In the Know

“I'll bet poetry readings are just about the most boring thing there is.”

“Well, I don’t know about that. I’d say they’re boring alright, but Hungarian movies give them a run for their money. College graduations shouldn’t be left out either.”

The boy and his father were driving back from Ojai. It was hot. Ojai is always hot except for two weeks in winter when a cold snap arrives and threatens the citrus growers. It brings on a panic of prevention. Smudge pots, huge fans run by generators; the crews work around the clock, same as fire season. But it was March.

“Did you like your sister’s poem?”

The boy considered a moment, “Not really. I didn’t understand why she put French in it. This isn’t France. And her voice was so phony.”

The road down from Ojai is only two lanes until the freeway. Most everything was green, most everything but the broom plants which were taxi-colored, and the wild mustard. The boy held an inhaler in his lap. His asthma was chronic and had begun giving him trouble beneath the oak trees. The reading was on the grounds.

“Dad, how come Daniel didn’t have to read? I’ll bet his poem would have been cooler than Hannah’s, or that girl who was so scared. Least he surfs and could have written about the waves or sunsets. Something cooler than French.”

“Oh I don’t know, I liked her poem. It’s tough to write a poem. At least she put Georgia in it and some real things. Things she knows about. Some poems don’t have anything real in them.”

Georgia was Hannah’s horse. Hannah chose her school in Ojai because it was near the stables where Georgia was boarded. After school, she’d work around the stables and help her trainer to offset the cost of lessons. There was a bus. Teenage girls and horses inhabit a private country.

“What about the music?” His dad quizzed him. “I think her flute is cool, and the boy with the Sitar was pretty fun. Did you like that?”

Traffic was light for a Saturday. He felt foolish talking down to his son, using stunted language as if kids were puppies that only understood the most rudimentary words. He’d always talked to him this way, but knew it was ill-advised.

“Afterward he let me play it. The sitar. It has 22 strings. Must take forever to learn how to play.”

“That was pretty co . . . generous of him. To let you play it. Do you ever think about learning an instrument? You’re older now and your Mom and I will look into lessons if you’d like.”

“I like drums.”

“What kind of drums . . . bongos, conga drums, rock and roll?”

“Like the guy in Nirvana that Hannah has on her wall. His drums. They’re called kits.”

Along this stretch, the road followed a creek which was nearly always empty, but the recent rains had filled it bank to bank. It was muddy and fast. It made the narrow canyon look more normal somehow. That’s how the father thought about California, that it was freakish, barren. His idea of a proper landscape he’d gleaned in his own youth from television commercials during football games. Maple trees framing two-story homes somewhere in the Northeast, maybe Connecticut. Life insurance, or Campbell’s soup. Everyone in flannel raking leaves, or digging up bulbs in their Wellingtons. California, at least Southern California was desert, no matter the lawns or swimming pools, it wasn’t right somehow. The run-off stream seemed right.

The boy had a t-shirt with Bart Simpson on it. It had a quote under his round face that said something daring or borderline perverse. That’s where comedy lives, even with kids.

“How about the piano? You have mom’s piano at the house. She could even help with your lessons. She can read music and plays pretty good.” He was testing the waters. He knew his son’s mom would like him to learn piano. She felt slighted when Hannah chose flute. Rejected somehow.

“She’s taught me some chords and I can play a couple songs already, but I like drums.”

The boy never looked at his father, just as the dad rarely took his eye off the road or glanced toward his son. They both looked and spoke forward as if addressing the road up ahead.

“She wants me to learn a Clara Schumann piece, but it’s hard. My fingers can’t reach like hers can. And no, I didn’t like the song Hannah played on the flute . . . She says her music teacher’s a lesbian. So’s her writing teacher, Karen.”

“You have an opinion about lesbians one way or the other?”

“No, not really. Karen is cool. I don’t know her music teacher. She only has classes once in awhile and I’ve hardly ever seen her. I like her art teacher best, Roz. Last week she let me sculpt some bowls the way Indians used to. She’s gonna fire them once she gets more stuff from the class.”

“Mom’s birthday’s coming. Maybe they’ll be ready by then.”

“I don’t think so. Mom wants a book. She told me.”

“What kind of book?”

The father had been separated from the boy’s mom for close to two years. He’d always been interested in what books she read. Sometimes he’d read them as well. His own copies. It helped him feel in the know.

“I forget. A German woman I think. Something about the holocaust. I think she died.”

He shook his inhaler and took two quick puffs, sucking in the Albuterol cloud. He replaced the nozzle cap.

“You ever think about that, dying?”

“Me? Hmm, well I suppose I do from time to time. The big mystery and all that. Why do you ask?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Just wondered if other people think about that stuff.”

“I would venture that everyone thinks about that stuff once in awhile. Was the reading so terrible that you’re thinking about ending it all? A rope, or the big jump from Golden Gate Bridge?”

The previous summer, the boy and father had taken a road trip to San Francisco. The boy had been focused on Alcatraz for months prior, and had exhausted his local library branch on the subject. They’d stayed at a Best Western near the Presidio, with a pool. Out on the island they’d both dressed in prison garb and had a Polaroid taken behind bars. They saw where Clint Eastwood made a movie. Where Al Capone grew old. One day they drove across the bridge to Marin and took a hike in the redwoods. Upon returning over the bridge, the father pointed out a parking lot where suicides often left their cars. He’d read that police check it conscientiously for what could be considered evidence. The father felt a quick rhythm under his tires from the girders. His mouth tasted bad.

“I think mom could teach school about the holocaust. She has so many books.”

“True enough. She’s fascinated alright . . . Does mom talk about dying?”

“No. Just the people who were gassed and stuff. The Jews mostly.”

The two lane road was dissolving into a long on-ramp to highway 33. They picked-up speed. The sun was hiding behind a steep hill to the North as they headed toward Ventura and the fog-banked Ocean.

“You know I love you don’t you Bud?”

“Yeah, I know.” He waited a while to size up the moment. “Dad, if you want, I’ll trade you my Storm for Magneto.”

“You mean the trading cards? Thought you liked Storm?”

“Yeah I do but I got doubles this week at Comics’ Corner. Plus, you should have Storm.”

The father knew Magneto was common, you couldn’t give them away. He’d given Storm to his son weeks prior, in a lop-sided trade. The kind dads and kids always do. He wondered if his son really had doubles. Then spoke to the road up ahead.

“Yeah, that’s cool. I’m crazy about Storm.”

To their left the late sun hit the hillside high above Mission Avenue. The father rolled down his window. Half way up the bald face of sandstone and scrub, a lone building, a hospital, reflected a coral glare.

“I go to meetings there sometimes. There’s no-one around. I swear it’s deserted up there. The halls, the rooms. Weird.”

The boy’s eyes were fluttering. They were tired eyes. He’d done all he could do.




(The above image is from a Marvel trading card of Magneto, one of the X-Men superheroes, 1992 or so).

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The Harvest__a story by Amy Hempel

Amy Hempel is a short story writer and journalist. Along with Raymond Carver and Mary Robison, she is regarded as one of the leading figures in American minimalist fiction, an influential style which began in the 1980's and is often associated with editor Gordon Lish. Her Collected Short Stories was published by Scribner in 2006.









The Harvest


The year I began to say vahz instead of vase, a man I barely knew nearly accidentally killed me.

The man was not hurt when the other car hit ours. The man I had known for one week held me in the street in a way that meant I couldn't see my legs. I remember knowing that I shouldn't look, and knowing that I would look if it wasn't that I couldn't.

My blood was on the front of this man's clothes.

He said, "You'll be okay, but this sweater is ruined."

I screamed from the fear of pain. But I did not feel any pain. In the hospital, after injections, I knew there was pain in the room — I just didn't know whose pain it was.

What happened to one of my legs required four hundred stitches, which, when I told it, became five hundred stitches, because nothing is ever quite as bad as it could be.

The five days they didn't know if they could save my leg or not I stretched to ten.

The lawyer was the one who used the word. But I won't get around to that until a couple of paragraphs.

We were having the looks discussion — how important are they. Crucial is what I had said.

I think looks are crucial.

But this guy was a lawyer. He sat in an aqua vinyl chair drawn up to my bed. What he meant by looks was how much my loss of them was worth in a court of law.

I could tell that the lawyer liked to say court of law. He told me he had taken the bar three times before he had passed. He said that his friends had given him handsomely embossed business cards, but where these lovely cards were supposed to say Attorney-at-Law, his cards said Attorney-at-Last.

He had already covered loss of earnings, that I could not now become an airline stewardess. That I had never considered becoming one was immaterial, he said, legally.

"There's another thing," he said. "We have to talk here about marriageability."

The tendency was to say marriage-a-what? although I knew what he meant the first time I heard it.

I was eighteen years old. I said, "First, don't we talk about dateability?"

The man of a week was already gone, the accident driving him back to his wife.

"Do you think looks are important?" I asked the man before he left.

"Not at first," he said.

In my neighborhood there is a fellow who was a chemistry teacher until an explosion took his face and left what was left behind. The rest of him is neatly dressed in dark suits and shined shoes. He carries a briefcase to the college campus. What a comfort — his family, people said — until his wife took the kids and moved out.

In the solarium, a woman showed me a snapshot. She said, "This is what my son used to look like."

I spent my evenings in Dialysis. They didn't mind when a lounger was free. They had wide-screen color TV, better than they had in Rehab. Wednesday nights we watched a show where women in expensive clothes appeared on lavish sets and promised to ruin one another.

On one side of me was a man who spoke only in phone numbers. You would ask them how he felt, he would say, "924-3130." Or he would say, "757-1366." We guessed what these numbers might be, but nobody spent the dime.

There was sometimes, on the other side of me, a twelve-year-old boy. His lashes were thick and dark from blood-pressure medication. He was next on the transplant list, as soon as — the word they used was harvest — as soon as a kidney was harvested.

The boy's mother prayed for drunk drivers.

I prayed for men who were not discriminating.

Aren't we all, I thought, somebody's harvest?

The hour would end, and a floor nurse would wheel me back to my room. She would say, "Why watch that trash? Why not just ask me how my day went?"

I spent fifteen minutes before going to bed squeezing rubber grips. One of the medications was making my fingers stiffen. The doctor said he'd give it to me till I couldn't button my blouse — a figure of speech to someone in a cotton gown.

The lawyer said, "Charitable works."

He opened his shirt and showed me where an acupuncture person had dabbed at his chest with cola syrup, sunk four needles, and told him that the real cure was charitable works.

I said, "Cure for what?"

The lawyer said, "Immaterial."

As soon as I knew that I would be all right, I was sure that I was dead and didn't know it. I moved through the days like a severed head that finishes a sentence. I waited for the moment that would snap me out of my seeming life.

The accident happened at sunset, so that is when I felt this way the most. The man I had met the week before was driving me to dinner when it happened. The place was at the beach, a beach on a bay that you can look across and see the city lights, a place where you can see everything without having to listen to any of it.

A long time later I went to that beach myself. I drove the car. It was the first good beach day; I wore shorts.

At the edge of the sand I unwound the elastic bandage and waded into the surf. A boy in a wet suit looked at my leg. He asked me if a shark had done it; there were sightings of great whites along that part of the coast.

I said that, yes, a shark had done it.

"And you're going back in?" the boy asked.

I said, "And I'm going back in."

I leave a lot out when I tell the truth. The same when I write a story. I'm going to start now to tell you what I have left out of "The Harvest," and maybe begin to wonder why I had to leave it out.

There was no other car. There was only the one car, the one that hit me when I was on the back of the man's motorcycle. But think of the awkward syllables when you have to say motorcycle.

The driver of the car was a newspaper reporter. He worked for a local paper. He was young, a recent graduate, and he was on his way to a labor meeting to cover a threatened strike. When I say I was then a journalism student, it is something you might not have accepted in "The Harvest."

In the years that followed, I watched for the reporter's byline. He broke the People's Temple story that resulted in Jim Jones’s flight to Guyana. Then he covered Jonestown. In the city room of the San Francisco Chronicle, as the death toll climbed to nine hundred, the numbers were posted like donations on pledge night. Somewhere in the hundreds, a sign was fixed to the wall that said JUAN CORONA, EAT YOUR HEART OUT.

In emergency room, what happened to one of my legs required not four hundred stitches but just over three hundred stitches. I exaggerated even before I began to exaggerate, because it's true — nothing is ever quite as bad as it could be.

My lawyer was no attorney-at-last. He was a partner in one of the city's oldest law firms. He would never have opened his shirt to reveal the site of acupuncture, which is something that he never would have had.

"Marriageability" was the original title of " The Harvest."

The damage to my leg was considered cosmetic although I am still, 15 years later, unable to kneel. In an out-of-court settlement the night before the trial, I was awarded nearly $100,000. The reporter's car insurance went up $12.43 per month.

It had been suggested that I rub my leg with ice, to bring up the scars, before I hiked my skirt three years later for the court. But there was no ice in the judge’s chambers, so I did not get a chance to pass or fail that moral test.

The man of a week, whose motorcycle it was, was not a married man. But when you thought he had a wife, wasn't I liable to do anything? And didn't I have it coming?

After the accident, the man got married. The girl he married was a fashion model. ("Do you think looks are important? I asked the man before he left. "Not at first," he said.)

In addition to being a beauty, the girl was worth millions of dollars. Would you have accepted this in "The Harvest" — that the model was also an heiress?

It is true we were headed for dinner when it happened. But the place where you can see everything without having to listen to any of it was not a beach on a bay; it was the top of Mount Tamalpais. We had the dinner with us as we headed up the twisting mountain road. This is the version that has room for perfect irony, so you won't mind when I say that for the next several months, from my hospital bed, I had a dead-on spectacular view of that very mountain.

I would have written this next part into the story if anybody would have believed it. But who would have? I was there and I didn't believe it.

On the day of my third operation, there was an attempted breakout at the Maximum Security Adjustment Center, adjacent to Death Row, at San Quentin prison. "Soledad Brother" George Jackson, a twenty-nine-year-old black man, pulled out a smuggled-in .38-caliber pistol, yelled, "This is it!" and opened fire. Jackson was killed; so were three guards and two "tiertenders," inmates who bring other prisoners their meals.

Three other guards were stabbed in the neck. The prison is a five-minute drive from Marin General, so that is where the injured guards were taken. The people who brought them were three kinds of police, including California Highway Patrol and Marin County sheriff's deputies, heavily armed.

Police were stationed on the roof of the hospital with rifles; they were posted in the hallways, waving patients and visitors back into their rooms.

When I was wheeled out of Recovery later that day, bandaged waist to ankle, three officers and an armed sheriff frisked me.

On the news that night, there was footage of the riot. They showed my surgeon talking to reporters, indicating, with a finger to his throat, how he had saved one of the guards by sewing up a slice from ear to ear.

I watched this on television, and because it was my doctor, and because hospital patients are self-absorbed, and because I was drugged, I thought the surgeon was talking about me. I thought that he was saying, "Well, she's dead. I'm announcing it to her in bed."

The psychiatrist I saw at the surgeon's referral said that the feeling was a common one. She said that victims of trauma who have not yet assimilated the trauma often believe they are dead and do not know it.

The great white sharks in the waters near my home attack one to seven people a year. Their primary victim is the abalone diver. With abalone stakes at thirty-five dollars a pound and going up, the Department of Fish and Game expects the shark attacks to show no slackening.

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Old Crimes

If I could age like Dan Duryea, I wouldn’t mind the onslaught of decrepitude and the bulky distension to my trousers that wearing diapers will certainly expose. That guy was a rock. His chiseled features and suave pomaded hair were the epitome of 1940’s gangster élan. That’s when gangsters wore suits and ties topped by a wide-brimmed hat, not the ¾ length baggie pants, NBA team jersey, thigh high white socks and immaculate white basketball shoes that they sport today. Curious to even think that gangsters of that bygone era could look as frightening as the grim reaper without one single tattoo exposed, not even a dagger through a ruby-red heart. One with “Helen” emblazoned across the top. The times do scuttle along in one mandatory direction I suppose.

Crime is normally a young person’s occupation. Perhaps that rings true owing to the small amount of criminals left alive when pension time comes a-knocking. Not that they all die in some dramatic criminal plot before realizing their golden years. Many expire quietly in drive-by shooting, prison shivs, drug overdoses, witness protection program snafus, or complications of H.I.V. Not the stuff of television news specials. Usually the most you can hope for is that some high school girls in the neighborhood will hold a weekend car wash in your honor to raise money for a headstone. Friends of the family will light tall candles and place plastic roses in front of your mother’s apartment building. A far cry from Don Corleone’s parade of black Packards leading out of the cemetery archway and around the neighboring streets on a drizzly late afternoon.

Maybe that’s why I was never fascinated with crime until I turned 60. Since I’d only been to prison as a visitor for a few hours upon a single occasion, the steel re-enforced cement walls and case-hardened steel bars didn’t provide the deterrent that was intended to rid me of my illegal folly. If one looks at the social opportunities for advancement in Los Angeles during our age, realizing that Karl Marx’s reputation has been somewhat tarnished, if not rusted, one might still find truth in describing the city as one divided by class. 3 major classes to be more exact: first the wealthy and powerful; then those who wish to become wealthy and powerful; and finally everyone else. I’m a class jumper, that is, I once belonged to the second rubric encompassing those of us who had hoped to become wealthy and powerful, however through a sequence of relentless circumstances I’ve dropped into the third basin which collects “everyone else.” It wasn’t a seismic shift of dense change, merely a wearing away of ambition and a corresponding increase of insidious boredom.

When one looks across the city it becomes obvious that the greatest mucilage keeping us from flying into chaos is not brotherly love, civic pride, or fear of police retribution, but rather it’s The Lotto. The California lottery is to its citizens what heaven is to the Christian faithful. It is the answer to every question. It is paramount among capitalist myths, proclaiming that we’re all suckers, but one day through luck, perseverance and a trickling away of our pocket money, we’ll strike it rich and be able to buy our own house trailer. It is our only reason for putting our pants on in the morning, or turning our television off at night. It defines us completely. Best of all, it discounts hard work. In fact it disregards work entirely. As long as you give the local liquor store clerk your 2 dollars or 5 dollars, you are entitled to dream of a brighter tomorrow. The horrors that fill your waking life will immediately discharge into nothingness and become replaced with any fantasy you can conjure. It is the great buffer against financial reality. A gambler’s hallelujah. It is Uncle Sam’s version of clemency and reward.

I began my criminal life, as I said, after I turned 60. The milestone occurred during a bad patch when I had lost half of my savings in the investment fraud scandals of George Bush’s last year in office. My girlfriend of longstanding also decided to use one of many understandable reasons to leave me at that same time. Both incidents were deep incisions into my already frail psyche, but it wasn’t until I lost my dog that doomsday began to toll its clear chime. She was a wolf-hybrid and I’d owned her since puppyhood. Funny, but friends came and went, lovers likewise, even family members relocated to New Jersey or the local cemetery--but my dog was a constant. I took her to work with me, traveled with her. She knew my quirks and phobias better than my girlfriend, better than my best friend. If I ever get a tattoo if will be her name in a circle of dog bones. How she loved bones. At that time, life seemed a passionless redundancy of breathing, eating and shitting. A full moon was too bright, a sunset too dull, and the hours in between whirred like a refrigerator motor with bad bearings.

So it was with an uncalculated decision one afternoon that I told my friend, Dallas Ely, I’d accompany him to a casino in Gardena. I’d been there once before with Dallas, a poker player. He was a luckless gambling addict and taught me that what losers need more than even winning, is someone to accompany them when they lose--I understood the rationale. I had an uncashed unemployment check. He drove.

Billboards for casinos always include colorful nightlife with wholesome people having fun. I’d say everything on that billboard, even the ladder, is a lie. Not that it bothers me much. After all, if there are no lies, there is no advertising--and I have a soft spot for ads. With the hope of one day purchasing what they offer, many an otherwise stuffed shirt has embezzled his entire company. Watching my fellow citizens act counter to their upbringing and moral code in order to buy a German automobile, or season’s tickets to the opera, or a trip to Jamaica, gives me faith that we’re all still malleable and will hasten to change at a moment’s notice. A scenario I prefer to one dictated by karma or fate. Plus the prettiest girls are always in ads. They might be selling a dialysis machine, but they’ll be wearing thong bikinis, spiked collars and stiletto heels. Capitalism is fun spelled wrong.

Dallas picked me up after 4:30. It probably took him half an hour to drive over. He lived in Santa Monica, and though he didn’t have a view of the ocean, at least the air was wet and smelled salty. For that I envied him; him and the hundreds of thousands like him that huddled on the lip of the Pacific in overcrowded apartments, paying stiff rents and voting the Democratic ticket. He couldn’t come earlier because he watched re-runs of The Simpsons every day at 3:00. He claimed the little girl sounded like his ex-wife and it gave him an erection. I didn’t want to know any particulars. Everyone has their reasons, even animation-voice-actress lovers.

We took the freeways through the witless census of bad drivers that usually parade the downtown lanes. Although typically slow, there were no accidents, and we finally gained speed after maneuvering the eddies of independent transport between Chinatown and the Coliseum, sluicing down the Harbor Freeway heading south. His car rode smooth and the air-conditioning worked. My car didn’t do those things—didn’t even try.

We pulled into a huge parking lot and paid the six dollar fee. The area wasn’t known to be very safe, so it was smart to park in the patrolled lot. Losing all the money to your name in a 20 hour nightmare of bad cards and maxed-out credit, only to leave and discover that your car has been stolen is not a notion one courts knowingly. We grabbed a couple of bacon-wrapped hot dogs from a vendor on the sidewalk. They always smelled better than they tasted, and tasted better than they felt in your stomach, but they were cheap. We hadn’t come to eat good food, but to win other people’s money.

Inside was cool and the lighting was pleasant. They hired designers from Las Vegas to build the casino. You never saw a clock, never saw a window, never felt a change in temperature. Nothing to indicate that time was passing, or that there was another world outside the confines of the main floor: a world of husbands, kids at school, bill collectors, jobs, bank balances. Instead there were card tables with green felt tops and multi-colored denominations of chips to stand-in for real money. Nothing was real, everything was possible. The only way one could lose was to leave out that front door.

I had no affection for poker, too many rules, so I separated from Dallas and found a Blackjack table that looked quiet if not prosperous. Blackjack is my kind of game, the skill quotient is nil. Anyone who can count to 21 and has enough chips to feed the house's lopsided odds can play. If it takes a tubercular dandy of the Old West like Doc Holiday to personify the game of poker, well then Blackjack might be the Manny Pacquiao of card games. Pacquiao is a Filipino boxing champion in 5 weight classes and a virtual deity in his home country. I saw him once at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas in a title bout against Erik Morales, and though he lost the fight in a 2 to 1 decision, Pacquiao was a precision puncher with a never-say-die heart. A few weeks afterward, a judge at the prizefight admitted to scoring a round improperly, costing the fight, which is all the more reason to equate Pacquiao with Blackjack. No matter how well you play your hand, you lose.

It took me about an hour to waste $300 dollars which put a sick fist of bile in my stomach, and rather than continue my downward spiral I took a break and walked around. On the second floor I found a snack bar and sipped a club soda with a bag of chips. At an adjacent yellow Formica table, a woman was jotting down numbers in a small notebook. She was middle-aged and Asian, cute Asian. Her head was bent either totalling her loses or working out a new mathematical scheme to break the bank on the Pai Gow games. "You winning or about to be winning?" I asked. My pick-up lines were rather cobwebbed due to lack of use. She ignored my interest, but I had nothing much to lose, so I leaned closer, "I said you look too sexy to be spending your waking hours banging out dollar bills in this joint. Let's go get a bottle and a room." Never in my life had I shown such rude authority. I must have been channeling Dan Duryea in Scarlet Street. Since I'd been alcohol free for over 10 years, the question of getting drunk with a stranger I'd met at a poker hall was completely out-of-character, completely. But the sick feeling in my stomach was gone, replaced by some intoxicating adrenalin I seemed to have created by my bold-faced bullshit.

I was prepared for a pithy rejoiner about losers with tiny dicks drinking water with a straw, but she smiled and replied with a little giggle, "No thank you. I'm here with a friend and I don't drink." She didn't rule out the implied sexual Olympics I'd imagined when offering the room. "We don't have to drink, I'm here with a friend myself and just wanted to kill some time until his luck runs dry. These seats are uncomfortable and the lighting makes me feel like I'm posing for a passport photo." She giggled again which I was now counting. "What are you writing down in that book? Lucrative figures I hope." She closed the notebook and placed both hands on top. "Nothing really. I just try to figure odds at Blackjack. Not merely numerical probabilities, but I include atmosphere, colors, time between hands, genders of people at each table." No wonder she was agreeable, she was nuts . . . Figures! But I continued, undeterred by the mental health issues at hand, "So do your calculations work? I'm not one for systems myself. I just give them my money and call it therapy." She giggled a third time and I was in love.

I rose from my table and asked if I could join her, carrying my clear plastic glass and Doritos. She didn't seem to mind, but took her book and placed it in the purse slung over her chair. "Can I get you something? A drink, a sandwich?" Christ, I thought. First I asked her to get drunk and fuck me senseless in some dive hotel room and now I'm acting like a schoolboy offering to share his lunch. If I can just keep her giggling I thought. "Well, sure." She answered kind of chipper, "I wouldn't mind a BLT and a diet Coke. But I've got money--and how about you? Can I offer you a sandwich or something?" As she was talking, she looked me in the eyes, but I noticed she was removing a wedding ring from her left hand. Oh thank you, Jesus. "Tell you what," I said, "Why don't you order us some food to go and I'll get a room upstairs. We can eat and talk more comfortably, maybe put on some music. Relax. I think the AMC channel is showing a Joel McCrae and Claudette Colbert movie at 8:00." Somewhere in the recesses of my consciousness I realized that not every sexy woman would get aroused by Joel McCrae and Claudette Colbert, but I was batting a thousand and giddy with confidence. A long moment began to stretch out on the carpet at my feet. It rolled onto it's back, curled it's tail, looked up at me and blinked. The noise of exuberant winners somewhere below broke the feline monotony of time's quiet loitering. "Okay." She replied, "I just have to tell my friend what I'm doing so he won't worry." She grabbed her purse as she rose and leaned close to my ear, "Palm Beach Story . . . Preston Sturges . . . Paramount, 1942 . . . You want pickles with your sandwich?"


2


Her name was Yukio and her breasts were small; not at all like the bovine sized glands I'd been spending my evenings masturbating to on dvd's titled Rosalita's Hot Lips, Nuns in Bondage #44 and Tolstoy's Tsarist Tarts: A Saga of Cruelty. I quit counting her giggles, her mewlings, her gurgles, gasps, grunts, burbles and breathy snorts. They were mixed with my own. And though I'm not here to confess to premature ejaculations, we did catch the second half of the movie. Flailing that sex stick around has never been my strong suit anyway. It always seemed so physically perfunctory, as if we guys are plugged into a 12 volt generator and are trying to hammer through bunker walls. I prefer to rest my reputation on my eight inch tongue and its rude calisthenics. That and my sweet talk.

Yukio knew some of the film's dialogue and recited lines along with Claudette Colbert. As fortune would have it, I knew a few Preston Sturges sheets of dialog myself, having once been a projectionist at the Rivoli Theater in San Luis Obispo--a now defunct revival house which showed vintage and art house fare for one week runs. It was a good time. The money wasn't much, but it beat repossessing cars which was what I was employed to perform in my prior incumbency.

I licked the tender flesh at the joints of her fingers while we watched Rudy Vallee get beaten in love's fickle parlor game. I could feel the indentation left by her wedding ring. "You said your friend was a guy. Nothing romantic I suppose?" I inquired, trying to sound off-handed. "Oh, well. . . no, not really." She answered without taking her eyes of the hotel flat screen. We were up against the headboard on pillows that could use a plumping. "He works here at the casino. Security." "He's not going to break down the door and shoot me like a dog in a fit of jealousy is he?" She offered another of her patented giggles. "No, he's used to it. Besides he doesn't know which room we're in." Her explanation didn't quiet my growing list of misgivings. "I mean he's not your husband or anything is he?" I said, my voice dropping a tone. "You're not being rude dear, you're just being yourself," She soundlessly lip-synced to Miss Colbert's delivery.

I had to admit, Preston Sturges made some great films. I took her longest finger and tried to touch the back of my throat with it, but gagged. My eyes even began to tear. I love those scenes in porn movies when a woman's eyes tear and her cheap slut mascara begins to run down her face. They almost look like early 1930's Universal monster movie ghouls. "But if he did find which room number we we're in, would he do anything?" I questioned again. Yukio looked at me and smiled, "Don't worry, he's not that kind of husband."

One of my least dependable abilities is thinking under stress. I've never been good at it, and as the years pass by it has become worse. "Really, what kind of husband is he?" I asked, scanning the room to make sure I knew where I'd left my pants and shoes. "We're partners mostly. We met years ago in a business deal and fell in love. We managed to get married, but can never find a good reason to get divorced."

I reached across my side of the bed to get my bottle of luke warm water and took a sip. "It's not my business I know, but do you both still live together? Sleep together?" She was watching Palm Beach Story again. "Please . . . don't . . . worry. He loves me too much to ever hurt any of my friends, and that includes you." She rolled over onto me and bit my nipple hard. The localized stab of pain wiped my brain clean and we started fooling around again. I forgot all my questions until after I'd pulled out of her leaving small dollops of cum on her back. Yukio wasn't tall exactly, but she had long thin legs connected to her narrow hips. She was probably in her mid 40's and still trim. I on the other hand had a pronounced gut that jutted out over my belt line like a profile of Orson Welles' chin in Touch of Evil. Glad she wasn't shallow.

At some point during our last dip into passion's swampy pit, the movie ended. I vaguely remembered finding the remote and silencing the post-screening commentary. We were both sweaty, so I turned the air-conditioner knob to a higher setting and pushed the fan slider to maximum. We still had half a bucket of watery ice left, so I filled our glasses with it. I gave her one and sat down beside her. She hadn't shaved her pubic hair as so many women had, and her black hair met along a crease above her vagina like a toupee, albeit a fine, dark, sexy toupee. For some unfathomable reason I wondered what she looked like when she was a kid, say kindergarten age. I bet I'd have had a crush on her. I could imagine mooning over her from a rear desk, or acting openly foolish if I though she was watching and it would make her smile.

There was a loud knock on the door. If I were Dan Duryea I'd have reached for my .38 then pulled on my pants, tucked in my wife-beater t-shirt and barked, "Waddya want?" Instead I pulled the blanket up to my chin and froze. Yukio slid out of bed and without benefit of her underclothes, pulled her dress on over her head. "Yes," She called to the door, "What is it?"
She walked to the door and put her hand on the secondary lock. The rear zipper of her dress was still open down to the crack of her ass. Her skin was was still flushed from our squishy exertions.

"Yukio . . . you okay? Open the door." It was a male voice and I wished I was losing money at a cold Blackjack table. She pulled back the door with the lock still in place so that the two inch clearance allowed her to see the guy outside in the hall. "Oh hi. We just finished watching a Preston Sturges show. Come in." She closed the door to unhook the lock, then reopened it wide. I was naked under the covers and began shaking in an un-gangster-like way. "Lester, this is Dennis. We met downstairs and decided to kill some time together."

He wasn't a big guy, but he wasn't small either. He wore black slacks and a Hawaiian shirt. Probably worked out at the casino gym three times a week. I'd put him somewhere in his early 40's, somewhere around Yukio's age. I pulled out my hand and gave a weak wave, "Pleased to meet you, Lester." If Preston Sturges was around I'd have asked him for some fucking direction, but he wasn't so I tried to follow Yukio's lead. He looked around the room, obviously spotting Yukio's underpants and bra on the floor with her sandals. I hate the unexpected--these pregnant pauses that ensue: the silence that sucks everything into its vortex just before a wave crashes its crippling power all over everything in sight.

He disregarded Yukio, who bent to pick up her underclothes. With a few strides he was at the foot of the bed and sat down. He could see my clothes scattered over the little table and chairs. A cross between a leer and a smile grew across his face and he looked me over. "Well," he began, "How was it?" Oh fuck! I wanted to call King's X, or Time Out, but he continued, "Don't you love it when Gerry says, 'You have no idea what a long-legged woman can do without doing anything? That's one of my favorite Claudette Colbert lines of all time."

"Yeah, how about Rudy Vallee when he's talking to Mary Astor?" Piped in Yukio.
"Oh that was so cool when John D. Heckensacker III says: 'You don't marry someone you just met the day before; at least I don't."
Only to be followed by Yukio imitating Mary Astor in her roll as Princess Centimillia: 'But that's the only way, dear. If you get to know too much about them you'd never marry them."

Both Lester and Yukio broke out in laughter and embraced. They kissed a slow affectionate dance of the lips and when they pulled away, he kept his arm around her waist and they both faced me again. "Must have been on the AMC channel huh?" Lester asked. I didn't know how to respond, I may even have been drooling I was so confused. Then he continued, "Tomorrow, they're showing Murnau's Island of Lost Souls. It doesn't screen that often, but I have to work." Lester didn't get the appropriate answer from me that he hoped to elicit, so he looked over at Yukio and squeezed her waist. They looked like an aging prom couple. She still had my cum on her back and it was probably being wiped onto his forearm as we all chatted like the good chums we'd become. Gotta love America.

Just as I had decided to squirm out of bed and put my pants on, Yukio read my mind and gathered them for me. It saved a naked waltz in front of her husband, my movie buddy Lester. His statute of limitations for flying into a rage and killing me with a handy blunt instrument was just about exhausted, so I got out of bed with my back to them both and slipped each leg into my pants. I grabbed my underpants and stuffed them into my pocket, then after buttoning up my semi-clean shirt, turned to continue our confab.

"Dennis made me cum twice." Yukio offered up for general comment. They must do things much more differently in the far East than I ever imagined, maybe Buddha's doing. Or maybe it's just Gardena. "Well, my friend must be wondering where I am. He's probably broke by now and in a hurry to drive home. It's been great meeting you both." I looked at Yukio and held out my palm for a handshake, which she took and held for a moment before returning it barely used. I didn't think Lester and I were really intent on shaking hands, so I just gave him another half wave as I ambled toward the door.

"Sure you have to leave so soon?" Lester asked in a regulated tone of voice. "I was hoping we could talk some business."

"Well, not right now. Besides I'm terrible at business. Worse than Blackjack even." I was looking at the door and cast this last sentence over my shoulder like a feeble lacrosse pass.

Yukio slid next to me and stroked my arm, "Please, Declan. It will only take a few minutes." I fabricated an insincere measure of a smile, but she must have perceived that I'd say anything to get outside that door in one piece, and that I wasn't about to agree to camping out for another few minutes or another nanosecond. So she lifted herself up on her toes and whispered in my ear a promise so lewd and exiting that I released my grip on the door handle and re-entered the room with no noticeable hesitation. Such is my firm hold on commitment. We each took a seat at the table and Lester remained leaning on a chest of drawers while he spoke his piece. It began, "First I'll have to shoot the guard."


3


“Do you know how to distinguish a good hotel from a dive?” Lester asked. I waited a beat while my memory swam back decades and retrieved a rule I'd learned while taking SAT tests in my student years: that any answer is preferable and statistically stronger than no answer, so I ventured one. “Let’s see, If the woman at the front counter behind the cross-hatched metal cage doesn’t show any fresh needle marks on her arms it’s the Plaza?” Lester showed disappointment in my flippancy.

“Well, yes, that might be a pertinent clue, but I’ll tell you the insider’s method of judgment. There’s money to be made on both ends of the spectrum, cheap or classy. It’s like Blackjack. There’s many ways to win, not merely pulling a King and an Ace off the deal. No, if you want to ascertain which way a hotel swings just tell the front desk you’d like to view the room before checking in. They’ll give you a pass key and verbal directions to the room. A good hotel will have security at the elevator and they’ll ask to see your key, a dive won’t. Then as you proceed, judge the carpet and the interior paint job. If it compliments well and the paint is trimmed with a second or third highlight, then once again it’s a nice place. Look down to the end of each corridor and notice if the facing wall is a mirror, again unless it’s Paris, the good hotels will have installed a quality mirror. Look for cameras in the corners. If you see surveillance cameras it’s a dump. A nice place will hide them behind glass or in light fixtures. Then when you walk into a room notice the bedspread. A light-colored, non-floral bedspread is a good sign. The Motel Six style chaotic print patterns are the tip-off of a joint. Know why the large hotel corporations buy these hideous eye-sores?” He asked while pointing to the bed where Yukio and I had broken commandments and vows. He seemed to be awaiting another guess from me.

“I don’t know, hide cum stains.” It just came out, before the sound waves left my mouth I felt contrite.

“Good guess, but no. Glycol ether solvents can remove semen stains. No, these gaudy floral patterns are designed to hide spare change that's fallen from your pockets. In hundreds of thousands of rooms spare change is left behind every day to the tune of over 30 million dollars a year. It never appears on a spread sheet. It’s untaxable, untraceable. High end hotels for obvious reasons don’t include these windfalls in their business management.

“So what? Some Johns in fleabag hotels leave spare change behind, the maids pick it up to buy themselves postage stamps. Who cares?”

“True enough Declan, it doesn’t seem like much, but to return to our Blackjack analogy, remember that drawing a 5 or 7 card Charlie wins more than two-card 21. Big denominations, or small denominations are all just figures. At the end of the day, it’s only the total that’s of interest.”

“Tell him about Global Props” Yukio said to Lester. She reached out and draped her hand on my arm. Funny, but her touch reminded me of my Grandmother when I was a youth. She had the most delicate and delicious touch. Her back rubs were probably my first introduction to sex. She’d actually get me hard just rubbing my back. Crazy. My grandmother. Crazy.

“Global Properties is a national hostelry, third largest in the United States, first in California. They own and manage hotels, motels, commercial real estate, casinos, and a cruise ship line. They’re the parent company of many medium priced chains up and down the coast: the Executive Suites is theirs, Harmony Hotels, J.W. Stubbs’s Business Hotels, Paradise Motels, the Golden Moon Cruise Line, and lots of independents you’ve never seen advertised. What makes them interesting to us is that they make a practice of keeping that chump change maids use to buy postage stamps. Every day . . . Every bed. Last year they made just under a million dollars. They own this casino.”

“So somewhere downstairs there’s a big bag of pennies. I still don’t get your business interest.”

“Declan, we can offer you $20,000 dollars cash for a weekend’s work. If we’re lucky, you get renumerated handsomely. If we’re unlucky you go to prison for a long time, or you’re shot and killed in a parking garage by the Los Angeles Police. It always comes down to luck and money. You won’t be asked to fire a gun, it’s actually more an acting assignment. It’s serious, but we’ve found it can be greatly entertaining. That’s the pitch. That’s the deal.”

“Why me? Why not some other recalcitrant loser taking a breather in the snack bar? I hate work, legal or illegal. I’m going to have to turn you down.” Then I looked at my wrist where a watch would have been had I a watch to wear, “Now, I have to meet my friend. I appreciate the offer. No hard feelings, but the answer’s no.”

Neither one of them seemed disappointed. Yukio was still caressing my arm, then she reached across my chest and dropped a folded piece of her notepaper in my shirt pocket. I picked up her hand and kissed it goodbye, rose and walked to the door.

“You have three days to decide. If we don’t hear from you by late Friday we’ll assume you’ve definitively refused.” Lester said, smiling as if we’d just finished a croquet game together instead of me having wonton and uncontrolled sexual eruptions with his wife. "I suggest you keep our conversation to yourself, though I understand that it's difficult not repeating such a strange offer. Just remember that you'll be placing the friends you tell about us in danger. We are part of a larger conglomeration of business associates, I can safely relate that none of the others are as friendly as us. Not even close.

“Okay, but I’m not really the criminal type. I was a bed-wetter and weep at Bette Davis movies.”

Yukio giggled.

I closed the door behind me and looked down the corridor, forgetting how I’d arrived or which direction led to the elevator. Turning right I hastened on. Dallas might have left already in a depressed fit of resignation, in which case the cab would cost me 40 dollars I didn’t have to waste. I felt excited and was breathing quicker than normal. More than anything I wanted to tell someone about my last few hours, someone who wouldn’t just laugh. Someone who understood how fortunate we humans are to live in a world of sexy Asian women who giggle and know the best lines in one of Preston Sturges’ greatest screenplays. Though that wasn’t all I could ruminate over. Funny people they grow in Gardena.

Dallas wasn’t at the same table, but he was still playing. This time it was a Texas Hold’em table. Oddly he had stacks of green and black chips which meant he was winning. I’d forgotten that sometimes that happened, if only to give yourself a pleasant memory before you lose it all to some stoical dealer in a long-sleeve white blouse, black bow tie and a name tag that never looks that permanent.

I didn’t want to jinx Dallas’ luck or pull him away from a winning run, so I told him I was tired and would take a cab home. I’d talk to him the next day to hear if he’d managed to walk out with any of the money stacked in front of him. Of course I knew the answer; if he didn’t lose he wouldn’t go home at all.

The night was dark and cool. Summer was in full swing, but temperatures had dropped after sunset when the ever-present jasmine began to broadcast its redolent carillon. You could still feel some of the day’s heat trapped in the sidewalk. It made Los Angeles bearable. Darkness hid the grimy cracked façade of it all; the neon and streetlights shouted out to you like old acquaintances you hadn’t seen in so long you forgot they owed you money.

I didn’t want to wait around for the front desk to call a cab, so I walked down to Vermont and hailed my own. Felt good to leave the sound of money behind me. Sometimes, I start humming that tune all the way to self-pity’s rendition of Kurt Weill’s thoat-slitting underworld. Not my favorite music on a Tuesday night when I still had $380 dollars in my pants and the taste of Yukio’s pussy on my lips.

4


Once home, I whipped two eggs around the skillet, then pulled out some cold sausages I’d fried the day before, grated some queso and concocted a thick quesadilla. With an icy glass of club soda and squeezed lemon I sat down to eat and ponder again the day’s events. I could see by its blinking red light that my phone’s answering machine had a message. The device was old, but it still worked okay. Although a novice might think that the pitted voices sounded like jumbled Navajo code, I'd trained myself at translating the garbled messages trapped within the stretched magnetic tape. In a world of cutting edge marvels in digital technology, I limped along with an analog consciousness. Old, broken or stolen, that’s me.

My cooking was satisfactory provided I used enough hot sauce, which I did. My refrigerator door held dozens of those murky plastic demitasse cups filled with assorted hot sauce mixtures from taco stands and take-out restaurants. I always cracked the cover and smelled them to be sure, but my experience dictated that good hot sauce never goes bad. It’s too mean.

With a mouth full of delicious slop, I pressed the Play button and listened. There were two messages, the first one was a wrong number, a Latino sounding woman asking for Linda. I probably receive more wrong numbers and recorded advertisements than actual messages intended for me personally, but it helps me to feel apart of this cockeyed world. If I'm lonely and bitter it helps to know that someone I've never met has my phone number written down on a pad of paper, or incised into a cell phone database. It matters little that it's all a mistake, the fact is we're connected.

The second message was from Yukio. Just at hearing her voice, my blood started acting coltish. She wanted to see me again without Lester. She left her cell number and hoped I'd return her call by Tomorrow. After she'd hung up, I listened to the soulless voice of the answering machine inquire if I wanted to delete the two messages. I saved Yukio's voice, jettisoned the wrong number.

Carrying my plate across the small apartment, I opened the cd deck to see what music selection still remained from that morning: a soundtrack from a Wong Kar-wai film, Our Glorious Years Have Passed Like Flowers. I returned the cd tray and hit the largest button, whose word had been rubbed off over the years. At the initial strings I remembered liking the tune and so turned the volume higher. It was a good movie as well, restrained and moody as hell. The cd began with Yumeji's Theme, a sprightly intro that sounded more like vintage Nino Rota than anything traditionally Chinese. I took another bite of my quesidilla and actually gave a little try at a circus pirouette. Though Yukio was Japanese, somehow my memory of Wong Kar-wai's film reminded me of her. Asians were all lumped together as the "Yellow Peril" when I was a kid: slant-eyed Kamikaze pilots with Tong braids and their geisha girlfriends with big hair and buck teeth, pouring tea and smoking opium. I knew we kicked their butts in the Pacific during the war and forced them to build our railroads in the previous century owing to their inferiority. I grew up believing everyone not white was inferior to the suburban collective of Sherman Oaks residents and habitues I belonged to. Differentiating between Mandarin, Cantonese, Korean, Tibetan, Japanese, Okinawan, Vietnamese, Laotian, Thai, Burmese, Ceylonese, Indonesian would be frivolous at best. Better to lump them into an indivisible rubric called "Chinks" and forget them.

After finishing my food, I washed the dishes I'd dirtied in hot foamy water and set them to dry on the sink. Though not a particularly clean renter, I was nonetheless tidy. A thin layer of dust covered most of the spaces not directly in the path of foot traffic, however all was stacked neatly and piled at every corner and upon every surface. Books, records, CDs, magazines, memento-stuffed cigar boxes, vhs tapes and DVDs rose up from the ground like those 5 foot ant hills one sees in photos of the Malawi bush. When visitors commented on the place, it was embarrassing. They were unusually kind, but transparent in their judgments and eventually I stopped inviting people. My dog, though large, had learned to maneuver around the piles like a trained ballet dancer learned to bypass any sorcerer wearing black tights. Though gone, there was still evidence of my dog's life in the apartment--deep scratches on the door; dust bunnies under furniture constructed largely of her shed undercoat; stains along the kitchen wall where her food and water bowls had been kept; or the deep indentation on my couch cushions where she curled at my feet during late night viewings of assorted movies, or while I read novels both perverse and profound. Her name was Hannah, she was killed by a drunk driver while sleeping in the rear bed of my pickup truck. My temporal lodge of forgiveness had been eroding ever since.

Often, I stretched out on my black leather couch and reminisced about Hannah through the cracked and debris-strewn bunker I call my memory. Women loved my dog. Usually better than me. She was a wonder of dignity and grace in a world where such attributes are rare or go unheralded. When women ascertained these qualities in her, they wanted to take her on errands with them, or walk her in the neighborhood park. Originating in a bloodline of large breeds from cold northern climes, she offered my women friends protection from unseen threats, and yet her handsome markings and furry athletic frame also gave them a feeling of style and a general swagger while in her company. All remarked upon her loyal disposition and equilibrium in matters of tongue licks, warm nuzzles and her indefatigable desire for tummy scratching. Owing to her lineage being half-wolf, she could also be accounted as one possessing a sudden ferocity in times of perceived danger. I carried many bite scars from breaking up the snarl and slash of bloody dogfights. Though never did she bare her teeth at women or children. In that, she exhibited a primordial system of implied ethics much preferable to the average bloke and lass of now-a-days' planet earth. And though I was often tempted to accept personal accolades for her temperament by my meager training, it was unwarranted. I never taught her anything that make her exemplary. Maybe Lester was right in his assessment of all eventualities being a by-product of luck, hence the medieval wheel of fortune, or the I Ching. Perhaps like Ra, the Egyptian sun god, Hannah was just born on an auspicious day. Good a reason as any.

It wasn't difficult for me to play second fiddle to a dog. I was grateful for her company, and secretly felt undeserving of such an even-tempered companion.

I'm not saying I believe absolutely in luck, or that there aren't ways to improve your chances. A gun will do that. Graft, corruption, financial malfeasance, crooked cops, or when a politician swears on a Bible--all sure winners. The only corrective which trumps all these is bad luck--that I do believe in. When that drunk hit my truck and killed Hannah, bad luck came calling. In fact it broke into my life, ordered a pizza and changed the channel on my TV; and like a good lapsed Presbyterian, I blamed myself.

If I even considered joining Yukio and Lester in their vague criminal plans, it would be tantamount to calling the authorities in advance and reserving a cell in Chino prison. My soul had even begun to smell like a long dead rodent stuck behind the plasterboard walls of my best intentions. I had the look grifters running a shell game hoped to find in a sucker. I couldn't shake it, and was becoming convinced it had come to stay. And yet like any gambler, I knew my luck could always change, or as Publius Vergilius Maro opines in The Aeneid: "audaces fortuna iuvat"--Fortune favors the bold.

Leaning my head back against the padded arm rest of the couch, I remembered that Yukio had put a note in my pocket. I removed it expecting a further clue to their money scheme, or perhaps her phone number, but instead on the blue lined paper was a hand-drawn happy face: circular, bold and silly as a school girl's lack of cogent description. I re-folded it and stuck it back in my pocket, then smiled. It came like a thundercloud across a horizon of parched July desert dropping big fat gobs of rain. A fucking happy face.

.

Individual Results May Vary

I was early for a change. It's not that I make appointments with Dr. Hsiao all that often, maybe once or twice a year, but when I'm late, the health clinic personnel become parental and dominant--all professional warmth dissipates, then turns icy and I'm forced to wait hours. Luckily, I remembered their primary regard for promptness and, like I said, arrived 10 minutes early.

The waiting room was big, airy with a flat screen television on which interviews with baseball personalities were being conducted while the network twiddled its thumbs waiting for a rain delay to cease in St. Louis. Dodgers vs Cardinals was the subtitle banner. I'm not someone who likes televisions in public places: Thai restaurants, supermarket check-out lines, produce departments of the grocery store, even little monitors on gasoline pumps blaring the evening news. Obviously, it's an infringement on my desire for quiet and serenity, but the core of my disdain is its mind-numbing homogeneity. Just once I'd like to see an announcer with a large facial scar and bad teeth loosen his badly-tied Windsor knot and stutter his way through the teleprompter's highlights. And instead of programming Titanic, or Harry Potter as the movie to watch while I gobble my Tom Kha Gai and Yellow Curry, perhaps someone at the television studio would broadcast Venus In Furs, or a filmed colposcopy. Anything but the dross we refer to as family entertainment.

I should mention I had booked the doctor's appointment for suicide. My own. No, I wasn't going to pull out a gun and blow my brains all over the pharmaceutical advertising and IKEA furniture. I merely wanted a prescription of sleeping pills to effect a nap into eternity.

While I waited, and leafed through a Newsweek, I tried to rehearse a convincing story to tell the doctor. Many years ago I was very good at such stories. With the aid of many a gullible, or greedy doctor I once kept my dosages of barbiturates in hefty supply. That was decades ago however, when my rainbow cache of downers might include: nembutals, seconals, amytals, tuinals, or luminals. Interesting that Pentobarbital, the pharmacological name for nembutals, has spun off to become the prime ingredient used for animal euthanasia, some of whose trade names include Euthasol, Euthatal, Euthanal, Euthanyl (in Canada), Beuthanasia-D, and Fatal Plus. Pretty cool huh? I don't suppose there could be any misrepresentation of my plans if I walked in and asked the doctor for a three month supply of Fatal Plus.

In movies, they always seem to glide over the actual procurement of sleeping pills. They're always just there in appropriate supply. Open a bathroom sink mirror and they appear next to Viagra, 0.5 ml syringes of Restylane and hormonal anti-wrinkle cremes. In reality, it takes a bit of dramatic enhancement to get sleeping pills from a doctor. A bit like getting absolution from a priest. They make you work for it.

I had taken a seat in a finger of the waiting room which blocked any view of the television. A mother and daughter were also tucked away there, whispering and playing on the girl's blackberry phone. They somehow seemed too happy; I imagined them sharing their last good afternoon together. In a few weeks tests would be interpreted to show an advanced stage of breast cancer in the mother. A pall would descend over their world never to be excised, never.

Although I knew it was merely my quixotic imagination at work, probably from stress at my approaching audition with Doctor Hsiao, it did seem true somehow. An old episode of Twilight Zone had opened here in the clinic, giving me the dubious power of temporal projection. I didn't want it to happen. Christ, who'd want cancer to be visited upon utter strangers, especially the happy duo I peered at over my copy of Newsweek? Fate wasn't in my hands, I was just able to look into the screenplay twenty pages ahead of the mother and daughter. Or as Rod Serling might intone: "There is a fifth dimension, beyond that which is known to man."

When my name was called from the rear door, a heavy set and rather attractive nurse waited for me to follow her. We stopped so that I could weigh myself on a white enamel scale. Then she led me into a generic examining room where she asked a few dull questions, took my blood pressure
and placed a thermometer under my tongue. It was quick and business-like, she could have been plucking feathers from a headless rooster. "The doctor will be with you shortly" she told me and exited the door, closing it behind her. I looked at some of the graphic aids on the counters and walls. Mostly weird medical artwork paid for by pharmaceutical companies with their logo emblazoned across the top. One shiny poster was for Atherosclerosis. It had 5 subsequent cross sections of the blood stream showing a progressive build-up of fatty tissue and cholesterol. It looked exactly like one I'd seen in an article on home plumbing, but instead of tree roots growing inside and blocking the clay pipes which lead to the street sewer, this artwork described heart attacks, brain hemorrhages, and paralytic strokes. Someone should curate an art exhibit of frightening posters in doctor's examination rooms with the faint voices of a choir barely audible from invisible speakers singing something funereal and appropriate. It had the effect of telling me the doctor was boss. He lived around this creepy stuff and called it healing.

Hanging from the wall was a dispenser of conical black plastic funnels, the ones doctors place on the end of light-emitting tools they use for checking your ears. I stole one and put it in my pocket. A small victory for the patients against great and expensive odds.

Dr. Hsiao opened the door as if a cartoon caption said "Swoosh." Big smile, thick-rimmed glasses, bloodless white lab coat. We shook hands politely, but I thought it was more like pugilists touching boxing gloves to begin round one. He had my file opened and quickly got to the point. "The nurse said you're having trouble sleeping?" He began. "That's right doctor" I lied. "Don't get to sleep until after the birds start singing each morning." I was looking him in the eye and tried to look convincing. "I've been out of work for awhile and I stay up all night on the computer or reading, just can't sleep."

He looked at my file in his hands to refresh himself with my past. He obviously didn't remember a thing about the 7 years of doctor-patient relationship we'd enjoyed up until this time. I didn't blame him. It was a clinic after all. He was merely the first line of bureaucratic defense summoned by the insurance companies to keep costs and complaints at a minimum. For any serious problem or ailment he merely recommended a specialist who then sent the patient to a battery of technicians to run tests, and who then sought interpretation from additional specialists until you were in the hospital with a shaved chest and a male nurse joking that your quadruple bypass operation was nothing to worry over. The end result is often bankruptcy and death.

"Are you still taking the Depakote and Wellbutrin?" He asked matter-of-factly. " That's one of the things I wanted to tell you, Doctor." I said, acting more interested in this conversation than I really was. "I quit taking them a few months back. At first it was difficult, but now it seems fine. After 15 years of constant medication, I want to see what I feel like without using them." I could tell from his silence that he didn't agree. The issue wasn't terribly important to me one way or the other. In truth, I had quit taking the medication a few years ago and was selling the medication refills he prescribed to me and which were paid for by my union health plan. Between unemployment and a rank economy, every little piece of untaxable income was a bromide to mind and body. There was a woman I once worked with who had been prescribed the same concoction of pills to combat Bi-Polar Syndrome, however she had no health insurance. Instead, she paid me cash every three months when my supply arrived. I only asked about half the pharmacy price. Both of us considered the transaction fair.

"That's why you're not sleeping." The doctor pronounced with alacrity and certainty. "A symptom of Bi-Polar disease is sleep disorders and insomnia. If you begin your medication again, your sleep patterns will return to normal." I knew that the conversation was beginning to slip away from me. "There's a new generation of anti-psychotic medication I recommend that's probably more effective than the Depakote and Wellbutrin. You'll also sleep deeply." Jesus, I thought, now I'm psychotic. This doctor has no idea what I am. Even the Bi-Polar diagnosis was not his. He merely continued an on-going prescription once given me by a Psychiatrist in Ventura before the good doctor was incarcerated from a County Medical Malpractice sting. That had been many years ago and I'd never been to a shrink since. We had both liked each other, he wore funny clothes with horses embroidered on his sweaters and shirts and thought my stories amusing. I complimented him on the paintings which covered his office walls, mostly idyllic landscapes of childish accomplishment. Doctor Durning. It was reported that he bilked over a million dollars from a county program: mostly by creating fictitious patients in a walk-in clinic downtown. It was for the homeless. After an initial aversion, I grew to like him. He kept my disability benefits flowing for years before his unfortunate exposure to the criminal courts. It was his diagnosis that Dr. Hsiao was referring to when he mentioned the new pharmacological treatments which would improve my emotional health and my circadian sleep rhythms.

I couldn't exactly tell him that he was merely following the lead of a psychiatrist with a pony fixation who's medical license was revoked and who had served 2 years in Tehachapi State Prison for getting rich on the backs of homeless street people. It would complicate matters. I also couldn't tell him that my circadian sleep rhythms were actually maintaining a stable schedule, all things considered. And where he gathered that I was in need of new anti-psychotic
chemicals instead of simple sleeping pills--well, I was flummoxed. This was going to be more difficult than I had supposed. I wish I'd worked harder on a good story.

"Couldn't I just get some sleeping pills? Use them to get myself back into a normal rhythm?" I inquired, sounding a tad more like an imbecile than I usually took credit for. "Sleeping pills aren't the answer." He countered. "You have to use them every night and pretty soon you become addicted. It's very difficult to stop once addicted. If I give you Ambien, you'll feel groggy every morning and might even begin walking in your sleep. People find themselves sleeping on the front lawn without any recollection of how or when they moved from their bed." I could tell that Doctor Hsiao had never taken a sleeping pill in his life. Nor had he taken a prescription for Bi-Polar Disorder or psychosis. He also had no idea that my file was filled with incorrect information in the main. Oh I was borderline crackers alright, but not along the lines he believed to be curative.

"I don't really want to go back on psych meds doctor. It took me too long to finally stop them. Why not prescribe some sleeping pills--any ones you feel comfortable offering me. I'll take them for a month or so and when I return for a follow-up visit, we can decide to change the plan or continue?" I don't get more rational than that. It was a good mixture of adult confidence in my own decisions and respect for the doctor's esteemed wealth of knowledge. If the police ask questions after my death, he can with good conscience offer the valiant rebuttals he tried to convince me to accept. He'd sleep well. I'd sleep longer.

"No Mr. Kelly." He continued. "I don't think you understand how easily you can become addicted to sleeping pills, and how difficult it is to quit them. Soon you'll rely on them every day. Sleepwalking at night, groggy at work, irritable." Christ, I thought. People give sleeping pills to their fucking Pomeranian dogs and this professional pill-pusher won't even give me a month's script? Does something I embody scream drug-addict? Do I have some tell-tale signs of suicidal depression written across my forehead in a secret language unknown to me?

"I'll go write this prescription for Risperidone and be right back Mr. Kelly." In a flash he was gone. What had happened? I was a grown man with a sincere request concerning a drug to help my short term health. Over 42 million sleeping pill prescriptions were sold last year. Ambien and Lunesta accounted for $3 Billion dollars worth. And here I am being refused by a doctor of higher moral caliber than his entire AMA brotherhood? I smell a stoolie. God, is this your doing? Are you telling me I just haven't earned it yet, as if suicide were some great reward unavailable to the unworthy?

I had walked in the doors feeling suicidally depressed, then followed a continual progression of wellness care until I arrived at a further moment which retained not only the exact same ennui, but had added a new desperation and a fresh sting from the swollen slap of refusal. Killing oneself shouldn't be quite this difficult, I mused. Merely stock-piling the necessary aids to eternal rest was becoming hard to arrange. Does this mean it has to be one of the less agreeable methods I'd hoped to avoid: the bullet, the bridge, the high-balling Amtrak locomotive? Don't you hate being treated like a kid? If I were a politician or a monsignor I'm convinced I'd be leaving with pocketfuls of deathly digestibles.

The good doctor returned through the door and handed me a typed and signed prescription for something I didn't want. Does it occur to these professionals just why people with low self-esteem like myself would want to end their life? We're tired of being treated like entities less important than a middle-class poodle. If you can sell 42 million scripts a year, why don't I rank in equal measure? Fuck, I'll even pay cash. How can I hold my head up at a Narcotics Anonymous meeting? It's all so seedy and humiliating, this living.

Instead of filling the script, I tossed it in the back seat and drove to a temple in Hollywood. There I attended a 6:00 meditation service hoping to calm myself and rethink the firm desire for an overdose. It would have to wait, at least a few days. While listening to the car radio I'd discovered the surf was pushing 15 feet and a rare B-movie noir, The Burglar, was playing at the Bing Theater. I suppose death must take it's place in line like everything else, at least until the right moment comes along in its own sweet, bedraggled way.

(Painting at top: "Sleep" by Gustave Courbet)

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The Dutch Mill

“Only mathematics should be used when speaking of God.” --Fabian De Marini


The military, both active and retired, was a major component in any San Diego neighborhood during the Vietnam War. The city boasted the largest Naval base on the West Coast, primary port to the Pacific Fleet. Just north of the city, Camp Pendleton was home to the Marine Corps' First Division, where tall numbers of American youth were being trained for the jungles of Southeast Asia. Needless to say the city was pro kick-some-ass, and virulently anti-gook. Me, I was a skinny liberal arts major at a Lutheran College and had no intention of getting involved in America’s fight against the Communist domino theory. Everywhere you ventured in those days it was a good bet you’d find sailors, jarheads, flyboys or some uniform yet to be posted. When you saw those guys in berets: red, green, or blue, you just kept walking.

Certainly, I wasn’t the only college kid in San Diego ducking the draft and playing volleyball in the sand. There were Universities and diploma mills in large supply. We didn’t have Harvard, M.I.T., or Stanford. It wasn’t that kind of place. We had what were usually referred to as “party schools,” God bless ‘em. Local bars were not very stringent about their age code for serving alcohol. We probably frequented favorite bars equally as often as the school cafeteria, at least after we learned the lay of the land. My college was on a mesa overlooking Mission Bay to the West and the long sandy beaches of the ocean just beyond it. Eventually I suppose you hit Japan. Sunsets were the stuff of VistaVision bikini movies, and the smell of jasmine which was planted all around the fake Spanish adobe buildings still gives me pause, no matter where I find it. The late 1960’s found me tanned, spoiled, failing and drunk a great deal of the time. My fellow students and I lived on Der Wienerschnitzel hot dogs, cheap wine you bought in a glass gallon jug, and dreams of fondling the breasts of similarly besotted co-eds from Music Appreciation class. "War? I guess, pass the joint."

THE DUTCH MILL was a sleepy little bar down the hill from my school. It was actually built to resemble its namesake with a two story cupola supporting a rotor upon which canvas was nailed to the blades. Probably wouldn’t fool Rembrandt, but it was painted to look like square granite blocks and even featured little red flower boxes with faded plastic geraniums. The kind of faux highway kitsch your mother used to point out on a driving trip, and which everyone ignored. I knew the bartender, a guy from school who was a few years older than me, Jesse Turnbull. He was a nice guy with an aura of violence about him. He was wide and strong. And although I can't recollect the exact story now, I do remember that he had spent a short stint in jail due to his temper. He’d quit school in his senior year to work full time at the bar and was punctual about driving down each Wednesday afternoon to Tijuana with a few buddies to play golf at the Country Club course, bet on the Jai Lai matches and get drunk on cheap shots of tequila and pitchers of weak, salted beer. A few years later he’d be drafted into the army and die in a helicopter crash somewhere in Vietnam. I never heard the whole story, you rarely did. If you ever heard a detailed or colorful story about someone who had died in the War it was usually just bullshit someone embellished while sitting in a low, torn-leatherette booth during happy hour. Jesse did like those Jai Lai games. Once, he returned from one of his Tijuana outings with a wife--some high-school girl from Imperial Beach. Seems he met her at the Jai Lai games, they won some money, got senselessly inebriated and decided to get married. I saw him the day after, the girl was still at his place. He already wanted an annulment, or just to forget it as a drunken escapade, but the girl was serious. Some guys thought there were young women without many prospects who would target a well-to-do young American guy, but I didn’t buy it. For one thing no-one I knew could be considered well-to-do. She just seemed dumb and thought love tended bar in San Diego. Hell, I’ve been known to fall in love with strangers when drunk, there just wasn’t a convenient, Mexican marriage license handy like there was in Tijuana.

I mentioned that I attended a Lutheran school which might lead one to imagine a student body of missionaries or pastors-to-be. Nope, that wouldn’t be correct. In the late 1960’s small religious schools were the last refuge for students who had failed to get accepted at better, larger schools. The small schools charged a stiffer tuition than many of the academically superior universities, but not because they were exemplary or even very religious. They were popular with C students who didn’t want to get drafted and be forced to kill people who didn’t even own a television set. The girls who attended were also C students, and though they had no fears of being drafted, they usually needed to get away from their parents. Or their parents felt similarly in need of distance and so plopped Cissy in a "safe" environment for a few years. Though once in awhile you did find a legitimate Christian who was on a path toward missionary work, or was sneaking up on delusional schizophrenia.

Sometime after the Tet offensive I took a theology class. It was mandatory for graduation, a token in the curriculum to appease wealthy donors and a few high-minded Protestants on the scholastic board. Fine with me. Better than another Statistics class any day. During one of the theology classes, Dr. Brunner introduced a renowned quote from St. Paul: “Faith without works is dead.” He even chalked it on the blackboard. I remember that it initiated a pretty good conversation among some of the students—the ones who weren’t asleep or busy drawing album art for the next IT’S A BEAUTIFUL DAY record. The class seemed to split along opposing lines of thought. One group accepted St. Paul’s dictum at face value and believed the phrase to be a linchpin in Christian activism. Others argued that it was a trite sentiment of dubious logic which could be blown out of the water by sermon screamers as far back as Duns Scotus, Meister Eckhart , or Luther himself. Faith in God, they would argue, was the supreme purpose in Christian life, a contract which must be revered as sacrosanct above all else, even the worthiest duties of devotion such as charity, or helping the sick and the poor-- even missionary work. The arguments were lively, though I considered it all poppycock.

Later that night at the DUTCH MILL, I was sipping a tap beer in the neon-interrupted dark listening to the juke box play a FIFTH DIMENSION tune. Jesse was bored and took some darts from behind the counter and began to toss them at a concentric target hung on the rear wall near the rest rooms. There was a small group of older students getting tanked at a table which included two girls I'd been lusting after for some time. There were also some swabbies at a booth talking inane, loud banter about a twin PBR Mark II 50 millimeter something-or-other. Then again, maybe it was Davy Jones' locker. All that nautical stuff sounds like math class. You could always tell the enlisted men. They had those really bad haircuts and their jeans were pressed with creases in the front. They also had that look of quizzical anticipation like someone long used to being beaten with a hose. Those guys drinking at their table had probably never even been on a ship yet, but anybody forced to wear those silly Crackerjack outfits with white Popeye hats on parade was immune from my enmity.

I played a few games of darts with Jesse, he asked about the campus and a few friends or teachers he still knew there. He asked about Professor Brunner. Seems that Jesse had been in a bind about flunking out of school in his Sophmore year and Brunner had saved him. Gave him an undeserved higher grade which kept him eligible to return. I was a little surprised, but that wasn't new. Everyday something surprised me. For instance when I was walking past the table of seniors on my way to the men's room, I think the tall, straight-haired brunette looked me over in an approving, half-drunk way. Her name was Lydia. I'd spoken with her a few times and found myself stuttering, which I rarely did. She used to go out with a friend of mine who belonged to a fraternity, Alpha Delta Rigamarole. In my freshman year I didn't know anyone yet and lived in the dorms; but was invited, on occasion, to attend parties at the fraternity houses. I didn't want to join any of them. The idea of hanging out exclusively with guys in a candlelit room while I drop my pants to be paddled by my "big brother" was a touch out of my area of interest. Though the parties were free and always had kegs of foamy beer. It was also one of the only places off campus where I ran into pretty girls. Like this Lydia. At the time we spoke she was dating Jack Pugh. He had invited me to the party on a Friday afternoon when I ran into him in the cafeteria. He had that method actor way about him. Kind of aloof, like a young John Savage with big Greek letters on his t-shirt. I could see why girls seemed to like him, he was probably fun. Seemed thoughtful, but with a dark streak. It probably didn't hurt that he was a scholarship pitcher on the baseball team and rolled a tight joint. Any girl looking for a real desperado was not going to be enrolled at a Lutheran College spending her weekends with frat boys. However, for the lonely (and I assume horny) women I saw in my classes, Jack Pugh was pretty cool.

After returning from peeing out my last beaker of beer I took up my darts and asked Jesse what he knew about Lydia. "Not much really." He offered. "I think she's from Nebraska. Her dad owns a string of dry cleaners or something." I tossed a dart and missed the inner ring of the target, almost missing the whole thing. "I'm pretty sure she fucked Tommy Vacaro when she was a freshman, but he got to all those new girls." I tried to look nonplussed but inside I was a shade jealous of Tommy Vacaro, whoever he was. "She's sure cute enough and has those great tits, but I think she can get a little bitchy." The slam on almost all girls by almost all guys is that they can be bitchy. Since I couldn't even get girls to speak with me, the idea that I'd reject them for being moody was a moot point. Sometimes I think guys mention a girl's flaws as a built-in caveat, just in case she suddenly dumps him. But I didn't have many friends, and there weren't any girls willing to date me, bitchy or no.

"Does she still go out with Pugh, Jack Pugh?" I asked. "No, I don't think so. I heard that he got her pregnant last year and it fucked things up. He had to fly to Juarez with her Mom and Dad when she had the abortion. Didn't sound like much fun." Jesse was pretty good at darts, and the narrow chalk board was so lopsided in his favor that we quit keeping score. He threw his darts and nailed each successive number soundly. "Last week she was in here with Andy McMillan, that guy on the basketball team, one of the twins."

The twins. Everyone knew who they were. Maybe every school has such examples of superior genetic design. They weren't identical, but both were around 6'6" tall with long dirty blond hair. They were pre-med majors with a taste for mind-expanding drugs who read Nietzsche and Proust and such. Way out of my Richard Brautigan league. Each one was handsome and together they started as tandem forwards on the basketball team, though technically "walk-ons". They didn't dress the same or anything like some twins. And as I recall they weren't too fastidious about hygiene. Their jacket collars were always ringed in saturated dried sweat and they smelled kind of gamey. But, then again, if I were a female hormone I'd probably jump on them and ask for a ride anywhere they were going. It may be indiscreet to peer into the future, but about ten years after my conversation with Jesse in the bar, that same twin (Lydia's romancer Andy) was living with his mother in La Jolla after being released from a mental hospital. Then, upon returning one evening from a stage play they'd attended at UCSD, he stabbed her to death with a carving knife. But remember what I said about stories in a bar, probably bullshit.

The other girl with Lydia that night was Cheryl Mancuso, a curly-topped sprite who by reputation was something of a "screamer." She was small, but had one of those cheerleader type bodies that filled the corridors of my late night fantasies. You could often find her in the company of Lydia between classes at school. She was sassy and wasn't above tossing a little disrespect at any passer-by who, she felt, might get her a laugh. I'd seen her interact with the lower echelon of social life and she could be cruel. But then again, "you pays your quarter you takes your chances." Her popularity among the girls probably owed more to everyone's fear of being chastised by her in public than any great desire to actually befriend her. And guys just like to fuck little wise-ass squealers. Me, I gave her a wide berth.

I knew Jesse could get better competition at darts from others in the room, so I went back to my bar stool and began to draw circles on the varnished wood with water that had collected beneath my glass. They say your college years are the training ground for adult life, well so far I'd made it to drawing rings on the bar with beer sweat, which, if you think about it, is a step past wearing your father's cigar band as a ring on your middle finger, but just barely. "Hey, Mister Snob. Can't even say hello?" It was a voice from behind my ear, and startled me so that when I wheeled my neck around my nose bumped into the face of Cheryl Mancuso. "Oh, sorry." I replied. "I guess you scared me." She was rubbing her cheek where I'd nose-whipped her. "That's okay, I don't need this face anyway." Her repartee wouldn't be mistaken for Dorothy Parker, but up close, she was even cuter than I thought, or else the beer had begun to dull my impeccable standards. "I was watching you with Jesse. My, but you're a shitty dart thrower." Oh Christ, just what I needed. Seems like people who spend most of their waking and dreaming life perfecting self-abasement, which is people like myself, don't deserve public flogging when they're trying to get drunk to forget all about it. "Yeah, well I suppose you're right there." By this time Jesse was throwing darts with another guy, an older chief petty officer who was a regular. The jukebox had begun a Buffalo Springfield song. I nodded to the dart board, "If it's so easy, why not try it yourself." She sat on the stool next to mine and smushed the watery circles I'd drawn. "I hate darts and I hate Jesse." She boldly declared. "Why the fuck drop out of school only to live and work in its shadow? What a loser." I turned to look at her fully. No doubt about it, she was cute. I wondered how deep inside her throat my dick would go before she choked? "What do you have against Jesse. Its just a job. Not everyone is wealthy enough to travel or get a penthouse apartment at . . . at . . . at the beach." She smiled. "Maybe I know him better than you do. Why should you defend him anyway, are you queer or something?" I looked over her head at the table beyond where Lydia was watching our conversation. She smiled and gave a slow wave. "Maybe I am queer, it won't put a dent in our relationship will it?" I responded. Thankful that my stutter didn't return. She snorted. It was a twisted little try at a laugh, but somehow got confused on its way out her mouth and detoured through her nose. "Nice." I said.

She took her wet finger and put it on the end of my nose. "What's the matter don't you like Cheryl? I thought you'd buy me a drink and we could hang out. I have a doob in my purse." Funny that only a year ago no-one I knew smoked pot or took drugs. Everyone drank. Things had changed pretty fast. Most of the marijuana was from Mexico and was comprised largely of stems and seeds. The cultivation of high-powered weed was in its infancy. Bennies and cartwheels were from Tijuana pharmacies. The mescaline, mushrooms and LSD were from God.

"Sure, if you're holding, lets go smoke some." She hopped off the stool exhibiting a certain energy that I could imagine as helpful in curing a boring sex life. Her skirt was short and though her legs weren't runway worthy, she was certainly sexy. If I could just sew her lips closed. I walked over and told Jesse I'd be back in a minute. Not that he needed to know, but I didn't want to follow Cheryl over to the table and run the risk of stuttering all over Lydia.

Once she grabbed her purse, I took my London Fog windbreaker off the back of my stool and followed her out the front door into a sea-breeze coolness that sent little bumps along my arms. "Where's your car?" She asked. This was a sore spot. I didn't have a car. Oh sure I could drive, but on my last night before leaving home to begin my college career as a freshman I got drunk and drove my Corvair into a telephone pole. It was a bad thing to do. There was drama and miles of plastic surgery sutures, then the grafts. Bones had broken all over the place and my face was propelled through the steering wheel, then through the windshield and finally rested on the scalding heat of fresh-crushed metal which had just seconds before had been a gold-flecked front hood. The blood helped cool the metal I suppose. When I tried to say "Anybody hurt?" I realized that my teeth were all gone and I'd opened a new mouth somewhere between my nose and my upper lip. "Don't have a car." I told her. She gave me a sigh and said she'd go get Lydia's keys back in the bar.

I put on my windbreaker, stuck my hands into the pockets and leaned against a streetlamp. Up on the hill lights from the campus buildings glowed a bit in the moist salty air. There were worse things than breathing that delicious chill while waiting for a pretty girl to bring you a joint to share, all while working on the first of your weekend buzz. From one of my pockets I removed a 12 ounce bottle of Romilar, a cough syrup mixture sold over the counter to those of us who liked to chase our beer with Dextromethorphan. I broke the seal and gulped a fair amount, then again. "Faith" I told myself "without works is dead."

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