I called his sister a whore and we more or less stopped being friends that day. It hurt his feelings quite badly, I think. I miss him a lot sometimes. It was 10 years ago.

He tried to reconnect not so long ago but I’m hard to reconnect with and there was always the lurking question: is your sister a whore or was I just an asshole for saying it?

She was fucking all kinds of guys while she was dating, supposedly steady, our friend and sometimes drummer, Chuck the hockey player. Chuck was a drummer, which I think I mentioned. He was quite good at both. I have another story about him being a drummer and me being sad about not being in a band. Our current story only involves him being a nice guy who didn’t deserve his steady to be out fucking Luc Longley.

I guess that’s why the story will be suddenly interesting to sports fans. That rust-colored scarecrow is somewhat famous now. I wonder if I’ll get a letter from an NBA lawyer.

One night I met Luc and a friend of his; another college basketball player but not a very good one because I can’t remember his name and I’m sure you never heard it. It started with an R, though. Robinson, maybe.

I was a security aide on my campus, which we discussed before. One night I was called up to a girls’ dorm to evict a couple boys who had overstayed the curfew. It was Longley and his retard friend R-something-or-other.

I suppose I could get another one of those legal threat letters for calling the kid a retard. But I don’t think it’ll be on NBA stationery so it’s not too scary, and I’ll stand behind the retard label. Here’s why.

When I very politely asked him and Luc to leave, R-for-retard gets like he’s gonna get up and swing. All oral, like tall white boys get when they never got knocked down for their lunch money as kids.

Now, R’tardo was out for part of the season due to a knee injury. I knew this. I also knew that was exactly where I was gonna kick him if he stood up too quickly. Man! I thought. This kid is *never* gonna play ball again. How perfect is that? I was probably smiling about it. That calmed him down I guess. He got more cooperative when it looked like I was a little too interested in his lunch money.

To be fair, Luc was a perfect gentleman. Excepting when he fucked Chuck’s girlfriend who was Jeremy’s sister and also a redhead. That really wasn’t so cool.

All in all, it was much cooler than that whore constantly encouraging my girlfriend to cheat on and dump me.

There was this girl who lived in the same college dorm I did. It was Hokona. She was on the girls’ side, as you might have guessed.

The girls’ side was the origin of Hokona’s nickname, “Whore-corner.” I worked in all the dorms though and I can assure you that the Santa Clara girls were the ones that were keeping college STD stats solid for the state. Hokona girls were the ones worth blowing midterms for because you’d get to bomb your finals for them too.

This girl was raven haired. Maybe a year or two younger than I was. I think she was Chicana but she was one of those girls who wasn’t mestizo enough to tell for sure.

I might have known her name once. If I did it was from asking around. She was so pretty, I never quite managed to ask her; her name and many things. We talked once. Once was all I could manage. She was so pretty and my crush made me boylike and foolish. It was difficult to understand her when we did talk.

Her smile was arresting. Her beautiful hair was longish and often up but sometimes loose on the back edge of her wheelchair. Her wheelchair was completely automatic because she needed it to be. She had some crude motor control over her arms and neck. Just enough to spur the chair to action with the joystick and to raise her head and smile and look away to the side. Christ! Had that smile been shown upon the Devil he might well have reconciled with his cousins in a daze of optimism.

She had a crush on me too I think but I didn’t know what to do about it then. I wonder if she still can smile that way.

I have a theory. We don’t pay enough attention to the oldies. That’s my theory. As always, I am prepared to back it up; like a Webelos in an earth mover.

I hear a far away voice on the telephone line
tell me what you think will tear us apart
said how about 4,000 miles and 21 years
do you think that’s enough for a start?

I’m up to 15,000 and holding
passing time just minding the view
but this seatbelt is tight and exposing
putting pressure on my big love for you

my big love for you
my big love for you
my big, my big, my big

Ah, Percy, truer words have never been spoken.

One of the worst nights of my life was spent in Hong Kong.

Probably you have already formed an idea of what it must have been; been like. It is natural to hear personal details in your mind when someone else utters trite phrases about himself. Trite things have no weight, only connotations. “Worst night of my life,” carries that. Doesn’t carry real information.

I hadn’t a drink. I wasn’t sick. I wasn’t getting dumped nor was breaking up with anyone. I hadn’t lost money. I hadn’t lost a job. I didn’t get beat up.

If the worst night you ever spent was just puking or crying or even bleeding then you couldn’t understand. There’s little point in the details. It’s written down elsewhere, more or less anyway, for the day when there comes a point.

Nothing bad happened to me. It was just one of those times when something bad did happen and I was caught out as the only adult. Again.

Your regular?

Found two red-tailed hawk feathers in the yard. That’s just the kind of yard we have. Pat would really like that. She’d say something cool about it. She’d cock her head to the side and say something so cool and I’d pretend I didn’t think she was that cool but she’d know she was. I’d call her Diné to make fun of her but she’d know all I meant was the world was at her feet since her grandma’s teeth and all.

Two girls thought I was worth smiling at and quickly looking away from while still smiling. My wife on my arm and all. You heard me right. What? We didn’t cover the wife? Well, for goodness sakes! Let’s get right down to the price of eggs. …Who’s kidding whom? There isn’t that kind of money available now that the Caliphs and Maharajas are on a peacetime budget.

I guess when friends and family die there is a tug at your coat. The more and closer the stronger. That tug is not exactly unwelcome when you’ve been sidling up where there’s no balance to be had all those years. And those dreams.

I realized “Forty Six & 2.” I beat him to those words 8 years: “In My Shadow.” Either an amazing footnote or a useless boast. What else am I?

More realizations. They could have, should have, called the cops on me when I drew that knife on Trent. I’ll never know if I have murder in me because I always stop when the chance comes up. My last chance to be tried as a juvenile, slim though it was, lost to whatever latent love I had for what the coke hadn’t erased in him. And to Cort sanely talking him into leaving the room. We talked since on account of some meddling kids. He seems quite a person again. I hadn’t considered that then. Luckily, Liz and Co. considered it in my case while having difficulty looking up the number for the police. You’re not Generation X if you could dial “911” in high-school. Or maybe it was just more juvenile self-preservation. They couldn’t turn me in for violence because they risked being caught for the drugs. Silly teenagers!

I wanted to write more. To describe an apology to a French girl without admitting hate is ever wrong when it’s pointed at that which destroys. You told me many times hate is a bad thing and you were never more unhealthy or more stupid. Hate of injustice, hate of slavery, hate of ignorance, hate of the dust of a small town on your shoes. Even hate of the distance and the lack of words by carrier across purple mountain majesties, sargaço roses, and so on.

At least there is no evil in the world. I am painting again and I know some of you aren’t useless. Some of you might even eventually justify not being dead instead of Adam.

There is a headline that Reuters is running on a story right now that goes: “Vanity Fair Sees Chelsea Transformed to Sex Symbol.”

I don’t have any trouble believing this at all. Working for the bookstore with the largest selection in the world I learned first hand what a tremendous demand there is for zoophilia in America and abroad.

This is a picture from Christmas six months before Star Wars came out. My grandmother is the lady, obviously. The kids are me, my sister, and my cousins. The night I almost got my dad to hit me in the face was the night in ’86 I called her, “Old.” She wasn’t then; never was.

My grandfather on the other side is dying right now. We have more in common than cynicism and the persisting desire to call the denizens of Deutschland, “Jerries.”

One of my best friends from high school, Adam(b), is also dying of cancer this week. I know because my best friend of 13 years who I haven’t spoken to in a couple more told me. She didn’t miss the sweet chance to get a couple digs in either.

Adam is only 32, I think, and that’s all he’ll ever be. We haven’t talked in years and maybe we never would have again. We spent most days together a long time ago. We never once had a fight. He is that nice.

I’m not going home to see either one before they die. I didn’t go home when my grandmother was dying. I love them all.

I don’t want to jump in just because someone called, “Jump in!” But I did want to ask you if you ever used the bathroom at school in the six years you were in high school and junior high?

So, I’m asking.

Halle Berry, did you ever use the bathroom at school in the six years you were in high school and junior high?

I never did. I was an Anglo (what you’d call “white” I guess, though I never said it was okay to call me that) kid in Northern New Mexico before the great New-York-Hollywood land grab happened in Santa Fe and Taos. It’s funny that $1,000 a month rent is totally incompatible with $5.25/hr wages — forcing local kids, who didn’t have living grandparents to move in with, to move away. And as I wasn’t born that pretty and my mom was unable to front for me to move to Chicago to be a model, I was stuck there getting called, “Fucking honkey,” having knives drawn on me, being humiliated by the girlfriends of vatos I was terrified of, and getting surreptitiously punched when walking in a crowd.

I was too scared to use the fucking bathroom for 6 years because I didn’t want get caught alone in there by the gang of pachucos in my class and get beat or killed. One of the kids who gave me a good kidney punch in gym class is serving murder time at the second worst state pen in the country. Another one is dead because another kid he used to pick on shot him and his twin brother during a graduation party.

So I guess I was born lucky. I mean compared to you. It must be hard being held back the way you have been. Why, you’d probably be the President instead of just a millionaire moviestar by now if only everyone got treated equally. Crying fucking shame how backwards this country is and surely the Anglo is to blame. Lord knows the Hollywood-New-York fuckwads that drove me out of my hometown have hands as clean as Pilate.

I know you think you were a vessel of truth that night, but six years I didn’t get to piss between 8am and 4pm, Monday through Friday.

I want to tell you about something that happened yesterday. It actually happened well over 10 years ago, which I mention purely so that the sycophants fawning at the feet of the false idol Historical Accuracy can have a holiday in keeping the time lines straight. But it did happen yesterday.

Why we do certain things… That’s not fair. I have no idea why you do anything you do. I do know why she did what she did, and why she was the way she was, and I don’t think it was for show, though it was a good one.

Renate, Barnaby, and I were sitting in front of the Hokona dormitory yesterday afternoon on the University of New Mexico. Barnaby was playing with a stick. Not just any stick. This is what, in locale parlance, was called a chingao-equalizer. Barnaby and I called it an arnis stick. You’d call it a stick or a 7/8" oak dowel if you hadn’t been high for most of your shop classes.

Barnaby liked Renate first. So he got to ask her out first. Fair is fair. But she said no. I am a good friend but I’m not a good enough friend to not ask her out after that.

So that’s where we were.

After some daylight passed, Barnaby said to her, “I’ll give you $10 if you take this [indicating the stick] and go hit my roommate in the face. He’s asleep. The door’s unlocked”

She said, “Okay,” the same way she said everything — like she was auditioning for the part of Dominique Francon in the unauthorized 2021 remake of “The Fountainhead,” and knew she was the only girl alive who could play the part. Not just a million miles away, but a million gene sequences further.

He handed her the stick. I, being the kind of naturalist who refuses to interfere, didn’t try to stop him. She got up and walked toward his room and his sleeping roommate.

I shook my head at him. He never thought she would. He was only goading her. Trying to get fingernails in to pry back enough to see. Call her perpetual bluff.

She came back two minutes later. She sat down. She didn’t give the stick back. She didn’t ask for her $10.

Barnaby said, “Did you do it? You didn’t do it.”

She: “The door was locked.”

“Horseshit! I just left it unlocked.” And he got up and stormed off to his room to check.

He came back quickly and said, “It was locked… Here’s the keys.”

“No,” I said and didn’t let him give them to her.

That’s one more kid, that’ll never go to school /
Never get to fall in love, never get to be cool Neil Young