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MONDAY, 25 SEPTEMBER, 2000, NEW ORLEANS, LA |
Today we’re going to try something a little different because I can’t be arsed to write my current exhausted thoughts. |
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MONDAY, 25 SEPTEMBER, 1995, SAN FRANCISCO, CA |
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Lunch at le Petit Café on Geary + 2nd. Waiter a long-haired boy with a wounded expression. Old man behind him, life dedicated to making sandwiches. He has become a sandwich. Biting sour of a pickle mixing with vociferous perfume from “Satchka,” a woman with big hair sitting at the adjacent table. One of her two friends speaks to her in a mixture of Russian + English. “Blah, blah, blah, heart attack. Blah, blah, blah, blah, desperate measures, blah, blah. Blah, fifth time this week, blah, blah.” Every four minutes, the woman speaking and the 3rd woman get up and leave, are gone for a minute and a half, then return. Satchka sits upright + silent in the interim, eyes straight ahead. She is the one with offensive perfume. Walking back to the office, it is sunny, warm for September. Sun feels healthy. A man is backing out of his driveway + waits for me to pass. His head is lolling out the window. I imagine him saying, “This is the Last Moment of Beauty,” and driving off to do something desperate and futile. Across the street, a week ago I see myself leaning against a wall under a window with many bars. From the window comes the sounds of, one after another + in order, the Chopin Études. It is a piano, not a recording. I entertain the fantasy that someone is actually manually playing them, black-key-étude, et al, but I know that, should someone be talented enough to play them, they would be the sort never to deign to play them on a piano so out of tune. It is a player-piano. I am 1/2 block away from the office when I begin to think I’ll never make it there. That I will crumple up on the sidewalk and die. Sounds are muted. Even the noise from Geary, 100 feet away is softened as through thick fabric. A bird chirp is louder than the 38 bus. Sun, warm. Delicate breeze. Everything is peaceful and lovely and I am dying. The Last Moment of Beauty. And I don’t mind death. I slip into it like old shoes, like a warm bath, like a short nap with the promise to awake refreshed. I am becoming sick again. Terror … at first. But the sickness is also as familiar as old shoes. And the terror is numbed from the repetition. I know, more or less, what to expect this time. And I am tired, thinking about how it will be. It’s my broken home + I return to it again + again. Shards + presses + hot gusts of foetid air, but, dammit, it is my home and this sort of feels like a monstrous homecoming. Somewhere bright, warm, cheery + most importantly, secluded, where I can ball up and disappear. I see a park bench, flowers, well-tended. No people. Birds in the trees. Afternoon sun, and me + my blood on the pavement. No one will come for hours, thank god. They do not exist, cannot exist until this is over. Boredom is no longer my love. I stare at the ridges + valleys of my fingerprints. Good hands. Normal hands, though well-formed from years of piano. Nails to the nubs betray their burden. In these pinkish tentacles lies the disease. But they look so normal. Well. That was uplifting. 
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