September 9, part four: journal entry (20 minutes)

(two days later:)

It rained all day yesterday and I wrote Anita a letter (finally). It wasn't very long. I just thanked her for taking care of Hazard (I resisted saying that, had she spent a little less time making babies and a little more time paying attention to his "distressing sounds," as Simon called them, he might not have suffered so much) and I wished them well in my old apartment (I signed and sent back the two-year lease so they could continue living there).

At about 4:30 the rain let up and I was feeling energetic so I took my cane for a walk to the Oakwood Cemetery (the entrance is barely a block-and-a-half from my front door). Very impressive. Very old. A historic sign just inside the fancy old wrought iron gate says it's the oldest cemetery in Texas and a bunch of other (interesting) stuff I intended to come home and write down, but instead I fell down.

My stairs are apparently very slippery when wet, particularly (and I guess fortunately) the fourth one up. Fortunate because, had it been, say, the eleventh one, the fall would've hurt a lot more. And judging from the way my hip feels today, it could have been fatal.

It's crazy that I'm walking around with a cane at 29. It feels/looks more like I'm 92. And I won't likely get there, so I suppose I ought to be thankful for the opportunity to be a rickety old man in this lifetime. But I'm not.

So I fell -- boom-boom-boom-boom -- and I seriously believe I could have gotten right up and kept on going, but I didn't. I just decided to feel sorry for myself (or something), just stayed put for awhile. I didn't have an inkling of a thought that anyone could see me there -- the six-foot high fence between my apartment and the college house makes it impossible for us to see each other except from the top of my staircase -- and as the standing water soaked into the front of my clothes, it was cool and felt sort of good.

But suddenly there were hands upon me, the hands of a tall black woman who was stronger than she looked in her tie-dyed house dress. That's right, it's the neighbor across the alley whom I hadn't seen until that very moment. She was very concerned about me, stood me up, placed my left hand on the stair rail while she fetched my cane and put it solidly in my right. I tried to tell her I wasn't really as hurt as it might have seemed, but it's hard to convince somebody that a person looking like me would just be lying face down at the foot of his stairs because the puddles of water soaking into his clothes was "cool and felt sort of good."

Her name is Brianne. She is chocolate brown and wears her hair in a multitude of long braids knotted into a wild collection at the back of her neck. The ends of the braids have wooden beads on them and they clack together a lot. Brianne's most striking (and unnerving) feature is her colored contact lenses, which make her eyes wish they were blue, but look more like they have sheer curtains pulled over them. Whatever. She's nice. She offered to do my laundry, which was piled up just inside the front door. I declined her offer, then when she refused my decline, I offered a compromise: I'll do them myself in your washing machine. She accepted and made me promise not to attempt to bring them over until the stairs are dry.

Apparently, she had a change of heart. This morning she showed up with a large canvas laundry bag, stuffed my clothes into it, and wouldn't take no for an answer. I don't think she noticed that I wasn't protesting, but my bruised hip necessitated my change of heart.

September 9, part three: journal entry (7 minutes)

It's overcast today. A storm is coming. The air smells like dirt. I sat at the top of my stairs and watched the college kids drink beer and make a huge spaghetti dinner. It was quite an event. The blond one with the unbecoming handlebar moustache seems to be the alpha dog. The Jewish kid (he wears a yarmulke) is the omega. The other six -- four boys and four girls total, fall into a not-so-clearly defined pecking order. They made the sauce from scratch -- Blondie must've brought his grandmother's recipe to school with him; he carried it around instructing the others to chop veggies, cook hamburger, boil pasta, garlic-butter long loaves of bread and make a salad. There's a huge burnt-orange ice chest on the deck just outside of the kitchen with a seemingly never-ending supply of beer. They threw vegetables at each other and for a while got into a beer-spewing fight which started when the chubby guy laughed beer onto his chubby girlfriend, and came to an end on the deck and in the back yard with cans of beer being shaken and aimed at one another. The whole operation came to a halt as the participants (all of the guys and the two rowdier girls) cleaned themselves up, the girls out of sight in the interior of the house and the boys hosing themselves and each other off on the near side of the deck, ending up shirtless and wet-shorted. That was my favorite part of the show. And when the dinner preparations resumed and I was sure there was nothing more to see (new shirts were donned), I made myself a PBJ sandwich and finished eating it just as they were setting up the card tables and folding chairs and getting ready to sit down for their meal.

September 9, part two: journal entry (10 minutes)

It's harder to be comfortable when you're an adult. It had to be hotter and more humid than this in Florida, but I'm dying (no pun intended). There were so many distractions when I was little, so much to help me forget the weather, forget the miserable state of my life. Running, jumping, screaming, even fear was a good antidote. Now I just lie around wanting to do something but with no energy to do it.

Anita sent me a long letter full of news, good and bad -- or what she considered good (she and Simon are gonna have a baby) and bad (Hazard died from a urinary infection and blockage that had been plaguing him unnoticed for weeks); I would likely label the news the other way around -- and I sat at the desk planning to respond and must have spent three hours looking at a blank piece of paper, no energy to write even "Dear Anita."

The sun set and my eyes were too strained to focus on the paper any longer so I looked out the front window and much to my horror (and curious delight) witnessed the across-the-street neighbors having sex. Such an ugly thing, hetero-sex, so uni-directional and uninteresting. I may have had different feelings about it if the young woman weren't the most visible participant. She isn't ugly in her street clothes -- and her boyfriend is certainly "attractive enough" -- but naked she looked like a Frankenstein creation, particularly because of the huge purple scar running from her belly button to her breastbone. The only opportunity I had to see the man's genitals I completely missed because he removed himself from her throat and traced the scar with his cock then quickly poked it into her pussy. I was way too distracted by the gash to get a good look. My mistake. I have half a mind to send them a postcard and let them know a thing or two from the peeping tom's point of view.

But then again, like I said, I don't even have the energy to write my "best friend" a reply to her letter, and now I've completely wasted what little I had today writing this journal entry.

September 9, part one: journal entry (5 minutes)

I managed to write a few "journal entries" from Randy's point of view. I'm not sure where they fit into the story; I just feel like I need to write a bunch and then see if and where they might go...

Today, I woke up in a wet bed. Not a wet dream -- I've never had one of those (I guess I've been too avid a masturbator for that to happen). No, I wet the bed, pissed myself. Jesus Christ! In the process of taking off the sheets and dumping them into the bathtub I decided to get off my meds. There's one for sleeping in my daily "cocktail" and I blame that for my bladder release.

The rest of the morning I sat at the desk letting the mattress air out and watching the top page of the Chronicle float up and down in the breeze of the ceiling fan.

I need to eat something. I need to wash my sheets. ( I need to get a spare set.) But I don't want to go back into the bathroom because the enemy is in there. It's a monster. It's the mirror. I was never one to spend much time in front of the mirror until Waco, until the KS started showing up. Brown spots are taking me over, and the only good thing I can think to say is I'm glad Mona is dead because she would undoubtedly say "You're turning into a nigger!"

I hate that woman, more now than ever. She told me once she wished she'd aborted me (and Rona), and these days I kind of wish she had, too. She might have saved us all a lot of misery. I wonder if she would have smoked as much, drunk as much?

Who am I kidding? She would have ended up with some other brats if not me and my half-sister. They might not have had my red hair or Rona's long legs, they might not have been homosexuals or sluts, but they still would have "been the death of her." She makes White Trash look bad!