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Whatever He Says
It's not that he was interested in other people's converstations but he couldn't help but overhear them, and the cadence alone was enough to distract him verily.
Sometimes, in crowded restaurants, after he had eaten and was sated, he would start hearing all of it at once, and although this was not always unpleasant, on occasion it gave him the feeling that he was in the wrong place at the wrong time.
He tried music when at home and other occupants of the dwelling--he often wasn't sure how he was related to some of them--were on the phone, but if the music played too loud it also distracted him, and so the Velvet Underground, and his ex-girlfriend's phone coversation, and then that neighborhood girl who had called his name out at the top of her lungs so he would let her in, and her phone conversation, and then Lou Reed who was just waiting on his man--uptown, for heroin, he's not fooling anyone around here--but all of it became not just too much but too complex for him too consider, and so he would reach out towards a simpler unknown, and then...
He woke up in the church of his youth. The pastor was a communist, or so many of the congregation thought, what with his sermons including the thoughts of Kant and Kierkegaard. He had pale blues eyes, the pastor did.
He liked the pastor, so unlike the used-car salesman type of pastor he knew from other daydreams. The pastor once compared him to the founder of the Methodist religion. He took it as a compliment.
Then he was leaving the church, pausing purposefully in the hallway that smelled of old age, death, and coffee. She interrupted his nothingness to say, "penny for your thoughts," and he blushed verily, for he had been thinking about bonking this woman's daughter, up on the alter, in front of the entire congregation, except they (the congregation) would be frozen in time, and he and the woman's daughter would be melting, were melting, had melted.
He stepped outside into blistering silence.
Homecoming For Slim2/13/2000
As I piss through the hole in the floor of my new home I feel the kind of relief that perhaps only a man can know. A little jiggle completes the act of indecent satisfaction and a drop astray instead of inside the hole stains the narrrow Bogalusa-made hardwood planks of my new den. I revel in the stain color, in my ability to create it.
A southwest breeze blowing across the top of the Superdome before veering up Canal and moving through the gap to the NOPD Internal Affairs parking lot crosses the Iberville intersection with a head of steam, causing the tall weeds growing from the cracks in the broken cement of the vacant lot to bend in submission, and then entering the double set of double hung six over twos that glasslessly grace the western wall, caressess my face as I sit stooped over on a bucket, elbows to kneees, on a warm February day. I could sleep there now with this cool breeze fingering my face as I sit in reflection amidst the detritus of the crack artists who have preceded me as resident of this small acadian dwelling. Pile up the unwashed moldy clothes that hang like spanish moss from the shelf and rod of the small closet, and lay this noisy head down for a proper nap.
It is so good to have a home and cry free at last.