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On Company Time
Freddy from Honduras said of his work mates, two are from Guatemala, and two from Bolivia. Any Salvadorans? I asked. No, Freddy grimaced. No te gusta Salvador? I asked. No, Freddy said. Porque? I asked. Because they kill women and children, he said. Cuando, I asked. Setena y siete, setenta y ocho, he said. Oh, si, recuerdo, I said, remembering back to my college months in Austin and all the love everyone was feeling for Daniel Ortega. Freddy is from the state of Limpira, which borders El Salvador. He is only twenty-five so he is carrying on a hatred handed down by his older relatives. Freddy said a nice house can be got in Honduras for $7,000. I paid $22,000 for my house in New Orleans. It was a fixer-upper.
I was talking to one of the Guatemalans around lunchtime yesterday. It was his birthday. He asked me to take him a la tienda. So I did and he got him two packs of Marlboro lights and a drink. He bought me a large Heinekin. Earlier he had asked me what I smoked and I showed him and he said, oh, Camel. I smoke Marlboro light, girly cigarette, but Camel for man (I tried to show him that my Camels were lights too but he didn't get it). Yes, I said, lowering my voice and puffing out my chest, and hacking up a hairball.
I want to now shine a brief light on the Marshall office of VDOT which has some good men and women working for it and some with rather antiquated racial attitudes towards its African-American workers. I will spare you the details because I would hate to taint a burgeoning lawsuit. But it seems they have a lot of fun down there with their workers, and even Anglo on Anglo gags are rife with hilarity. Workers have been known to duct tape weaker workers into submission and then sit on their chests and wag penises in their faces. So if you live in Virginia and pay taxes you might make a note on your next tax bill that you would prefer your money not go to projects that would include penis-wagging on company time. Unless that is something you do support. I am not here to make judgments.
Deputy Dog Lives Another Day
Dear Mom,
I don't know if you remember this but back when you were still living I wrote to you about a barking dog in Virginia, down the hill from where I stay. He would bark all night at the moon and stars and the foxes and if there were sheep out here he would bark at the sheep. A yappy bark. A high pitched yappy bark. The sound would travel hundreds of feet and come into my bedroom and make me feel insane in a way disproportionate to the aggravation. If I were a superpower I might, to show how discontented I am, fire bomb a hundred small cities and follow up with a couple of atomic bombs dropped on the citizens of two larger cities, or, say I were the bitch step sister of a superpower and some mean people kidnapped two of my people, and these mean people were a group with no agenda that I considered relevant, I might fly around in jets and drop bombs over the entire country where the mean people holed up. What, mom? The innocents? Please, please mother, there are no innocents.
By the way, speaking of ill-logic, after a lifetime of eye-wandering under-achieving, with a list of suspect accomplishments including, college-quiting, cross-country hitchhiking, boxcar riding, ghetto dwelling, and a series of moderately satisfying dead-end blue collar jobs, I have ended up as sole occupant of a rather large house on top of a hill, surrounded 360 degrees by Blue Ridge foothills on a property that has a pond, a pool, a tennis court, and as we speak, a rather ambitious re-landscaping of all the land between the pool and the tennis court. Yes mother, I am in the bighouse. What? No mother, no. I know that's what Cagney and Robinson called the...no, I don't mean THAT bighouse. No, unh uh, I've never meant it that way, don't be silly.
Anyway, to the point--I am several hundred feet higher up the hill from the yappy dog and I can still hear it, sometimes waking up in the middle of the night to hear it, and so I was just wondering if maybe Jesus would let you have a dog I could send you this one. I know that after our cat, Frank, died, you said you didn't want anymore pets, but that's been a good many years ago and I think you might enjoy this dog, its no bigger than a puppy really, and...no, I wouldn't say it was cute but do you remember that cartoon Deputy Dog?, well, it looks kind of like that.
Sure, yeah, no, I understand. No, you are absolutely right, I should count my blessings. What? No, this isn't long-distance. No, really, I don't think you have to worry about that anymore, I think you are operating with the currency of eternity now and so....click...dial tone. Ok then, it was nice chatting.
One Twin Banging
The police came banging on my door yesterday. I opened the door and it was one of the twins. "Jesus man, why you bangin' like that?, you sound like the police."
"I'm not the police."
"You sound like the police, what's up?"
"Just wanted to see if I could take a quick dip in the pool."
"Of course man, go ahead." Up to this point I had thought this twin was the other twin, the one who is the far less likely to abuse the privilege. But quickly I realized this twin was not the one I thought he was and what the hell is up with these twins now starting to look like each other? They didn't use to even seem like brothers much less twins but now they are like mirror images of each other.
And then these two teenagers, his step children?, come up and he says, "I just wanted to come by and check with you and see if it was all right..." and I interrupted him and said, "it looks like you already decided it was all right."
"No man, it's not like that."
"Go ahead and get wet."
He tells his step children, teenagers both of them, to go swimming, he wants to catch up with me because I had been in New Orleans all winter and spring and he hadn't talked to me in so long. He used "New Orleans" like a currency. As if it were a valuable thing that would be of interest to the teenagers but they like the rest of the world overwhelmed by who will be the next American Idol or get voted off which island or fired from which high level job, did not, do not, give a damn. Only Brad Pitt can save you now.
I don't know if the guy was coked up (a possibility) or just really excited to see me (unlikely) but he talked a mile a minute--about what, I cannot tell you, because I really wasn't listening. I was so mad at myself for my mistake of thinking he was the good twin instead of the fucked up one. How long would I have to listen to this drivel designed to suggest an age old intimacy? You cannot be nice to people who see niceness as a weakness to be taken advantage of. From a couple of sources I have enough information about this guy's recent behaviour to just scratch him off the list of people I need to be even nominally nice to.
Well, sun's starting to come up, new day. Another bird just smacked into one of the windows up here at the bighouse, makes my heart race.
Dude banging like a cop on my door, that was a bad start.
Brother Dreams Of Clifford
My brother has been talking to my dead mother and father in his dreams. I myself don't dream, or talk to anybody. My father, a full blooded dead Lebanese (which I only mention so I can get this off my chest--fuck Israel), apparently knows he is dead, whereas my mother hasn't quite hipped up to the fact of her recent death. My mom asked after me in my brother's dream. My brother thinks she should have the decency to only ask after him in his dreams. He said he may have to tell her what's what in the next dream. I said, well, break it to her easy.
The English Of Freddy
You can't hardly do any good slacking out here what with all that worker noise.Those guys are working 13 hours a day and the only break I get from them is when I go down and paint the outside of the cottage they are living in, which used to be the cottage I lived in. I will live down there again someday but for now it is Las Casas de Los Latino's.
The Latino's, there's five of them out here, they don't seem that friendly to Freddy from Honduras. He is always working by himself while the other four guys laugh and joke and work together. Yesterday they were calling out to him in Spanish and laughing. I was skimming leaves off the pool surface. Freddy said under his breath to his co-workers, fuck you. English very good, Freddy, I said.
Poem For Ira
Well, they got him last night at Massie's Corner, after a week of relentless man hunting, so there's one less pocket-knife stabbing murderous son-of-a-bitch roaming around Rappahannock County.
They were talking about it at the diner this morning but I'd already received the spoiler by email.
This morning every table at the diner had a big fat bouquet of hydrangea blossoms. I had fresh raspberry pancakes and bacon and eggs and iced tea and cranberry juice.
The geese have returned to the property. If they mess with those new hibiscus plants down at the pond, I'll be having pate for breakfast.
After receiving the news about the captured murderer I went around unlocking doors on the property, but they were already unlocked.
Caca Rica
A helicopter with search light looking for a toothless murderer was flying around last night illuminating the tops of trees in this bucolic Rappahannock arena while I smoked a cigarette and danced oddly like a marionette puppet on the front porch of this premier 40 acre property within walking distance of the Inn at Little Washington, which notably, other than the notability of the starter meals at $230 a pop, speculatively exudes septic overflow uphill from the pond here, and is why I don't eat the fish I catch, but throw them back, because that shit is just too rich for me.