I’m the guest of honor. I am a little late but not too late.
I reach the door. I reach for the door handle. I can see them all gathered there
inside. I see Walter’s head. It’s a converted Victorian house. The knob would’n
turn. The door has been locked. It’s this damn neighborhood. I never felt
uncomfortable here but I’m not from Guatemala. I don’t transacts business here.
I don’t have a cash drawer full of lose change here. It’s not that they
mistrust their neighbors so much, it’s that they distrust everyone. Maybe
they’re right. Some people have reasons for being paranoid. I would be too if I
weren’t so naïve. Someone comes and unlocks the door. They relock it after I’m
in. It’s a 15x10 white cell. But who cares as long as there an open bottle of
wine, hot food and good company – Walter, Amy, Lorraine, Gigi, Tony, Paul and
myself. Everyone greets me. Now we can eat, Walter says. But first I read to them my just concluded Charlie
Manson interview. “Have you sent any of this in for publication?” Lorraine
asks. “Not yet, it only just happened,” I say. After eating we all walk over to
a gallery opening in the neighborhood. It’s next door to Dave Egger’s store. It
was a reception for “Lip Magazine”. “This is the gallery where I show my
work,” Lorraine tells me. “I make
drawings in my journal,” I tell her. She asks to see them. I show her my
notebook. Walter has seen them before. Gigi wants to see. She wants to know what they are are suppose
to be off. “Why do they have to ‘be off ’ something,” I want to know? Do they have
to represent anything in particular? “Well, I guess, if you insist, you could what
you want of them.” “Dinosaurs”, she says. “Oh I see now, they are dinosaurs. See there’s
Barney.” “And that one’s Dino,” Lorraine
said. “It’s sort of like astronomy,” Walter remarks.
I learned to understand Cezanne much better and to see truly
how he made landscapes when I was hungry. I used to wonder if he were hungry
too when he painted; but I thought possibly it was only that he had forgot to
eat – Ernest Hemingway – A Movable feast p75
Navigating Paris streets
Avoiding places to eat
When
without funds
Their
smells ache
The rue de l’Odeon is bare
Of eating
places
Turn right to Sylvia’s bookstore
All your hunger is contained
Your
perceptions are heightened
Go to the
museum
And see
Cezanne
You’re too thin
Hemingway,
Sylvia says
Hunger is healthy
And it
makes the pictures
Look better,
I replied
But eating
Is
wonderful too, she says
The faster we travel, the sooner we get there, granted we
don’t try to go to far.
I’m back a Eldo’s again today. That’s two days in a row.
Another Californicator, please! The Athletics are playing Pittsburgh. I am
reading ‘Recovering the Black Female Body’ or to be more precise – on being a
fat girl. I look around. There are three of us in a row at the bar all reading.
We are not fat black sisters. We are all
men reading books. It’s an extraordinary coincidence (It would have been a
bigger coincidence if we had all been black church ladies at the bar drinking
beer). The guy on my left is reading a novel. He says it has taken him
twenty-seven years to get around to it. It’s called ‘Beer, Books and Bikes’. I
tell him that it took me twenty years to read Thomas Mann’s ‘Magic Mountain’
from the time I started until I had finished it. Not continuous reading you
understand. Every couple of years I pick it up and read a little bit more. I
have recently started to re-read it. Twenty years or there about, I was at it.
Some books just have to be read in their own time, he says. The guy on the
right is reading some stories by Edgar Allen Poe. I ask him if he knew what Poe
was famous for? He looks at me quizzically. He doesn’t want to look stupid and
say something too obvious. It’s probably a trick question, he thinks. “No,” he
say, “tell me”. “Poetry,” I say, “Edgar Allen Poe invented poetry.” “Really,”
he says. I grin. That was a Walter joke. You can’t tell a Walter joke to just
anybody. We all go back to reading our respective books. Just this morning
Walter and I had been discussing whether they are called ‘Rollie Pollies’ or
‘Pill Bugs’. I don’t remember how the had subject come up. He said he’d never
heard the term ‘Rollie Pollie’ before. And Linda says that that was what she
had called them too. It is probably a regional thing. There’s a term for
neologisms that are used just at home but I couldn’t remember it. Walter wanted
an example. That roll of cardboard on which toilet paper is wrapped. Some families
have a name of it. Say they call in a ‘peek-a-poo’ and when you’re a kid in a
family that call it a peek-a-poo you
don’t know that no one else calls it that. And say you’re at school and the
toilet paper runs out in the john and you go and tell the teacher holding the
empty cardboard roll and say. “We’re down to the ‘peek-a-poo’ in the boy’s john”, (assuming
your in grade school of course – hopefully you wouldn’t do this in high school
or even middle school). “That can prove to be a very embarrassing moment,” I
said. And that’s when Walter told me about Edgar Allen Poe inventing poetry.
Now is when the future becomes the past
For any serious purpose, intelligence is a very minor gift –
G H Hardy – Apology
Walter tells me that I shouldn’t just write “he said”, “she
said” all the time. “You’ve got to use a bunch of other phrases like ‘he
intoned’, ‘she rejoined’ or ‘I
jubilantly replied’. You gotta introduce a little variety into your writing.”,
he said. He made a suggestion that I
change “’I will behave all day‘ I said” to “’I’ll behave all day,’I rejoiced.”
“I will think about that,” I
enunciated.
Scratch the cat
Kiss the dog
Pat the horse on the ass
Tis a good wife
That will put up with that
Milk the cows
Slop the hogs
Poison the rats
Tis a damn fine banker
Who’ll wait for it
Curse the weather
Fall off the wagon
Swat at the flies
Tis a tolerant god
That will allow all this
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