Farmingdale

I moved in right quick having found a room that day. Small dormered with a story-book green dresser and a single bed smelling of stale cramped life like the inside of a draw. It was my second time living on a top floor if I include my stay with Grandma, the one I fled that very morning after having been up all night, and when I think of how I might explain why I left I can only say this for now, fright.

So one week in and already found work bussing tables at this Italian family style restaurant, it smelled too and how particular, fetid, damp and garlicky. Finally I thought here is my life. Having made the prodigal return from Queens back home or at least one town over, I thought, this is great, everything being the same but now here and now now.

I had plans to eaves-drop on my customers, study the living, mabey for a screen-play I'd tell others to impress knowing then what I've always known, that everything is a reward unto itself or none at all, and to know people, to live among them with the ears, with the heart open would always be enough.

I still dreamt big but it was a lie to impress myself, to subvert my egoistic conditioning, an attempt to live in between plans, and when those lie's wore thin I thought it was beer or pot I lived for and again another cover for living, for with all its meager winnings and great upset, not once has it been uninteresting.

Like this yule visit with crack toking friends at the end of the hall, a Christmas eve to remember, the unatural acrid smell, the way each would pick and scrape at there pipes at bits of foil in preparation for the next hit, immediate to the last, like insects with big blood filled human hearts and eyes which sought to drink the whole world with you in it, there was real love there.

When living the low life we find it trembling and jewel like there in cramped rooms, in the parking lots of seven-eleven, we hear it falling up the stairs with a head wound, or with pupils grown big enough to house the waking dreams of not one but two boxes of somanex, we clean up a months worth of it's piss in milk pint cartons, we talk with its failure it's deep sadness, how it scams the grocery store's for five towns over, we listen when it describe's the work of carting it's body around, of how it clinicaly died once and the nothing it had seen there, we let it sleep on our floor when it's man-friend is raging scared all the while, we talk with it sipping german dessert wines smoking nat shermans, its face large as life the eyes all a twinkle, blink, blink it says, it claims to be your soul-mate, it begs for sexual favor at three in the morning when your just trying to have a drink, there it stands in it's whities stumbling before a 19" color set clutching a half gallon of Georgi having just bleed its heart out for its boy, it's deceased father, it's failed marriage, it smokes something nameless and black while the last light fades behind the tree-line out of doors, there through the quarter windows, and it thinks, are we out of beer?