Drip, Drip, Drip, Drip, Drip

(Digital Photo from a last night's "Postcards" collaboration)

Sushi on the veranda did not help all that much.  The air was warm and moist as storms built all around, the skies bruised and purple, the absolute stillness replaced by small puffs of wind as the storms drew near.  I did not write.  I drank the sake and ate the edamami and sashimi and watched the people hurrying by to get where they were going before the rain came.  

I had just finished taking photographs in my studio with the woman above.  I am making photos as much as I can lately.  It is nerve-wracking.  My nerves are on edge the whole time.  I never know if I making a decent picture.  I shoot the last of the Polaroid film and it comes out bright and crisp and the images look like all images.  I will have to wait until I have made my special ju-ju process with the film and have scanned the photo and all the ephemera that goes into it to see what I have.  I cannot tell much until everything is scanned and I begin to work with it in the computer, so I have to scan everything.  It takes about twenty minutes to get an image to where I can see what it is and can be, and I am shooting between thirty and forty Polaroids each time.  So I scan and wait and wait and scan.  I figure it takes me about forty hours or more to get a few good images.  And that is just the one on the screen.  There is still the printing and the transfers and/or whatever other processes I put the image through.  I have a job and a life, as well, and trying to cram everything in is putting me on edge.  

And perhaps that is why the narrative factory is on strike.  I don't know.  I need to be able to sleep through the night rather than waking up at four in the morning.  

But it is important to me to finish one project so I can begin another.  I am in a hurry, but there is no hurrying anything, neither images nor words.  

Drip, drip, drip, drip, drip.  I sound like a leaky faucet.  

*      *      *      *      *

Terry was a Health professor.  I don't remember how I met him, but I ended up playing basketball with him from time to time.   He was short and blond and had once been well-built.  He'd been an athlete at State and had modeled for the art classes.  Now, in his mid-thirties, the effects of his bachelor's life were obvious.  Still, there was a power in him that you recognized immediately.  

Terry had been married to a wealthy girl from Atlanta, but recently, she had left him.  And so he'd had to go to work.  He had his athlete's degree and had parlayed that into an M.A. and had managed to get a job at the junior college.  And he liked it.  Especially the girls. 

Terry was handsome and outgoing, and he was a player.  One day after basketball, he invited me over to his apartment.  "Come over after you get cleaned up," he said.  "We'll have drinks."  

When I got there, two girls from his class were already there drinking wine spritzers.  They were pretty, of course, and happy, too.  They laughed a lot.  Terry made sure that everyone's glasses were always full, especially his.  

I ended up taking his Health class only because I knew him.  He wasn't much of a teacher, but the class was easy and full of all the people who went to his house to drink.  There were plenty of girls.  

His classes let out early most of the time.  

There is hardly anything more to the tale than that except I ended up going out with his girlfriend after he pissed her off by borrowing her car and leaving it on the far side of town when it got a flat.  I was sitting at a table between classes talking to a guy about dating.  I still hadn't had one.  

"Why don't you ask somebody out?  You've got to ask them out, they're not going to come to you."

"I couldn't stand it if they said 'no,'" I told him.  

"You're crazy!  What does it matter?  Someone will say yes eventually." 

Just then, Terry's girlfriend came over and sat down and began cursing Terry for leaving her car and calling her to tell her where it was.  "The bastard expects me to go pick it up.  Fucker."  

I didn't say anything but nodded.  Then she turned to face me.  

"What are you doing tonight?" she asked me.  

I managed to say, "Nothing."  

"You want to go out?"

My friend's jaw dropped.  

"Sure," I said, not knowing what else to say but not really wanting to.  This was Terry's girl and he was bound not to like it, and she was older than I and much more worldly.  I would be terrified.  

"OK, come pick me up around seven."  

And she got up and left.  I just looked at my friend.  "See," I said.  He just shook his head.  

At the end of the term, Terry was packing up his office.  "I'm done," he said.  "They didn't renew my contract."  

"What are you going to do?" I asked him.  He had his little mousy dog with him.  Even the dog looked sad.  

"I'm moving back to Atlanta.  A friend of mine owns a hotel there and he asked me to manage it."  I could tell by the way he packed his books into boxes that he didn't want to leave, but I think that was only because of the coeds and not his love of teaching.  I don't think he liked teaching at all.  

I stayed and helped him until he had everything in his car, and then we shook hands and said goodbye.  I watched as he drove his old beater away for the last time.  

Terry had been a good role model.  I learned about a lot of things I didn't want to be.