Possible to be Weary: NORA
Hi Nora!
No more blind dates for me, man. I’m going on strike. Rooftops in NYC on Spring Break are mighty dangerous for this type. I felt like a kite trapped in the dendrites of a tree.
I think his brain was thoroughly adled by the heat. We went and saw a Frida/Diego exhibit at the Museo Del Barrio, and he said (he likes to hold forth), “I don’t know, Max. I have some reservations about a few of these portraits. They still look like they appear airbrushed on the side of a van.” The date was over at that point, I only blame myself, I blame myself that he sounds so much like Simon.
That was my Spring Break for ya, oh yeah, I also overboiled some potatoes, you know how I get, drinking loads of flat champagne, reading in bed, day dreaming about the leftovers from a party the previous night. I was the left overs from the previous night’s party. But left overs are kind of funny, don’t you think? Fuck, where were you?
I’m supposed to go to Disneyland (Spring Break never ends!) next week with S and his new Cuban babe, what’s-her-face, since it’s been her lifelong dream (an ironic one, I hope) to visit all that milk and honey. He says I’m not to make any raft/Elian jokes in her presence. Also, I’m not to remind him that you’re Cuban too and that the two of you (probably) rest on opposite sides of the bar according to the order “Cuba Libre” (well, I made that up, but I’ve got my gut feelings).
I’m at The Albatross. Sorry, I couldn’t wait for you to get back into town. I completely forgot that I went to the movies today, that I watched “The Mummy” —
Quick: Brendan Fraser or Keanu Reeves?
This Bartender Ted is up to no good. He just invited me to a Giants game. Who? What? I wanted to say, “I thought you were a good buddy and you only appear to be scary.”
Did I do wrong? He’s quite nice with a soft voice and all the tattoos of bare-breasted women in pin-up poses don’t freak me out, but that’s a lot of tits, dude. Oh, the imagelessness of words, I swoon!
We met over a towel swipe to the face. Ted stopped himself in the middle of wiping down the bar surface and looked at me like he was some ostrich that just popped its head out of the sand. Why did I obey “Come closer a sec”? I guess it was the next logical thing to do, I’m always getting lime on my face, in my hair, on all the women and bare breasts and pin-up poses I seem to be covered with.
I gotta go read. It’s called Rickshaw Boy (1936), and it’s about the pitiful degradation and ruin of an industrious peasant who moves to 1920s Beijing, becomes a rickshaw puller, and works every day from dawn to night, until finally he dies in the snow. I’m almost done with it. You can have it when I’m done. And then we can write plays with Marxist themes. Have we hit puberty yet? Let’s make the roads run red, pal.
Oh yeah, in 1966 this guy Lao She (Luotuo Xiangzi) committed suicide by drowning himself in a lake in Beijing.
Love,
Max