I planned on writing a novelette, Nihil, over these three days. This ambitious but not unrealistic project [1] has wilted under fey old age: I sleep 10-12 hours in the soft lit, cool night, listening to audio recordings of history books. The resulting history articles are taxing. I have brought back books to the recycled book store. The articles still need complete, before their return.
The stacks in the history room beckon. I find a book on Crazy Horse and Red Cloud for my roommate Little Boy, who is Northern Cheyenne. I find a Plantation America source in the stacks, copy the title and author and date, and text it to Lynn so she may render me a usable word file. I find readable, thin volumes on the 1381 Peasant Rising and on De Toquerville’s American observations.
I had thought to write two chapters today in Nihil. I woke groggy, listening to The Alchemist, a nice short novel by a man with a Spanish name, narrated by Jeremy Irons.
Tired after history, I cross the street to eat, the last dose of my traveling Iá´ ermectin apple flavored horse dewormer that I eat a morning to hold back various plagues, leaving me wanting food before the return fast. 20 hour train trips down and back make excellent times to fast with little temptation. The last twenty pounds needs to come off so I can get back to Iggy Pop levels of emaciation and hopefully take some strain off of the lame leg and certainly much strain off of my sore shoulders.
I was tired and hungry. Last night I stayed up and finished my two nights of eating this week, Tuesday and Wednesday, munching on peanuts and pork rinds washed down by a $10 six-pack of cheap beer while listening to audiobooks. [2] The grog did not want to leave the cloudy mind—the nerve medicine making it worse, the medicine for the eye seizures that have been plaguing me twice daily making all the more sleep creep sure.
I outlined a novel and a biography yesterday: Siren: A Fable of Nike and the Seven Sires and In These Parts: Remembrances of Kelley B. Days of fading health and gathering shadows can make for good fiction writing quality if not pace, so long as these are not action scenes, but perspective. I am hoping after this piece to write a chapter in Nihil, to be completed on my next visit. Or, a chapter in Kelley’s life, might for the monkey on my back, suffice.
I just received a phone call from a long time lady friend who game me a pep talk and helped some…
The cafe across the street is manned by Julio and a younger, bald fellow. This fellow pats me lightly on the back and calls me, “Buddy,” while Julio, older and full haired names me “Sir,” and “Bro,” alternately, causing the younger man to chuckle. The corned beef skillet is $19.99 and coffee $3.99 [4 cups] with 9.375% California tax and a 3% living cost fee.
I had brought enough money to have a meal like this daily. But the rooms went up to $120 a night and the greedy Hindu at the counter beamed when I asked him if he took cash, “Cash, yes, cash!”
I prefer not to use a debit card and most hotels insist. But this clean, small motel, well, it is run by the new managerial class in America, Indians, who use Mexicans for labor and Caucasians for contractors.
Yesterday it rained, so the cute blonde with the big natural rack and the green tube top split by her purse string, would not be out in the winter sun, in the cool, cloudy aftermath. No sense in taking a walk.
A broken down cracker is returning from his beer and snack run on his bicycle to his room as I leave.
When I return, knocked almost cold by the good meal, the darling Latina maids ask me if I need anything and seem depressed when I told them I leave today, as I tip them.
Grabbing my glasses to take next door to the book stacks a new SUV packed with four Asian babes stops to speak with me, smile, and point to the room they are staying in, wondering, it seems, if I would like to visit. I suppose they are being dispersed soon to some of the numerous massage parlors on the Left Coast.
It’s a shame I’m not staying, four tiny cuties in a one bed room, well, that would kill a day of writing energy for sure.
The street crossings are easy, even cholo gang bangers glad to let an old crippled cracker crumble across the street. Really, criminals in San Jose are nicer than the cops, karens, groes and wigger yos of the hollowed [not hallowed] east.
The forty-something cracker grunt standing outside the liquor the night before last, just drinking his six-pack of Hineken, did not have to worry about being the target of a feral groe chimp-out.
A handful of young women say good morning to me.
The only crappy personality is the Hindu merchant down the street who sells $10 6-packs of Busch.
The book store staff is very nice, including the cute, blocky-bodied dyke who looks at me with a warmth not found among the Lesbos of the East, and shapes her soft greeting, Welcome, come on in,” and her energetic farewell, “Thank you so much for stopping in—would you like a bookmark, sir?”
I teeter out, determined to get back here to this tiny night stand, between the bed and the fridge, where the only light hangs above, to compose something worthwhile at this makeshift mini desk.
I am in room 18, which is, of course, right next to room 6, the door of which is generally partly open. Yesterday I heard a noise and opened the door, wondering if it were one of the maids. A squat Latino in rain gear with fishing pole was walking away. When I opened the door he turned around and waved.
The room on the other side of me, 21, I think is occupied by Jerry Springer, a foul mouthed blond man organizing a meet up of some kind, while speaking to a woman in a small white sedan.
After entering and getting ready to write, there is a knock on the door, a man’s knock. I open the door and it is the Latino next door, holding out a chocolate covered ice cream bar by the stick, still in the wrapper, who smiles and says, “Howdy, neighbor!”
I might have smiled as I stammered, thought of declining, and said, “Oh, oh thanks.”
I took the delicacy, which must have run him $2 in San Jose and we waved to each other. I tossed the bar in the trash, feeling bad about that and recalling Guru Rick’s sage advice: “Living with eaters is tough, tough on discipline.”
It is interesting that these recent Americans, just learning to speak American, treat this wandering stranger so much better the those people who are supposedly his fellow citizens.
Outside I hear by the cars rolling by that it has rained again, and according to some walker or another, the leaves on the double wide sidewalk of the 70 year old commercial district, yet claw at the concrete: big, beautiful maple leaves, fallen from a breed of beige and vanilla two-tone trees that line the concrete and asphalt Beautiful Way. There, in three short hours, this fantasy of being able to rent a room and live in autonomy, will once again end, as the gimp shoulders its 25 pound life and crutches back west to the enabling railway.
The kind Spic next door is playing Christmas music—perhaps the first real neighbor I’ve had since I lost the house next to Eric in 1999.
I will try to write tomorrow morning on the train.
…
Notes
-1. I wrote Thunderbird at about 30,000 words in one weekend in 2017.
-2. 3 cans a night, jest enough to keep the liver in trim for Portland. Train rides are now coffee only, the beer at Manhattan prices. As a cripple, about my only remaining human skill is drinking companion.
