The Red Sox break out of their slump, taking two games from the Yankees. Jim Rice looks slow, but they are playing in 95F weather. The weather is no better in the East Village. The agust air is exhausted by summer. I’ve only been to the beach once in comparison to my beach bum days of 1975 in Mimai Beach and on the West Coast; Encinitas-Torrey Pines-Matzatlan-Esquinapa-Puerto Vallarta-Gloucester-Provincetown.
I don’t have the money to go anywhere now.
LATER
The afternoon rain wash the smog from the city skies and I walk across 1st Avenue without stumbling on the melted tar. I enter the apartment. Alice has cleaned everything for the tenth time.
“Do you want to wake up at 9 tomorrow morning and take me to school?” she asks, touching my hand.
“I don’t know.” Her acting classes were on the Upper West Side. Te other side of the world from the East Village. Some of the streets were as bad as these, but Alice was worried about Hakkim.
“You don’t have to be so mean.”
“Then I’ll be your bodyguard.” I came from the South shore. We fought everyone no matter what the odds. “And I’ll do it in ther winter when the city is dark.”
“My hero.”
I looked at the collapsible steel guard gates.
She only wanted one thing.
To be safe.
After putting up the gates we painted the walls.After one coat I thought we were done. Alice held up another can.
Ivory white.
I’ve have had lovers before, but never lived with any women than my mother and sisters. This was just about sex and one month ago Harriet the thin nurse from Boston said, “Fuck me anytime you want.”
We lasted a month.
After leading the American League East most of the summer the Red Sox have collapsed into a slump and surrendered First Place to the Tampa Bay Rays. I hate evry team from the Gulf Coast city. The Rays win too much.
I watch nothing on the TV. I look at my journal a little. Mostly I surf the internet for my condition.
This morning the surgeons sealed my stomach lesions. The anesthesiologist gassed me with propofol. I said, “Tell me go and I’ll see if I can count backward from ten.”
“Okay. 1-2-3 go.”
My consciousness disappeared along with reality and I woke in a blinding whiteness. I have been an atheist since age 8, but I am a true devotee to nothingness and that coma was nirvana. was it.
As for sex.
I’ve been faithful to Mem.
I know she loves me.
