coyote speaks

Interlude III – Amelia

05/03/2007 at 4:20 pm (fiction)

(Interlude I)
(Interlude II)

Amelia writes a letter to her ex-boyfriend on a piece of paper torn from the title page of Joyce’s Ulysses with a pen that she stole from the last hotel she stayed in with her big brother and his fiancée. The envelope she stole from a box in the drug store and she has been picking up pennies off the street for weeks to get enough change to buy stamps.

She does this because she can, not because she has to.

Writing in small print in the margins of her favorite books, she chronicles her experiences on the streets and she doesn’t phone her brother for help even when she needs it. She hasn’t spoken to him in several weeks, but she doesn’t worry about it; if he needs to find her he’ll know where she’ll be.

But right now she’s lonely for home and she writes a letter to Eric that she might not even send, depending on how she feels in an hour or two. “Hi Eric” she writes, “It’s been an awful long time since I’ve seen you hasn’t it.” And then she stops. What does she have to talk about? Her life has become so large that encapsulating even a small part of it on the piece of paper that says ULYSSES in block letters (with Joyce written below it much smaller in italics) seems impossible. “I am doing well. I hope you are too.”

She pauses and chews on the end of a dirty blonde strand of hair, lights a cigarette, writes “I’m homesick. I don’t love you anymore. But I miss you anyway,” stuffs the slip of paper in the envelope and drops it in the mailbox on the way to the coffee shop that always gives her the dregs of whatever leftover coffee they have in the morning. It doesn’t taste delicious but that isn’t the point, the point is doing everything herself in the only way she knows how, living off of no one and nothing and keeping herself alive that way.

Occasionally it’s been a near thing, twice she was mugged and beaten and once she was almost raped by a friend of hers but someone came in the nick of time and kicked the shit out of the guy, he (the other guy) was six foot four and almost as wide, his name was Hassan and they dated for a little while after he put the first guy George in the hospital. It hadn’t worked out but she kind of loves him a little still anyway. He had really beautiful eyes. She hasn’t seen him in a few weeks.

Walking down the street her stomach’s feeling a little weird like something’s about to happen and her palms are sweating and suddenly her heart falls into her stomach with a resounding painful wrench and she trips along the sidewalk. The world is a little darker now as she walks with one hand on the outside of the buildings, even though she knows the sun is shining she can’t hardly see it. Something bad is happening somewhere to someone she loves. And she sent the letter that said it but she knows that it was a lie; it’s Eric and he’s going to die and she’ll never be able to tell him how much she is still in love with him.

Amelia almost falls into the coffee shop and coincidentally her brother is right there and catches her.

“You okay girlie?” he asks.

She pants for a few moments, safe in the skinny dorky arms of her big brother and finally gasps out “I have to go home.”

He nods. Tom understands her whims and her feelings and never makes fun of her for them, at least not when it counts. And he understands that home is not California so he says, “Come on back, I’ll buy you a plane ticket and you can go.” A pause and a laugh, “you should probably take a shower first, you smell.”

So two days later she hasn’t heard anything but she’s clean and showered and holding a duffel bag carrying pretty much her only possessions in front of the airplane with the ticket clutched in her sweaty hands, this is nervousness for flying but it’s time to go home.

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Interlude II

02/17/2007 at 2:05 am (fiction)

(Interlude I)

The Chinese restaurant is filled to the brim but we all know the guy who runs it even though I can’t remember his name right now, David Wang or Chin or something like that, only his first name isn’t really David, he’s fresh-off-the-boat and he changed it to sound more American. But his voice doesn’t sound very American quite yet, and I can hear him speaking through the chattering chirruping yuppies who frequent this place every Friday night, and he says, “Yes, come, you are always welcome,” and I follow him in past the crowds of yuppies with their flashy watches and their voices shrill and grating, sawing in my eardrums with their happiness and their wealth and their upscale dining habits.

I haven’t had a fix in thirty-six hours and I’m just a stupid junkie but I was the first person to eat here ten years ago when it first opened and I was a baby pothead in need of greasy food for the munchies. And I stumbled into this place, a lot cheaper back then but just as good, and I made friends with David even though I still can’t remember his last name, Wu maybe, or Chang, so David sits me down at a little one-person-two-at-most table in the very back and sends his niece to take my order. She’s a few years younger than me but I see her at parties everywhere, purple hair and six piercings in each ear and a nose stud, totally cute and totally off-limits. She doesn’t wait on the yuppies because they make fun of her and she has a few anger problems, psychological issues a lot like my own, but David knows we’re friends sort of and whenever I show up he lets her have a change from dish-washing and sends her to wait on me.

Her name’s Jinny and she says, “What will you have?” and I make a crack about opium because that’s all I can think about right now, and it’s also a racist joke between friends and everything. She says something about me being a stupid honky and I laugh and tell her my usual, just fried rice. It’s the cheapest thing on the menu because all of my money goes to other things, my recreational pastimes, right now it’s smack but it’s whatever I can get usually. She leaves and I sit there for a while can’t tell how long drinking water and folding paper napkins into birds. The atmosphere hurts my ears and my eyes, people up and down and around and up again, talking like squirrels maybe chipmunks through their beaks and their faces all crunched up into little balls and rolling around the floor up and down and up.

“Hey,” Jinny says. “Hey. Eric.”

I snap back to reality and I can hear the bone-break crinkly stick crack of me doing so.

“Hi,” I say perfectly nonchalantly, nothing’s wrong it’s all good et cetera with my blindingly brilliant smile that puts everyone around me on edge just a little bit more.

“Food,” Jinny says and puts it down in front of me.

“Thanks,” I say and start to eat it while she sits down across from me and starts playing with my birds, chirp chirping. I’ve made them wrong so they don’t flap their wings. You wouldn’t think it to look at me, my hands are too shaky for precision work right now but I used to be pretty good with that origami stuff.

“So I heard about you and Brian,” she says.

I shrug. “Yeah,” and keep eating.

“What happened this time?” she asks.

I ignore her because I don’t want to talk about it. It was stupid, idiotic and all my fault, he’d been clean since we stopped seeing each other the first time, and I guess he thought I was too or something, as though he didn’t know me any better, yeah right. So the first time that he came over to my apartment with flowers or some shit like that, romantic stuff that I’ve never been good at and never expect anyone else to be good at either, so that time he came over and saw the mirror and the razor and the powder – that was the coke week, the week I had enough money to keep me up up up for almost the whole week, it was glorious – he came over and he flipped his shit. Shouted at me for hours, I was sure the neighbors could hear every word. The next time that happened was two months later, I’d been in my room for six days straight, didn’t even leave for food I was that depressed, I wanted to die so I just sat there in bed, read a couple of books and when it got really bad sometimes I would do whatever I had in my dresser. I guess my housemates called him and told him, because he came in without knocking when I was vomiting from the ketamine and I said I loved him and he slammed the door. He said he thought I was better, thought I was cured, thought I was clean and I almost cried again but I told myself Brian would never make me cry again because at twenty-three that’s just shameful. So he left and I haven’t talked to him since because I’m too prideful to go over to his apartment again to apologize or whatever he wants me to do.

That’s what I’m thinking but I don’t say any of it because it doesn’t need to get around, it’s what people are saying anyway and people don’t need the ego boost of me saying “Yeah, sure, your conjectures about my junkie-like behavior are correct sir, now get me another hit of whatever please.”

So I shrug and I say, “It didn’t work out the first time, I don’t know why I thought it would work the second.” And I keep eating as the lights grew steadily brighter until everything is too washed out to look at, even the purple in Jinny’s hair hurts my eyes to look at.

She leans over the table and whispers in my ear “I have some weed in my car, let’s go out and smoke it when you’re done eating,” as though she has a thing for me – and maybe she does, let’s face it, even all shaky and sad and junkie, I’m still a looker, right. I laugh out loud, laugh until tears stream down my face because she’s just a baby, a little girl who doesn’t know what she’s getting into, and I put down five dollars and leave the restaurant, still giggling with wet eyes. Her angry eyes make two holes in my back straight through. I should go back and apologize but it would just make things worse, it always does, and she’s still off-limits no matter how much she wants to change that. Pretty Jinny and her black nails and punk hair.

I miss Amelia, still in California living the life of a street girl with dirty hair even though she has a home to go to when she needs a shower, and I miss Brian, and I wish my life were something other than what it is.

But it’s not, so I go home, and maybe I shoot up more smack or maybe I go downtown and take some E and go dancing until four in the morning or maybe I go home and think about Brian more (his house is only three doors down from here – maybe that’s why I came here in the first place, hoping to run into him accidentally.)

My life is a straight shot downhill and I’m wearing roller skates. I can only read books with happy endings but I know I’m not going to get one myself and that makes me feel even worse. The next time I’m happy I should just stop, just say “Hey, this is what it feels like and I can die now.” But I know I’ll keep going until I can’t anymore, and that point won’t be happy but it will be an ending.

So I go home and I shoot up, and I guess the heroin is my happy ending, or at least it is for now.

(written 2/16/07)

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The Midwest (On Being Driven to School)

02/16/2007 at 11:49 pm (fiction)

We were driving down the road, driving backcountry roads to the school with the wind whipping our faces from the open windows and the smell of our cigarettes drifting behind us for miles like some sort of jet stream. The late November air was warm, it was over sixty and so was our speed as we tore through these small towns dotting the Midwestern landscape.

They were tiny little things, three four five houses at a stretch, peeling whitegreen paint and bluewhite shutters, shuttered fast against the outside, the Other, the Us. Tearing down the roads at a breakneck speed, passing the trucks and the cars and the motorbikes who looked at us in our little red car as though we were insane, and we were, because it was a beautiful day and neither of us has any life left going so we drove.

Halfway through the day I looked over at the old man and I said, “Do you even know where you’re going?” and he pulled over with a quick jerk along the side of the road, near a railroad crossing with rickety wood rails instead of metal; it looked like it hadn’t been used for years but there was still a ‘beware train’ sign in front of it. At least I think that’s what it said once, but now the words said ‘beware rain’ and I looked up at the sky but it was a brilliant blue, the color of a newborn’s eyes, and I laughed and there were no clouds.

We looked at the map and I was right because he didn’t know where he was going, we’d been driving in the opposite direction for fifty miles already, and I didn’t care. In fact, I thought it was brilliant and I jumped around the car until the old man said, “Stop that,” and he got in.

We drove more, this time possibly in the right direction, but I didn’t so much care at this point. I stared out the open window and the wind flapped my hair in my face and made my eyes dry up, and I blinked more but didn’t move my head. The land was just farms, just farms stretching as far as the eye could see. First it was flat, nothing but flat land and cows and sometimes a house, for miles and miles, but then after a few hours the land turned into hills, with the gently waving cornstalks golden and ripe in the fields, standing around and looking like some sort of magical battalion climbing those hills to an invisible enemy above. There were still houses, but less towns. There were farms and barns and broken down silos covered in rust, and I thought to myself, “Why does anyone prefer the city? It’s cold and metal,” and I compared it to this living golden vision and I vowed never again to return to the city. I vowed that one day I would find a lover and I would settle down in a tiny cottage like the one on my left that we just passed at seventy-five miles per hour, and own a cow and a horse and have a child or two and be just like these people.

There were no people working in the field, but a few minutes after that dawning realization we stopped with a jerk as a cart and two horses trotted out in front of our car, and I realized that they were the Amish, and that they were who I wanted to be – not pseudo-bohemians living in pseudo-poverty in a rural cottage while they painted and wrote poems and talked about how much their lives were enriched by doing the same thing that they would have done in a tiny apartment in the city – no, I wanted to be one with the upright bearded man in the hat, the small woman in the long dress and bonnet, the six children in antiquated clothing clustered behind them. That life was purer to me than any other, and I watched them go, staring at them and wondering how I could become them.

And then we drove off, and I lost them.

(Written 11/26/06, in the manner of Kerouac’s On The Road)

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Conversation I

02/16/2007 at 11:43 pm (fiction)

what, he said, am i supposed to be some kind of superhero now? he came into the room and hung his jacket on the back of a chair.

no, she said. but it would be nice if you could come home on time like you promised.

i didn’t promise he said. i said i’d try.

no, she said. you promised, i remember. but even trying would get you home earlier than this. she gestured at the kitchen window which was lit by the three a.m. streetlights outside.

well i’m sorry he said.

i’m not a jealous person she said. but -

could have fooled me he said.

i’m not a jealous person, she said again. but you’re not wearing your tie, did you forget that somewhere?

i left it at work, he said.

right, she said. six hours ago.

i was having a drink, he said. a few drinks.

right, she said. he didn’t say anything and the silence went on too long so she said, there’s dinner in the fridge. i can warm it up for you if you want.

thanks, he said.

after he ate dinner she went into the bathroom and cried.

(written 11/26/06 in the manner of Diane di Prima)

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