise adjusts to an augural quiet. She spins me around so I can
see the square patch of bare skin spot center of the back of my head.
"What did you—" I stammer, "what can you do?"
There is nothing she can. There is nothing anyone can do that will make it better.
My nephew looks good without his mullet though.
Back
in the car we put our hats back on and get a drive thru lunch of
chicken nuggets and milkshakes. Well he does. I go by the mart for a
SanTan tallboy. Moon Juice. "It could be worse," my nephew says from the
back seat, "I mean, with your hat on it's not that bad, you can only
see a little of it."
Reaching back to feel the spot, I recognize and
appreciate that he is only trying to console me. We don't talk the rest
of the way back to Quarters where I tell him to go play in the yard.
"Practice your driving," I say, pointing to the jumble of the derelict
cars while I walk down the drive to the road to check the mailbox.
Somewhere a dog barks. In the box are bills and politicians and an
early birthday card featuring a shaggy mopey dog wearing a superhero
mask. It reads "super bitch its your birthday" with a five spot.
I take a snapshot with phone to send to my brother, and then a back-of-the-head selfie of my mangled haircut to Jen.
She texts bad a scrunchie face emoji and then:
We can't keep going on this way. I think we need to take a break.
Walking
in the house I feel sticky and freighted with humidity and humiliation.
Kara takes one look at me and cackles. Like, immediate,
head-in-her-knees keel-over-to-the-floor laughter. "Fuck happened to
you?"
"I know. It's the worst." She is already uploading my mugshot
onto her Instagram as I grab the smoldering bowl off the coffee table
and help myself to a double hit, deep lung laundering tokes to clear my
head in smoke.
Then I take a shot. The 90 proof that we keep on the high shelf. Heading for oblivion with the scabrous divinity.
To
understand and know anything it is essential that the understanding of
the knower be adequate to the thing to be known, so to embrace the
contours of the infinite light we must evanesce ourselves and our
tensions and our egos into dissolute unknowability. Close the door,
turn the fan on high and lay down.
The next thing I know its the
long shadow hour of late late afternoon and Kara has opened my door and
is peaking her head in and whispering "Where's your nephew?"
"He didn't come inside?"
"He did for a bit but you were sleeping so he went back out. Just seeing if he's with you. It's been a little while."
I
scan the horizon and I hear it before I see anything. A kind of
wailing. High and not too far off. I run down the patio steps, hopping
over the western chain link I saw him right away behind a straw brown
yucca. He is on the ground yowling, curled into a capital G, his hands
gripping his right ankle. I kneel down to him and and he cries and
yowls louder.
"What was it buddy?"
"S-s-s-s-snake."
"Did you
see it?" He shakes his head. I can see now that his achilles tendon is
swollen and red, about the size of an apple. "Did you see it?"
"I didn't see it, I felt the bite," he cries, "I'm sorry! I'm sorry!"
"It's okay. Didn't you hear the rattle?"
"I didn't hear the rattle" he cries again.
Kara and Dionysis join me and I tell them to call an ambulance.
"I ain't calling no fucking ambulance," Kara says.
"Call an ambulance!"
Dionysis
says that he'll get his truck. He runs off. Kara kneels down to comfort
and console and in a minute I hear the metal ting of Quarter's padlock,
the steel whine of the iron gate, and then the truck engine starting up
with a roar. I and look around, frantically, for the snake. Red
touches black and you're okay jack, red and yellow'll kill a fella. I
don't see any snake, just plenty of hidey holes, cholla spikes
everywhere and the the velutinous and impenetrable prickly pears.
Dionysus reappears saying "let's go" and I pick my nephew up out of the
dirt, cradling him just like I did when he was three and fell asleep on
the couch, only now hyperconscientious of his tender and mewl-inducing
ankle, and I carry him back over to the fence and gracefully palce him
across into Dionysis' waiting arms on the other side, who then races him
the sixty paces or so to the passenger seat of the truck. Kara hops in
the other side to occupy the middle seat and I notice then that the
truck is parked right under the third tree, a deep tire rut runs
straight back through the very soft brown center of my carefully
manicured garden soil.
"You can't park there!" I shout.
"Why not?"
"It's, that's, those are my flower beds."
Dionysis does a double take and squints at the dirt and at me before hopping in the truck and slamming the door behind him.
"Man your flowers are dead."
Most
evenings this time of year the faroff fullness of dark monsoon clouds
advances northwest up the ranks of the wide desert valley where
Quarter's house lays sponged in the pages of twilight by a setting
convection oven sun and this year it's already a month late and I watch
the heat lightening and the dark rain clouds so close, so far, and its
all happening so slowly I can feel the sweat running down my crack at a
faster clip. Sun, sweat, moon, monsoon. The summer rains will take care
of everything right? Isn't that what they do? Bring the desert back
into green life, wash away the snakeskin we shed, all this fucked up
everything, and deliver us from this bleak neverending present into a
less bleak newly washed future. The past is like the grime behind my
shoe tongues. I'm just waiting for the rains to come, sitting placidly
in the bleached western patio looking for a way to feel hope. But even
if the rains do come, then what? After that is just another long long
drying out again, we all regrow our skin and it hardens and cakes and
when does it all end?
I've already called my sister. When they
text from the Emergency Room that he's doing fine and going to be fine I
forward the text immediately to my sister who says
Thnx, here and my ruinous babysitting career is over. My hair, my garden, my relationship with my sister, my relationship...
"I don't know who you are anymore," says Jen. Where'd she come from? I don't know. Her eyes are wet and her arms are crossed.
"I'm just a guy telling a, telling stories."
"Ha!
That's a crock and you know it. Only those with power tell stories. You
tell stories about other people but you, you don't have any power at
all anymore. If anything your story will be told by somebody else."
"I could tell my story if I wanted to."
"You
couldn't and you can't because you don't want to because you're so full
of secrets and if you let your secrets out then you think that people
have power to wield over you. It's like you're sabotaging your own life
so you can remain unknown to yourself and it's just hurting the people
around you and it's hurting you and it hurt your nephew today, I heard,
and it's hurting me."
"Did my sister tell you."
"Yeah. She says essentially he's going to be alright. No thanks to you."
"I
know, she just texted." Jen snorts and leans against a stack of baked
bricks and I realize that my head is throbbing, or is it a cicada
reaching some hidden crescendo?
"What the fuck is the matter with you?"
"Just, nothing. I mean I guess I'm just fucked up by the neuroses of modern masculinity right?"
"Fuck that. Do you even have any idea why I'm upset with you right now?"
"Because..." Have to think about that one, "because I stopped coming over to your place?"
"No.
I'm mad because your buddy Quarter's dickhead drug lackeys fucking
assaulted me the other night at the party and when I went to find you so
you could help get me out of here you were so deliriously drunk that
you were scaring your friends so I lay you down on the futon with Emma
and luckily Kara's boyfriend was there and was a real gentleman and he
had to escort me to my car because those assholes, your friend Quarter's
friends, wouldn't fucking leave me alone.
"I had no idea."
"No
you didn't. And then I came back out here the next morning to check on
you even though my sister told me I shouldn't and you were just ...
awful. What are you even fucking doing right now? I'm sorry for
swearing but not really sorry because this is a shitty place for you to
be and when are you going to get your head out of your ass and notice
that?"
"It's not that shitty. Plus the monsoon will be here soon."
"Ugh! Why can't you just be serious and see what's in front of you? Take off your masks."
"It's not safe."
"Aren't I safe?"
"The world isn't safe."
Later
still, inside, the angry drunks are laughing fiendishly but, oddly
enough, friendly too, toward Dionysis' exploits on the video game.
"Watch out nigga!"
He laughs like "Houh houh houh houh."
"Shiiit," says Kara.
My
moleskin notebook sits on top of my dirty garden shoes, which are next
to a book I haven't seen before. Must be a gift from Jen. The Sibley
Guide to Trees.
Laurel, larch, Banyan, cherry, elm, oak, dogwood,
ash, pine, catalpa, magnolia, acacia, mesquite, apple, orange, birch,
aspen, palm, sycamore, hickory, walnut, willow, linden, juniper, alder,
sequoia, spruce, yew
I should write this down. I open my laptop
and I also open up my notebook, to set the muse's top in motion, as it
were. I find the snippets of conversations overheard at the party. I
start to work.
At midnight it starts raining. I finish my writing
and knowing it's not great but it's a start I go outside with a beer,
and a cigar, to celebrate and watch and feel and rest. It's really
coming down now. I'm not going to show you the poem. I'll give you a
hint though: At the end of the poem is silence.
