It's a long story. Long. I'll get to it, maybe. I don't know if I am up to it today. Maybe part. I don't know. I have too many worries to know anything anymore.
"A man alone ain't got no bloody fucking chance."
Hemingway said that in "To Have and Have Not." It's a fair statement, but I don't know if anyone has a bloody fucking chance. To riff on his Nobel Acceptance Speech, company might palliate the loneliness. He was speaking of writing groups, though. A writer who listens to what others say about his/her writing will begin to write like the herd. I think that is what Hem meant. It's like aspiring to be a photographer by watching YouTube videos.
I wander.
I didn't do much yesterday. I seem to do less and less each day. But I do what I must. Yesterday afternoon, I went to my mother's.
"My computers don't work," she said. I could guess what happened. Apple updated the operating system. Every time they do that, my mother gets lost in the changes, so I go in and fix it back to what it was. This time, however, she said there were a lot of pop ups on the screen asking for her user id or her password. Uh-oh. I looked at her desktop. Her mail wouldn't work. I went in and tried fixing it for a long while. SMPTE vs POP--what the fuck do I know? Eventually, though, she could receive mail but not send it. I got wore out and had to give up for the moment. Then I went to her laptop. Done. One of the four foot fluorescent bulbs was out in the garage. I tried a couple bulbs that we had leftover from the last fiasco and lo and behold, one of them worked. Then we sat.
"I've gotta go, ma. I need to get groceries for dinner."
It was six when I got to the store. I was going to cook, but it was getting late, so I had another idea. I would get half a cooked chicken and pair it with some Aimee's frozen brown rice/black-eyed peas/vegetable things. Oh. . . and some packaged cooked beets.
As I approached the prepared food counter, I saw a tall, fairly attractive woman talking to the woman who was preparing her sub sandwich. She had tattoos all over and two mismatched sandals. She was waving her hands and sounded a little manic. But as I say, she was kind of attractive, so I kept looking at her. Then I noticed her legs. Oh, shit!
"Hey lady. . . I recognize those tats."
Sure as shitting, it was Bo. We had "dated" back in 2001 for awhile. I was teaching a course in The Personal Essay at Country Club College at the time, and when class let out, I would stroll over to the sushi place on the Boulevard to get some dinner. She was a waitress there, six feet tall, leggy, attractive. She was the first woman I had ever seen with tats. Later I would find out she was pretty famous in town. She dated the tall boy who wrote the culture column for the city's newspaper. That was when my own hometown was the center of the electronic music scene. Q was a nascent D.J. then, and friends with many who would become famous. The whole scene was. . . well, I really shouldn't try to say. I wasn't part of that crowd, and as Jimmy Buffet said, "Don't try to describe a Kiss concert if you haven't seen one."
Yea.
But she was royalty there and a well-known figure about town. One day I heard two fellows talking about the big blonde at the gym with the crazy leg tattoos. She was striking.
I'll back the fuck up on this story later. I have a bunch of things I'm wanting to write, so the next few days may be a mishmashed hodgepodge of non-intersecting stories. Intersectionality, of course, is a hip term in Progressive Academics, so I'll try my best.
As you can see in this pic, the rest of her skin was clear and clean but for the two red stars on her forearms outlined spectacularly in blue. But that is not how her skin looks now. He skin is inked all the way up including her neck. Her life has taken some turns. But again. . . I may get to that.
When I said, "I recognize those tats," pointing to her legs, she turned to face me.
"Oh, my God."
She walked toward me.
"Give me a hug!"
She'd always been taller than I, but now she fairly dwarfed me. I must be shrinking.
"How are you doing?" she asked.
"Oh. . . I'm fine," I lied. "And you?"
"Not so good. My ex is taking me to court."
She shook her head and waved her wrapped sub in the air.
"I've got someone fucking with my car. I don't know. I don't like to leave it for very long."
O.K. This was getting weird.
"So I've got to go." She pulled out her phone. "What's your number?"
Oh, shit. . . what could I say? I could hear Tennessee saying, "He denied her like Peter denied Christ." I didn't want to give her my number, but we had been intimate. She had been lovely. We had shared things.
So I said it and watched her punch it into her phone.
"O.K." she said. "I've got to run." She hugged me again and I said, "It is good to see you," and turned to leave.
As she walked away, I heard her say in a low voice as if in an aside, "Hot Teacher."
A spark ran up my spine. I'd forgotten that is what she used to call me. Hot Teacher. Huh. That felt alright.
I shopped and got my groceries looking about me as I did. And when I checked out and left the store, I fairly scoured the parking lot as I walked to my car. After I loaded my groceries, I checked my phone. I had a call from an unknown number. Ah. . . she had called to check that I had been honest and true.
"Now what?" I thought. "What madness am I in for now?"
When I got home, I put away the groceries and opened an Athletic non-alcohol beer. I lit a cigar and went to the deck to think. It is important, I hold, to put the day into some sort of narrative order, to connect the dots, to try to find some pattern or perceived meaning to one's living in the void. What I found myself thinking about was that period between my divorce and meeting the tenant. Those were wild and wonderful times. I'd fallen in love rather quickly after my divorce, a love that would haunt me, but when she left town. . . well, that is a whole other chapter. As has always been the case, though, her leaving me was a highway to her unbridled success. It seems to be the universal case. Except for the girl with the Betty Page tattoo. But that's a long story and will have to be told in parts.
I think, though, that the period after my divorce was the most vivid time of my life.
I went in and prepared my quick dinner. It was as healthy a meal I didn't cook as was possible, and it was good, too. Just as I finished, my phone rang. It startled me. Was it her? What was she going to want?
It was my mother.
"My t.v. won't work. I can turn it on, but I can't change the channels. I called the cable company and they rebooted it but it still wont' work. They said they would have to send somebody out to the house tomorrow. So I'm stuck for tonight. Just my luck. I guess I will read. It has been a bad day. I don't have any luck. I just wanted to tell you, anyway."
What she meant was she needed to tell me. I know the feeling. She may have been waiting for me to say I'd come over and have a look. Rather. . . .
"Maybe it is the batteries in the remote."
"No. I changed them."
"Did you unplug the router for a minute and then plug it back in."
"They rebooted my stuff remotely."
"Yes, but they didn't unplug it. Unplug it and wait a minute before you plug it back in, then call me back."
"Alright," she said in a despondent voice.
She didn't call back, so I called her.
"Did you unplug it?"
"I don't know which one it is. There are so many things plugged in. I unplugged something."
"And. . . ."
"It still doesn't work."
"O.K. I guess you will have to wait on the cable people."
In five minutes the phone rang again.
"It is working now," she said. "I unplugged it and plugged it back in and it worked."
"Well good."
"Now I'll have to call the cable company and let them know," she said with irritation.
"That would be a good idea. But I'm glad you got it working. I'll talk to you later."
Yup. It is like that. Everything is a mystery, now, that someone needs to figure out.
Maybe I'll get back to the narrative tomorrow, but I think it might take more than one day. And somehow, I will need to complain about my contemporaneous life, too. While I can.
"I just wanted to tell you."
Yea. A plaintive cry into the blackness of the blogosphere. Brilliant. Just fucking brilliant.
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