I got a letter from Jack, or rather legal mail, the interview with Mia that he did, his letter of summary to Zane and therefore the DA. I read it. It was good. She was honest with him about me, about the two of us having sex, the whole nine yards. I tossed the envelope in the shelf space cut into the side of the bed. It reads #4 on the envelope over my name and SID number. Pod 4. I started to think about it, and my brain snapped open, a part of it that has been shut off, the thinking part, really, and I started jotting down things that ran across my mind with 4:

4 legs to a dog.

4 quarts to a gallon.

4 body systems.

4 primary body tissues.

4 gospels.

4 rivers from Eden.

4 pecks to a bushel.

4 oceans.

4 elements.

4 seasons.

4 business quarters.

4 quadrants to a circle.

4 suits in a deck of cards.

4 limbs.

4 horsemen.

4H clubs.

4^th dimension, the coordinate dimension to the existing three dimensions, related as time, to describe any event. Einstein derived that there is an extra 43 seconds of arc per century relative to Mercury’s orbit.

4 Rushmore heads.

4 food groups.

4 directions.

4 faces of God, or rather Ezekiel’s vision of God:  4 living creatures.

4 is the last description of basic grouping: 2 is a couple, 3 is a few, 4 is several or more.

4 to an ideal family.

4 outer spheres.

4 layers of earth.

4 colors of race.

4 phases of life: youth, adult, middle-age, elderly.

4 main principles of evolution: embryology, morphology, biogeography, paleontology.

4 sub-sections of evolution: population genetics, biochemistry, molecular biology, and genomics, which is basically machine-driven genetic sequencing.

4 rows of checkers/back row of chess.

***

Impatient today, languid, angry, a man unkind. I would seriously not wish this upon my worst enemy. I want to be whole again, to feel the air pulsing around me, the beat of the city, the warmth of life. All this dead time, though it occurs to me that I’ve spent a great deal of my life in a small room writing, and it also occurs to me that being able to leave that room was part of the glue that held me to the writing, because what was on the other side of the door was the enemy. The jobs, the faces, the human race going on mechanically, all of it was the enemy in my youth. It’s reversed in here, like how obesity once meant wealth. And nothing is more mechanical than jail. Shit, all those hours I thought I was beating the rap, all the time I saw the general public as something to avoid. I was a young fool in love with the word, and that’s all there was to it. Knowing that now hardly lessens the grip I have on that time. It calls me back to it, actually, but there is nothing further from the romance of life than jail. Nothing. Even death is a release, a peace, or it must be. It’s hard to imagine seeing any of these guys on the outside. Like I can’t imagine Bates in street clothes.

What I wouldn’t give to be in a bookstore again, to have a selection of true literature from which to pull, to see a novel of mine perched upon their shelves like a trophy. I have to beat this case, Helena, I have to see the impossible through. Let their evidence tower over me, but let three jurors see the burning truth, see through the contrivance of the state, the bullshit of the state and the corrupt police work, the lies from the midget whore, with her freakish, little hands holding a tissue to her nose. Let the state throw me at the wall. I have to be heard.

Small disgusts are luxuries now. Boredom, a day trapped in the house due to weather, a shitty job, bills, one beer until payday, a flat tire, a bad driver in front of me, a parking ticket. Luxuries.

Hardwood floors, and the carpet of a staircase. Closing the door behind me in the bathroom, a toilet seat, hot water. A living room past a kitchen, a cup of coffee on the table by the couch, the sweet taste of music, the idea of drinking whiskey after the sun falls. All of it, and so mad am I with love for the world in this cell that it breaks me into tears.

***

Over breakfast, I heard about an inmate who last year smashed a deputy’s face in with his fist, grabbed his keys and got out of the pod and down the hall to the final door before the outside, when he was tasered. On top of the 15 dollar charge for the taser cartridge, he was thrown in the hole, given a muumuu to wear and has existed on bread loaf and water since. He just sits there and rots in the dark. I watched the deputy and the jumpsuits. My whole life has been spent getting away from shit like this, on a larger scale. The uniform of life, the blindness of ignorance and the lack of question. I chose the metal to live, to burn upon the dense air, the road and the sunlight, the words and wander, the feeling of the words leaving my fingertips and entering the keys in long rips of light and grace, the burning of fog and swamp, long lines of blood without the mercy of fading.

***

A barber’s chair, a clean haircut, clean neck and ears. A black t-shirt, jeans, sneakers. A fucking belt. Change in my pockets. Contact lenses, and not these old and scratched glasses, mismatched nose pads, cracked and dated. Being able to again own fingernail and toenail clippers without having to check them out from the pod desk. The mania of being in here has created a pair of palms compressing my chest and back together at all times. I know I have to stay strong, I know that I have to fight this. I miss you and our time behind the machine together so goddamn much it’s crazy. The resentment of this place has easily and effortlessly crossed over to hatred. The faces, the fucking faces, Helena. Seeing the young faces is especially sickening. Eyes filled and frozen in the rictus of paranoia and morbid fascination, but mixed with an evil numbness. I don’t hear any older inmates scorning the younger ones, no warnings imparted, zero edification. Misery does not love company in here so much as misery eats itself. The cards shuffle, paranoid and desperate questions spark self-doubt, the long and dark miles of not knowing your fate, but thinking you do, and what you think is based on what you see, the worst possible outcome.

Basketball games. I should be thankful for them. They get the cell doors popped open, depending on the deputy, who is usually a fan of sports, and it keeps the population in here seated and mesmerized, freeing up the phones and tables. It’s the dawning of a raw time, Helena. I can’t tell you how important you are to me. It’s not comprehensible. I know things have to work out if I am ever going to be seated in a soft chair with my music, your solar eyes resting beneath the keys, waiting for the right feeling to trigger the right sentence, so you will awake and pull me down home.

 –Excerpt from Bad Jacket, coming soon…

I reached up and closed the sunroof when we made it to the flat stretch that would be 150 miles to Sacramento. I looked in the mirror and noted some age, and also the electric-blue eye of my dog in the corner of the rearview. Nothing was left lost to old time wasted, nothing left for us at this point but to see how far we could push ourselves toward a place that held the least amount of pain, to a place that I could write about, but not discover in the flesh, only because I’d lost the edge to fear, sometime back in the decade. But the realization of it hit me in the chest and I smiled mean at the road, because I knew that I’d just been waiting for something. And the edge given to fear was really nothing more than a piece that I’d tossed it to keep the waters even, to keep my mind sane for the words. The lost loves and the patience of death had kept me balanced, but what I had missed was what had been there in between, which was all of life. I turned up the music and gunned it around a flatbed hauling cable. A hawk coasted across my eye line and steered itself into a large circle over the field to our left. I watched him make another round, then go down fast for his kill.

*   *   *

It was hot in Sacramento, and we sat out back and drank wine while I told them about Lolly. Chico was running their dog, Trixie, a fat, shaggy shepherd/huskie mix that actually dwarfed his hair loss. They ran the yard in circles and jumps. Doug and Kathryn had a friend staying from Nevada City, the Portland of California, and she pressed me for information on the team behind Lolly, because she was into the clothes. I told them about the guys, the humor, the laid-back atmosphere of them. I was tired from the drive. The couch felt good at midnight.

In the morning, Doug and I drove out for breakfast, and we talked about his photography for awhile. It always fascinated me that he’d married a professional photographer. I thought about it there at the diner. I don’t think I could marry a woman that wrote for a  living. We’d drive each other insane.

*   *   *

Back at the house, the girls were awake and drinking coffee, and we said our goodbyes. It was already hot in Sacramento, and it wasn’t even 10 in the morning. I cranked up the AC and slammed cold coffee, blasting through the farmlands. I drove south over the grapevine, and into the mouth of Burbank, then into the heart of the beast.

*   *   *

I took a detour and drove into Hollywood, around the cul-de-sac, and looked at the building where my studio apartment had been. It was still there of course, but I wasn’t walking out of it with no car, to a job that paid less than six dollars an hour. I sat there in the air conditioning of the Malibu, and looked up at the stairs that ran up past the manager quarters. The carpet was blue now, not the blood-red it had been back in my mid-twenties. I was there, in that car, 41, my stomach full with good food and expensive coffee, paid for by the words. I stared at the front door and remembered back to walking out the same door, quiet as a ninja, so the landlord wouldn’t hear me and hit me up for past rent. I remembered the crazy Mexican woman who thought that she was a Native American. She used to bang on her ceiling with a broomstick at two in the morning when my typewriter was keeping her awake. She simply called me “boy.”

And I’d walked the streets of Los Angeles as a younger man, blind with passion and hungry for living. The pimps that nodded good morning and called me brother, the jack rollers and hustlers, the plastic bodies pumped with greed under the heat on the boulevards, all of it was within me, the hunger for the word, mad with compulsion, the sun bleeding down upon the homeless, the sweat running down the necks of taxi drivers and vagrants with too many clothes but nowhere to put them. The bitter market owners with their children hiding around corners watching me browse the shelves who knew that I was poor, shaggy-haired and running with the dream, walking the streets while the rooming houses watched me like statues with eyes that moved. But I had the fire of the word, I had the sentences running down my arms with the sweat while I walked the city and waited for the room to cool down.

*   *   *

Chico and I drove down Hollywood Boulevard for posterity, and the street was once again hot and full of the same, only more homogenized, safer. It was almost boring now, and it bothered me. Back on the freeway, I followed the 10 to Maple, where we drove into the Fashion District. I wanted to see the Lolly address and get a gauge on the neighborhood again. At a red light, I watched a homeless guy wearing a suit coat and a long greying beard moonwalk out into the middle of the street, and start a tap routine. I watched him and turned up the music, which had been a cover of What a Wonderful World by Tom Waits and Nick Cave. The moment was nothing short of beautiful. The light turned green but there were no cars behind me, so I sat it out and watched the production without feeling exploitive—it was L.A., the city of it, the long and hot grit untouched by celluloid. The heart of the city. He paused in the middle of the road, in a robot pose, and I coasted up and around him. The Fashion District was full with tents along 9^th Street, fruit stands and open doors of stores, mannequins, walkers, clothing everywhere. Short and dark men with over-gelled hair in shiny suits walking in, hands full, and walking out on the move. I was grateful to have the farm waiting for me back in Washington, in the sense that I no longer had to deal with any of it again, the stress of the hustles.

*   *   *

I decided on Motel 6 in Inglewood, because it was only a few minutes from LAX. I had to pick up Todd and Scott at 8:30 a.m. They were staying at the Lolly loft.

*   *   *

A thing about Motel 6, or a few of things:  First, they’re the best thing on the road, they allow dogs and are usually pretty mellow, not to mention affordable. Second, it’s like a motel by the people, for the people. Not a dive, but it’s not The Hilton. Third, apart from one I stayed in once in Florida, the rooms are clean and the parking lots safe. The one in Inglewood had a big lobby, giant rooms, carts for luggage. Definitely the most international Motel 6 I’d seen─I actually felt a bit upper-crust in the elevator. I let Chico in, poured his water and food, then went down and unloaded the car.

*   *   *

Todd glanced at the radio.                                                                                                                    “What are you listening to?”                                                                                                        “Opera station.”                                                                                                                               “Oh.”                                                                                                                                                           I looked at Scott in the rearview. They were both tired and on edge. I’d slept like a rock. We pulled out onto the freeway. I reached over and plugged my phone into the console, and played some metal. Todd rubbed his eyes.                                                                                “Let’s go back to opera.”                                                                                                                         I cranked it up, “If it’s too loud, you’re too old.”                                                                          We laughed. I clicked forward to Nina Simone. It was strange to be with them in Los Angeles.                                                                                                                                                “We can stop for coffee to pull you out of your slumps.”                                                           “There’s a Starbucks in the building,” Todd said, “but if you can’t wait, that’s fine.”               “I can wait. I’ve been up since seven pounding coffee. You two are the ones in living dead mode.”                                                                                                                                             Schoenfeld stared at the windshield, “It was an early morning. I heard that alarm and felt genuine fear.”                                                                                                                                           I pulled off the 105 and switched to the 110. Todd looked out over the freeway. I passed a Jetta, “I don’t remember the side streets. I think Figueroa runs up from Inglewood. The 10’s going to be like a parking lot.”                                                                                           “Always is,” he said, “except for way early or way later. Even mid-day is like rush hour here.”

We drove in silence for awhile, then jumped on the 10, which wasn’t as bad as we’d thought it would be. Their flight being delayed nearly an hour helped. We ramped off Maple and made the left, and drove into the Fashion District, which was busier than it had been on the day before. Todd looked out his window.                                                               “See that? Forever 21 started out as a shop that size. Now look at them.”                                  I eyed the shop. It was small, stuffed with racks of clothes and displays. He pointed to the alley by Olympic, and we turned right then up the ramp into the lot, paid the fee and walked down a staircase to the sidewalk. A woman sat in front of the double doors selling cans of soda from a cooler, and small bags of chips. She and Todd said hello, and we walked to the corner for coffee, came back and he keyed in the access code. The double doors opened to a large lobby past the vestibule. At the immediate left, the elevator waited. It opened, we stepped in, and he hit the third floor button. It’s impossible not to think of Pulp Fiction when you’re in an elevator going up in Los Angeles.

–Excerpt from Lolly: From Fishing to Fashion, Reeling in an Unlikely Fashion Success

                               –John Stanton, Waxington County Jail, 2010

______________________________________________________________

For you, Helena, one night at random while trial approaches.

It’s the hours that eat you in here, Helena.  The down time, the hours of freezing, processed air and zero privacy.  Timing my work-outs, bowel movements, masturbation, and even tears around the next deputy’s cell walk. My pink socks are dirty from the concrete floor in here.  20 hours a day in this cell.  Pencil stubs and yellow lined paper.  The DA wants to see me twist in the wind.  Narcs are sent in dressed as inmates, detectives thumb through my stories and poems they make me turn into Property every week, they’ve turned trash to torpedoes, sneaking in my cell and reading my paperwork.

I write this to you, Helena, because it started it with you.  It started with a touch of your grace in a hot desert room.  Odds are if I beat this case and don’t get life in prison, I will more than likely finish this book alone before dawn in a shitty apartment as the other books were finished, or I will be in a different woman’s place tapping it out while she sleeps in another room with my dog next to her. If I get convicted I will end my life before transport comes for me, or I will decide to end it day by day in a protective-custody cell writing out the works that have been haunting me but had to lie in the wake of precedence. But this book will be destroyed, for a number of reasons.

Jack the PI says the truth always comes out in court.  I play that in my head like a mantra, to get me into an hour’s nightmare every morning, an hour before the lights flip on full power, and the dim grey walls become white like Mercury, and the intercom blasts instructions for razors and showers, for the med-line then breakfast, which in two hours will be a tablespoon of cold oatmeal and half a frozen apple.

…My life in here is a new, sick dream.  I exist by minutes in this cell, by dark hours of uniform garbage.  It’s pushing 9:30 pm and we’re celled in for the night.  I sit and pencil this to you, Helena, my muse for lack of a definitive word, because I need you here next to me, a friendly face to listen without words.  Know that I write this with a gun to my head, while every fifteen minutes the hacks walk by and make their count, while the lights of the cities across the states are lit and waiting for spring to burn off to summer.  I’ll start from the phone call now, and will soon revert to form, because I need to make this letter to you as clear as I can, but bear with me for a chapter, Helena.  Afterall, you taught me how to write, how to sit and be water, bone, blood, and fist while the words fire from chest to arms.  Yet what I wouldn’t give to feel my bare feet in the grass, my hands upon warm dirt.  I sit in this concrete box freezing.  The pencil moves across the page while outside my shadow looks around for its body.

−Excerpt from Bad Jacket, coming soon…

A lot of ex-cons and drunks lived in the building.  My room was the corner spot on the 3rd floor.  The old man in the room next to me was deaf.  The girl in the room across from me was a diagnosed schizophrenic.  She almost never wore clothes.  She was maybe 25.  The government gave her 500 dollars a month.  She kept her door open.  Big black men walked in there and shut the door.  It was a shitty place to live.  The bathroom was never occupied when I had to use it.  I was the only one in the building who showered regularly.  But the toilet was well used.  Every time I walked in there I came face to face with a bowl full of dead shit and sometimes a syringe on the floor.  The bathrooms on the other floors were worse.  I had a sink in my room.  I pissed in the sink late at night.  I was the youngest tenant, and the only one with a job.  I had to walk past the landlord’s office to get up to my room.  I’d walk in and deal with him.                                                                                         “How was workin’ tonight, young man?”                                                                                         “It was work.”                                                                                                                             “Anybody asks you anything about this building you tell them you don’t know.”                     “Right.”                                                                                                                                             “Don’t tell them my name, neither.”                                                                                              “I’d rather die.”                                                                                                                                 “And don’t bring no girls up there, neither.”                                                                                     “Alright, Dave.”                                                                                                                                “Fact, don’t bring nobody up there.”                                                                                                   “Got it.”                                                                                                                                                     It was almost the same scene every night.  I’d get in my room and shut the door.  Then he’d knock.                                                                                                                                                     “It’s Dave.”                                                                                                                                            He’d sit on my bed.  Dave was tall and slim and black.  Dave smoked menthols.  He was fifty.  He had the job and nothing else.  I never saw him laugh.  The world was out to get him.                                                                                                                                                        He sat down and lit up.  I leaned on the desk.                                                                           “Feels like I just saw you, Dave.”                                                                                                       He nodded to my typewriter.                                                                                                          “You writin’ stories ‘bout me an’ this hotel?”                                                                                      “No.”                                                                                                                                                      “See to it you don’t.”                                                                                                                          “Let me have a menthol, Dave.”                                                                                                           “Can’t do it.  I have one every hour.  I have the pack timed.”                                                 “Bullshit.  You’re on your second smoke since I walked in.”                                                           “Still can’t do it.”                                                                                                                                      I lit one of my own, “Dave, and don’t take this personally, you need to get out of the building once in a while.  This place is getting to you.”                                                            “Can’t leave.  One a you might try somethin’ on me.”                                                                “Like what?”                                                                                                                                   “Sneak somebody in, move out without notice.  I run a tight ship here.”                                  “The place is fucking destroyed, man.”                                                                                        “You have any stories about me here?”                                                                                   “Seriously, Dave.  Take a walk down 23rd or something.  Ease your mind.”                               The front buzzer sounded.  Somebody had walked in downstairs.  He jumped up and ran out of the room.  I locked the door, closed the blinds and laid in bed.  I listened to the street and the wind, the hours taken by the jobs and the rain, the repeating day and night varied only by a new tenant getting the boot or a new story that I would start and maybe finish.  The winter and the cancer air of the hotel had become a morbid process, and my job was another tumor that had grown from it.  I closed my eyes and thought about hot sand.

−Excerpt. ‘Life for all of this’ from Dead Birds Hot

The desert met us at nightfall in New Mexico, but we had stopped in the Texas Panhandle to look at the stars.  They were bright and close to the desert, dusty and forever, and bulging from their firmaments −swirls of galaxy and all things mysterious, the beauty of our pilgrimage wept in blinks of white and silver, and flashes of modest reds from the convex sky.  And there at the turnout, we undressed and fucked on the hood of the car, and our bodies were a speck of tongue writhing beneath giants and fleeting space junk.

–Flotsam for Jetsam, coming soon…

The boat was rocking so bad you could run up and down the door frames.  People like to imagine the ocean as being blue and beautiful.  I used to imagine it that way.  When you’re that far out at sea the water is black.  Day or night it is black and deadly looking, like obsidian in slow motion.  Black as far as you could see.  The boat was small, anyway.  We were going side to side like the boat was plastic.  Everyone was grabbing their survival suits.  Some were crying and some were scribbling down their wills.  I laid in my rack and drank from the flask.  Let them fire my corpse.  I sat back and thought how it figured that I would end out there.  I masturbated one last time, emptied the flask and closed my eyes.  If the boat capsized then their survival suits were useless.  The boat crashed through the swells and you could hear the waves roaring into the sides.  My last thought before I made myself sleep was Helena.

It was calm and dark.  I didn’t know what to expect.  There was no light or movement.  I heard nothing.  I reached out and pulled the curtain back and stood in the dark.  Then I felt it, a gentle rocking beneath my feet.  I walked to the door and went outside.

It was warm out there.  I was shirtless.  The Sun sat dark red on the horizon and it was huge.  You could look right at it.  The black water stretched out far to reach it.  I breathed in and held the handrail, watched the horizon melt around the Sun.  How small we were against the grace of the heavens.  Our petty dreams, our need for self.  Our weak assurances.

I was the only one out there.  I saw a whale emerge from the water and twist out there in front of the red.  It hung there upside down in front of the Sun, it hung there careless and lazy, totally oblivious to us, to the human refuse of the boat, sacrificing our luck and lives for a goddamned dollar.  It went back through and my heart swelled in my chest so fast that it cracked my bones.  Something happened to me which I could not understand.  I wept.  I stood there and wept at the beauty of what I saw.  I wept when I thought that the moment was meant for me and me alone, as I so badly wanted it to be that way.  I so badly wanted to be chosen by God there, to be pulled out amongst the clean cold blackness of the water, to stand naked on the back of a whale before the harmlessness of a sun which was now trained for damage.  I wanted that scene, I wanted to be transcended into that scene forever.  I wanted everything to be beautiful again.  I wanted to be beautiful again.

−March of Time and Skin

There wasn’t much of a tour to give.  It was a one-bedroom, with a closet connected to the dining room big enough for my bed.  The bedroom was in the back corner and used for my office, which was a computer, a typer across the room on another desk and two chairs.  She looked at the line of folders across the shelves,                                                                                  “Are those folders all your writing?”                                                                                                     “The stuff I’ve printed out, but not all of it.”                                                                                       “Jesus.”                                                                                                                                               Lucy jumped on the bed.  She picked out a folder and sat on the couch,                                  “No TV?”                                                                                                                                                     I knocked on the doors of an old armoire,                                                                                           “In here.  TV’s not furniture.”                                                                                                                 She smiled.  I played a CD, Nina Simone live in Chicago, then uncorked the wine.  I looked at the folder, short stories and poems.  I kicked off my shoes and set my flannel on the back of a kitchen chair. I reached for her coat, “Hang that up for you, babe?”                          She handed it to me and watched me drape it across the back of another chair.  I poured the wine and handed her a glass.  She took it and closed the folder.                                             “You can really write.”                                                                                                                            “Thank you.”                                                                                                                                             I toasted her glass, and changed the subject to the bar, her job, and so forth.  She set her glass on the coffee table, then reached for mine.  She set it next to hers and held her hand out.  I pulled her up.  She smiled.                                                                                                          “I love this song.  We’re dancing.”                                                                                                         “I never have.”                                                                                                                                          “You are tonight.”                                                                                                                                   My Baby Just Cares For Me played, and we slow danced.  She talked in my ear.                  “I knew I liked you, John.  I knew it right when I saw you.  You’re fucking perfect.  Thank you for the best night I’ve had in over two years, if not longer.”                                         “Likewise.”                                                                                                                                             By the middle of the next song, we were kissing and she was pulling my shirt off, which led to the bed in less than a verse.  We went at it like rabbits, then like lazy, drunken people, then like rabbits again.  Her body was perfect to the point of ridiculousness.

In the morning she was at the table, starting to write me a note.  I put my pants on,               “Morning.” I kissed her head, then her lips.  She set the pen down.  I started some coffee and called from the kitchen,                                                                                                                   “Want some eggs, baby?”                                                                                                                        “I should get back,” she said.  I walked out of the kitchen.  She was putting her coat on.  I walked up behind her and wrapped my arms around her.                                                            She put her hands on my forearms.                                                                                                      “It’s too fast, John, and I like you too much already.  I’ve never jumped into bed with a man like that, and I don’t want you thinking anything.”                                                                I turned her around and looked at her, and I took off her coat.                                                    “We’re better than that.  Get your ass to the table.”                                                                          After sex we ate.  After that, we were locked at the hip.

Christine’s hours were from noon until 8.  She had Tuesdays and Wednesdays off.  If she saw my car out front, she’d step in and kiss me.  Tom said she was making me soft.        “Soft my ass,” Dave said, “I’ve never seen him on his toes like this before.”                              I looked at him, “Tom, I think you need a woman to soften your ass up.  Grizzled motherfucker.”                                                                                                                                   “Pass.”

The next week, I worked it out, barely, to where I was able to switch my days off to Tuesday and Wednesday.  Tom didn’t give me any shit about it, because it gave him my Monday night special, which was an extra fifty for the drive.  I still had four hours in the days alone to write, and there was no law written that said we had to spend the days together, but I switched for a reason, and she was more than happy about it.

The third week into it, I gave her a key to my place.  She’d been wanting to give her sister and Billy their house back.  They weren’t complaining, but this way she had her own place, and Lucy had some company when I was at work.  And it was just plain good to have someone to come home to.  She wanted to pay half the rent, but I refused.

I was sitting at the table with Dave and Tom on Sunday.  The Surrounders came in, had a glass of Chablis, loomed and left.  I shook my head and stared at my cards,                    “What a team those two make.”                                                                                                             Dave nodded, “Dirty fuckers.  That’s why gays are so meticulous, though.  They’re organized, tidy, hygiene-obsessive neat freaks because they take it and give it up the ass.  Pure compensation, transference at its simplest.”                                                                             Tom lit a smoke, “Plus, they’re usually good with money.  Think about being a gay Jew.  You’d fuckin’ have it made, considering, of course, that fucking a guy in the ass is your thing.”                                                                                                                                                    The bell sang out.  Christine walked over and kissed me.  I squeezed her side.                       “Hi, baby.”                                                                                                                                                              “Hello, hot pants.”                                                                                                                                    Tom shook his head, “Hot pants.”  She had a new one for me every time I was sitting with the guys.  Dave leaned over and kissed her cheek.                                                                     “Hi, doll.  If you want a drink help yourself.”                                                                        “Thank you!”                                                                                                                                              She poured a Chablis and sat next to me.                                                                                   “How was work?” I asked.                                                                                                                      “Made 40 bucks in tips.”                                                                                                                         “Righteous.”                                                                                                                                          She snapped her fingers, “Oh, tomorrow night we’re going over to Gary and Stephan’s for dinner.”                                                                                                                                                 She put her chin on my shoulder and looked at my cards.  Dave and Tom looked at me.  I saw the scene in my head.  They went in, ordered twin lattes, talked to her, introduced their gay selves then she told them that her boyfriend worked at Dave’s.  I reached up and put my hand on the back of her head.  “Babe,” I started, then Dave and Tom broke out laughing.                                                                                                                                       “What?” she said.                                                                                                                                      “I’d rather not go to Gary and Stephan’s.  They’re customers.  I don’t like worlds colliding.” She wrapped her arms around me, “Oh, they’re sweet.  They’re making a huge dinner.  Good wine, come on.  A double date.  They remind me of my neighbors in Los Feliz.  Please?”                                                                                                                                           “Once.  Tomorrow night.  I’m not homophobic, babe, but I don’t want to buddy up with them.  They’re sweet now because they’re sober.”                                                                             “How bad can they be?”                                                                                                                   Dave nodded, “Horny toads.  It they don’t propose an orgy I’ll pay off your car.”                 She slapped his arm, “They’re men, afterall.  They can still be my friends.”                               I shook my head.  Her phone rang,                                                                                                  “That’s Amanda.  I’d better go.  I was supposed to help her with the batters and salads for the display case,” she touched Dave’s arm, “we’re not competing with you.”                          He laughed, “Thank you, hon.”                                                                                                              “Alright,” she kissed my cheek, “see you at home.”  She paused at the door, “LOVER.”      We watched her drive off.  Tom trumped the book with the 3 of spades,                                  “You got your hands full with that one.”                                                                                      Dave took the next book with a queen over my jack, “Hands full like a fox.  She’s a keeper.” Tom looked at me, “What are the owners like, John?”                                                                     “Straight-laced, entrepreneurial, early risers.  Driven and shit.”                                            “Are they solid?”                                                                                                                                    “I don’t know.  I don’t think Billy would understand a whole lot outside of the box, you know?”                                                                                                                                                “Best neighbors to have,” Dave said.                                                                                                   I took the next book with a nine that walked, swept the game and handed the deck to Tom.  He shuffled.  I cut them and he dealt.  I watched the table, “I can’t fucking believe we’re having dinner at the fucking Surrounders tomorrow night.”                                               Tom looked at his cards, “And you know they’ll have the hot tub ready.”                             “Oh, they will,” Dave said, “hot tub, wine, candles, the whole nine yards.”                          Tom closed his eyes and shook his head at me, “And you have to sit there and fucking take it.”                                                                                                                                                             He smiled.  Dave looked into his cards, “Lest you be taken as a closed-minded gay basher.” “Be careful,” Tom said, “if those three take, become buddies, then your personal life will get Surrounded.  Next thing you know, you’re all watching blocks of Will & Grace on the nights you two should be fucking.”                                                                                                       “Not going to happen, Tom.”                                                                                                                  “You watch, man.  You’re already like a puppy with a hard-on whenever she comes around.”                                                                                                                                          “Bullshit.”                                                                                                                                         “Bullshit my ass.  She could tell you to jump up in the air and take a shit, and you’d say how high and what color.”  “Tom, someday when you become a man, you’ll meet a girl, too.”                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                              The phone rang.  Tom grabbed it off the table before I could.                                                        “Pizza Guy.”                                                                                                                                                There was a pause, then Tom assaulted.                                                                                              “A-HA!  I GOT you, motherfucker!  You’ve now spoken to me.  You lose.”                          Dave laughed, “Give me the phone.  Hey Mikey.  Yeah, they switched Mondays.  Mikey, quit being a bitch and get down here.  Over and out.”                                                                      “Dysfunctional motherfuckers,” I said.

I shifted into fourth and we drove toward their house.  Christine smiled at me, “I really appreciate you taking me tonight.”                                                                                                      I told her that I didn’t want to sit in the hot tub with them I knew they had sex in it.                                                                                                                                                                              She laughed, “Relax.  It’s not like it hasn’t been treated since.”                                                     “Still,” I said.  We pulled into the driveway.  She smiled at me, “If a chunk of something floats your way, just scoop it out like a June bug.”                                                                           I held my stomach.  She kissed me and laughed.

–Flotsam for Jetsam

We got in the car, dropped Lopez off at his, then I went with Blagg to his dealer’s house, where they sat around and snorted more shit, and the guy across from them pulled out a glass pipe shaped like bong, loaded a rock and lit it up.  He inhaled and held the pipe over to me with a blowfish face.  I put my hand up.  His brow furrowed and he blew the scentless cloud over the table.                                                                                                        Blagg smiled at him,“John doesn’t do chemicals.”                                                                      The guy coughed and looked at me,“I thought writers were supposed to be crazy.”           “I’m pacing myself,” I said.                                                                                                         Blagg’s dealer rolled a joint and handed it to me.                                                                         “Sure,” I took a hit and passed it across.  He set the pipe down and inhaled.  He was bigger than Lopez, a tattoo ran from his neck to his wrist, and one eye was permanently half milk.  Something about a gunshot or a gunfight, I wasn’t paying attention.  He hit the joint and looked at me.                                                                                                                               “Blagg here says that you were down in L.A. for awhile.”                                                             “I was.”                                                                                                                                                   He ripped off a bunch of names of the people Blagg told him about who read me.  Actors, singers, on and on.  He nodded at me,“What are they like, or what’s that like?  You know, being there then hanging up here with us and shit?”                                                               Blagg smiled into the table.  Seattle was my home, had been since 1995.  I looked at the guy, “Just people.  Like you, only minus the compulsive meth addiction.”                            The dealer cracked up.  He looked like Blagg, only wider and dying- looking.  The big dude leaned back in his chair, “Alright, you are crazy.”                                                                      Blagg broke out coughing in laughter.  The dude put his knuckles over the table and I pounded them.  −Blagg was going through a phase, a dangerously addictive one, but he never dove into the depths of crystal, and he kept the usage held down to the weekends.  A pizza delivery driver at 40, and part-time house cleaner with a buddy of his, he worked hard on his career in the remaining hours.  Lopez drove a school bus, and that was pretty much that.  The three of us had been a team for a long time, though Lopez had become a rare occurrence.  Once in a while he sent us emails of safe porn, like a girl in a thong on a bicycle.  Every now and then I’d send him a phone shot of a naked girl I knew, and he deleted it instantly out of fear.  The worst was the time when he was having dinner with his family and Blagg and I were drunk at a bar in the junction, and my nephew sent me a photo of a big, black, naked guy on the edge of a bed with a thick, foot-long cock hanging low; and a naked, skanky blonde passed out on her stomach behind him.  The look on the guy’s face sold the picture, sensitive and cocky.  My nephew and I sent the worst photos back and forth to try to make each other gag.  Blagg saw the cock shot and looked at me. “Lopez.”                                                                                                                                                     I sent it, and two minutes later the phone rang.  I answered it, and it was Lopez, his wife screaming bloody murder in the background, so I put her on speaker.  He was telling me not to send that shit to his phone anymore, and his wife was yelling at the top of her lungs at me.  Blagg listened and laughed into his lap.                                                                               Lopez stalled.                                                                                                                                     “You got me on speaker?”                                                                                                                   Blagg wailed and Lopez’s wife came into the foreground:                                                            “I DON’T CARE!  HE CAN KEEP MY ON SPEAKER, LOW-LIFE MOTHERFUCKER, I’LL SLAP THE FU−”                                                                                                                                      I hung up on her.  Blagg was about to die from heart failure.  He laughed, gripped his beer and beat the table.  He raised his head and looked at me, “Fuck, there goes Lopez.”

But the next day I was sober, and I called him up.  He made me apologize to his wife.  I lied to her, told her that I’d sent it out as a group photo.  I smoothed it out.  We still didn’t get to see him for a month after that, when she finally released him for a night, and going to his house was always out of the question, it just wasn’t allowed.

–Excerpt from ‘Rebel Yell’ in Dead Birds Hot, re-released this fall.

We left and ducked into a Mexican restaurant a few streets over.                                            “Quesadillas sound so fucking good,” Amanda said, “chicken ones.”                                      We ordered a huge spread.  The waiter looked at Lionel,                                                 “Margaritas, senor?”                                                                                                                           We laughed.                                                                                                                                             “You drunk fuck,” I said.                                                                                                                  “Not tonight, Juan.  Sprite, though.”                                                                                                 The waiter raised his eyebrows and nodded, impressed.  We cracked up.                                   “Jesus, Lionel,” Amanda said, “quite the rep.”                                                                       “Evidently.”                                                                                                                                    “Come to think of it,” I said, “the bartender on Abbot acted like he’d been electrocuted when I asked for a water.”                                                                                                                The table next to us started laughing.  I looked at them,                                                             “Right?”                                                                                                                                               One of the guys nodded at me,                                                                                                “When’s your next book coming out?”                                                                                                I swallowed my chip and shook my head,                                                                                “Don’t know what the turn-around time is.  I’m reading the blue-line this week, then it goes out for review, then they advertise, then it’s released.”                                                          “What’s the title?”                                                                                                                       “Nowhere Fast.  It’s a collection of short stories.  Wish me luck.”                                                 They nodded.  One of the women smiled, “You won’t need it, but good luck.”                           I tilted my water at her, “Thanks.”                                                                                                  Our food came.  Their table stood.  One of the guys nodded to me,                                        “Later, John.”                                                                                                                                “Later.”                                                                                                                                           Amanda sang into her plate, “Rock star.”                                                                                          I sang into mine, “You wake up to Billy.”                                                                                     Christine choked on her food.  Lionel laughed.  Billy shook his head,                                      “You piece of shit.”                                                                                                                                  I stopped the waiter, “Can I get some ranch?”                                                                         “White trash.” Billy said.                                                                                                                “Don’t try, kitten,” I said, “just sit there and masticate.”

–Flotsam for Jetsam