How I came to the house was a mystery, not that it was mysterious or even a mystery of any sorts, it was just that I hadn't planned on coming to the house, I'd had no intention in that I hadn't considered it, I hadn't thought at all about coming to the house. I came to the house before and without directly thinking about it would have continued coming, in that with an increasing frequency I went to the house, I came to the house once or twice a week, I would visit the house, that is, the people who lived in the house. But I had never anticipated or given any thought to the idea or possibility of coming to the house and staying, of going to the house and not ever leaving.

It was towards the end of February and at the over-ripe verging on rotting age of nineteen my life was collapsing from all sides. My very first apartment was no longer my apartment, the six-month lease had expired though that wasn't why it was no longer mine. It wasn't mine anymore because of another contract, an oral agreement precluding, superceding the lease: when my family had moved out of town I had declined to accompany them, adamantly refusing to have any part of it, I settled on the pretext that I wanted to stay in town to attend art school, whereupon my mother struck me a kindly bargain whereby she would pay for my tuition and my very first apartment, as long as I continued attending, while I would find a job to pay for my food, materials and whatever sundries.

I never did get a job, find one, I looked twice, applying or trying to apply three or four places over the span of two afternoons, until I became disgusted with it all, the degradation and humiliating rejection, on solid no all it took, my apartment and tuition were taken care of so I decided to do without a job.

(We were sitting together in the spacious central drawing area of the art school. It was the 11:30 lunch break, and with nothing to do and nothing to eat, we had seated ourselves in preparation for out next class at the far back corner of the room. On our drawing tables, tilted horizontally, our metal boxes full of pencils, chalks, charcoals, of paints, brushes, inks, erasers and knick-knacks, our pads of paper, our drawings, our pains, our frustrations, our anger, our hunger were spread about covering the wooden tops. Cathy's handsome coat was draped behind her chair, mine was as dirty and worn out as the tile floor on which it sprawled. The other tables were laid out in a semblance of rows, the room was vast and their latticework added to the effect. High above was the ceiling I half expected to be deep blue and partly obscured by clouds, but it was the same dirty white color as the walls. The doors and trim were a massive deep oak that was badly nicked and scratched. In the emptiness we were so diminutive yet all the more obtrusive. We were hungry.

(She looked at me and her hair was thick and auburn, her face pale and Irish, her eyes bright and lively. I felt dirty, and unconsciously rubbed the scruff on my cheeks that was years away from developing into a beard. She offered me a cigarette which I accepted greedily with profuse thanks. We lit up and talked, sitting tiny and immense in our corner.

(We talked about how stupid things were. The stupidity of the government, the lunacy governing Washington, our collective sense of impending doom, our fear of war. The sound of a tinny radio drifted over from somewhere in the painting area, and we cursed the stupidity of the tune, the stupidity of the upper class painters, the stupidity of their work. It was all so flat, stale, contrived, lacking in emotion, and we were young.

("I'm hungry," I said.

("So am I," she echoed.

(I never had any money; I had to hustle to obtain bus fare out to school. Today her pockets were empty too; if she had had anything, we would now be sharing it.

(Cathy took care of me as best she could. Quite often, when we went to the basement store for supplies, she would fill in an amount on the blank check her mother had given her that was large enough to cover my needs, those I couldn't cover myself by pilfering.

(She said, as she offered another cigarette, that she would raid her father's quarter jar so that tomorrow we could obtain chips, chocolate and Coca-cola from the machines in the basement. "Maybe later in the week I can get some money out of my mother and we can go out and go to Pasquale's to eat after school. You have to eat, you know."

("Yea. Thanks, that'd be real nice."

(After school she would go home to her parents' house and eat anything she wanted from the cabinets. Mine were several hundred miles away, and I would go home to my cold miniscule apartment and deliberated between going to bed with an empty belly or going to the trouble of boiling a half cup ration of macaroni, to be eaten heavily salted and peppered.

(I would go home, disembark from my bus, and climb the long concrete staircase to my door. I would unlock the door, open it, and hold it open long enough to let it in. Böll's wolf was mine, was me; it was the shadow that hung over me and stared balefully out of my sunken eyes. And I would let it in.

(I rubbed my belly. Thursdays I went home with her, partook of her family's hospitality and spent the night in the guestroom. This was all because of a Friday class scheduled such that the most convenient bus I could take would deposit me at the school three hours early. But it was only Monday, so I rubbed my belly some more.

(It was during a pause in our conversation that they approached, the two girls with whom we had recently become acquainted. The one was short, nicely built with dark skin, eyes and long brown hair. The other was taller, thinner with a Nordic face, blue eyes and fine blonde hair. They pulled up chairs and set down their supplies. I eyed them hungrily.

("Do either of you have a spare quarter or two you could lend us? Neither of us have eaten, and we're both broke."

(I couldn't tell if they took my request for granted, or whether they were shocked by my brazenness, maybe both. Nevertheless, the two went through their purses before admitting they had none.

("And the only thing edible that I have," the dark one added in jest, "is the leftover sugar I brought for my coffee this morning. You're certainly welcome to it." She smiled and produced the plastic bag of sugar out of her metal box.

(I looked at it for a minute, then accepted it. "Thanks," I said as I poured some into the palm of my hand. I ate it as gracefully as a tabby lapping milk.

(While the other two gazed on in astonishment, Cathy blurted out, "Gross, how can you do that?"

("It tastes good, you want some?" and as she grimaced, I poured another handful and ate it.

(I poured out the remainder. When I had finished it, I knew I had eaten very well, as the sweetness lingered on my tongue and my stomach howled ever louder.)

My apartment was not mine, I reneged on the deal, nothing was working except how it worked to fall apart ever more completely.

That white shit just wasn't going away, no matter how much I ignored it, it kept right on spreading sludgy sick yellowish white shit growing in the back of my throat. It wasn't sore, nor did I feel bad. My situation had become desperate before the holidays, but then I had visited my family for a week, eating constantly. As a Christmas gift my sisters had made me want to cry for a cardboard box of food, sensible basics and sweet and treat things as they remembered me old habits, so I was feeling fine, back home at my apartment my home, a vacation of leisure and sleeping late and so much food I could eat two small meals a day, excluding snacking which was peanuts and cheese, dry cereal and chocolate covered cherries for three or four days. After a week, I tilt my head, mouth wide open, to the optimum angle where the bulb over the bathroom sink shines on the back of my throat that I see in the mirror. Cultivating it is now covered in thick yellow-white slime, sore enough to drive me through several cartons of soda-on-special, tired and a little weak which I disregard, I'm continually tired, I always am, it's a part of my personality, I like to sleep, being awake is just preparation for slumber. But white shit in my throat, for over a week, and soda-on-special, that's unnatural.

I was advised to see a doctor, by my friends, my mother and my friends' mothers; Cathy told me about her family doctor, his office was within walking distance, so I made an appointment.

The first real thing the doctor said was to ask me what the hell I was doing walking through the snow and sub-freezing cold to his office, what the hell I was doing being out of bed. Then he told me I had mono--I hadn't been kissed in over a year!--very severe, wondering how I could even stand up, adding that my white blood count was the highest he'd ever seen, about four times the average case.

Thinking fondly on my apartment that was no longer mine because I made the decision after the decision began manifesting its early presence through a habit I developed of oversleeping and through oversleeping several times arriving at the conclusion to not get up at all nor even try to get to school however late as a resulting mixture of my natural inclination to sleep and long held belief that being asleep is preferable to being awake in that it seems that the sole purpose of being awake is to prepare for sleep and getting up before one wakes up naturally is unnatural and the very thought of having to get up at a specified time in the morning and knowing that I have to has often proven cause enough to induce me into tyrannically inescapable bouts of insomnia counting off the few and ticking fewer hours before the time I must get up even though still wide awake, in a potent alliance with behavior modifying effects of the times I did get up anyway and all the effort expended in reaching school it would seem should deem a reward greater than the general unpleasantness of the art school or the specific defeat I received the one time I did make it out there however completely against my will on that particular day only to discover that the school was closed due to the bad weather which I had to plow through again on foot the miles for hours before the next bus just to get back to my apartment that became no longer mine because instead of being a pupil of great and constant punctuality I metamorphosed into a pupil of tardiness and absenteeism until I decided it wasn't worth the bother to ever get up at all again since I had nothing but contempt for the school anyway and nothing in the means of the supplies required to complete the idiotically simple and obvious assignments which boiled down to a definition that I wasn't attending art school which was what I told my mother and henceforth my apartment was no longer mine when the lease expired.

My apartment that became not mine with its cheap, tacked together look and basement feel because it was a basement that had been tacked cheaply together into two separate apartments and a storage/boiler room that I could look into through the holes in the thin masonite wall by the tub in my bathroom, holes I would plug up with wads of toilet paper against the men from somewhere that sometimes were in the room, kicking around in the junkpiles of broken furniture and rusted through sinks, guffawing and grunting and, I was certain, dislodging the wads and peering back through the holes; sometimes I couldn't remember whether I had forgotten to block back up the largest one that I favored after taking a bath (generally the only time I looked through it aside from when I grew desperate pacing the apartment a madman of boredom) or had actually done so (and they in their boredom had pushed out the plug for a view).

Fitting and comfortable, my apartment became me, in that it suited me perfectly, and in a sense was like living inside of myself, that is, it was myself incarnated in a structure, it had my character and thoughts and to an extent I developed its as it developed mine; it was the structure, the shell, the body, and sitting inside I was the brain, I just sat there and thought, an existence self-contained and everything became a part of one fluid movement. The four burners on the stove I light and turn up to HIGH for heat, the sofa I sleep on with a few blankets in preference to ever pulling it out into the sofabed and a worn foam metal tubing cramped stained mattress, the paneling thin and flimsy to the touch, the mail slot in the door that looks right in on the sofa or out onto the street, the door lock that I can open with my driver's license whenever I forget the key, a splendid view of a traffic light that plays soft molded patterns of green-yellow-red on the curtains all through the night, changing just for me when the cars are all home and their drivers asleep.

For weeks a dirty sock hangs limply over one of the steam pipes running along the ceiling, I like how it looks and see no reason to remove it.

My apartment that was no longer mine I was sorry to leave, I liked it so much, but as I was leaving when it no longer was mine I felt sort of glad, relieved, for I was beginning to have to admit that some of the reasons I liked it weren't all the good, and carried on to extremes as some of them were in the process of being, could end up rather bad.

Before I left the apartment I agonized about it every time I left, I rarely left the apartment unless it was absolutely necessary, for school when I would, and for friends' houses when I could if it was paramount that I have something decent to eat like a peanut butter sandwich when I was down to macaroni; at night when I needed to walk the half mile to the store for cigarettes, or when I had enough change to have to have a can of soda, a bag of chips, I sat waiting and waiting until I exploded, just in case someone happened over, which was rare, then I jump up and put on my coat, write a note that I leave on the door in case someone comes over they'll know to wait, that I've just gone to the store and I'll be right back, and when I get back I take the note off the door so that when they come over they won't wait outside for me while I'm sitting inside, sometimes I'm sitting inside days at a stretch.

Cathy gave me an odd look when I told her about my plan if only I had the money. What I really wanted to do was take pieces of heavy black cardboard and tape them permanently over all the windows and then never come out. I thought it was a great idea but she just seemed worried, "You can't do that, they'd come and break down the door and take you away."

So I was leaving my apartment that was no longer mine and I went to the house that I had visited before, the house shared by the sugar girl, I went with a favor in mind due to my apartment full of possessions in my apartment soon not to be mine. I asked her if I could store my things in the house until I figured something out. She was extremely amenable and seemed almost pleased.

"Where are you going to live?"

"Oh, I don't know, I guess I'll find someplace to stay, some floor to sleep on, it really doesn't matter."

I came to the house and had every intention of leaving.

"Well, why don't you just stay here? You can sleep on the floor in my room if you want to."

One floor seemed as good as the next, I came to the house.

In the morning when I woke or was woken up, sleeping in the room I was not alone, sleep slipped away in a spiral. It was too early ten, and I was silly caught naked in a sleeping bag on my bed of the floor curled around the heater, in spring, winter habit, in the livingroom glowing midmorning, the windows all night open.

Miss Chile was sitting at the table watching me when I kept my eyes open. He was big and sweet, dressed close to the peak after pure fashion. He also came resplendent with a three-liter bottle of cheap chablis.

"Waie-ell, would you care for a little wine?"

Down around the floor it smells really bad, sour and smutty, a reassuring and personal sort of perfume. The rug made the smell of the sleeping bag and I was long convinced when I wake up I smell like the rug, musky I felt shameful, long unwashed which is often true. Wall to wall in the room, old and cheap, the yellow carpet more grey, cat shit and cat piss, vomits, spilled beer and bongwater, cigarettes and food bits.

Slipping out of the sleeping bag after blindly, thus hardly discreetly, pulling on a small pair of gym trunks, same fragrance, I thought sitting up and drinking some wine, fast, would cast a vast improvement on the situation.

I wasn't much of a wine drinker, that cheap white shit tastes like something going bad, rotten and tart down my throat in slight sips. Halfway through the second glass the wine made its important point, my mouth was numbed with parchness tasting nothing, without even holding my nose I could drink as though water. So I did, still amazed each time I became empty.

Chile divvied up the dregs of the bottle even with my glass still two-thirds full, but this is so much fun, my laughter annihilates the causes, I will go force myself to pee and make room for more fun. A little more is another same size of the same. I weaken with the new onslaught, I can barely manage to smoke cigarettes, I lie limpid and unattended, less pay much attention to that glass: the wine builds unnoticeably until it with a sip tastes ten times worse then ever. All sorts of people start coming in and out of the backdoor, through the kitchen into our livingroom, so many doors to leave by and I can't say anything distracting, unless prodded when I can stumble, stammer in spurts a whip-cracking witticism that's so funny to see him so drunk. They go away. Those people are a band and friends practicing upstairs, Chile goes up, leaving, leaving me with a half done bottle of wine greenish setting in the middle of the round table by the window, the table plastic and white and bright yellow, I sit there as I am the only one in the room, downstairs, stuck there immobile, the sun crept hot in the room, light another cigarette, mouth foul, another drink, not so nice, another drink, my is: spinning. I sense it, back up to rise, I don't believe it, no, it won't happen, stay calm, stand up slow and swallow back. I vomited a ferocious geyser splattering the table just before the bottle, instantaneously a joyous second gushing, then I just keep aiming at the table, one more good one, good vomits come in threes, a fourth a fifth one, I gag like a cat a few more times, not an odd strand of mucus left in my stomach, my throat raw and charred. I feel great, I feel a thousand times better than before, just as drunk by without feeling sick at all anymore; my vomit is great, it's just a whole lot of wine spilling all over the table, I clear the important things off the table, then, newspaper to keep it from dripping off the edge and stomped on the carpet where it already has and where I'd missed. The sponge in the kitchen and, while there, and a sauce pan from the stove, and I'll wipe the wine off the table into the pan but no, soak it up with newspapers, use the pan to pour off a puddle in the seat of one of the molded plastic chairs and one of the guys from upstairs is suddenly walking into the room. He looks around young and incredulously, "Did you just throw up all over the table?"

And I weak and pale and giddy, "No, I just spilled a whole bunch of wine."

"Oh, come on, you threw up, didn't you?"

"But it was just like spilling a whole bunch of wine."

Even though I clean up completely and brush my teeth, change clothes and nothing smells unusual before anyone else ventures on in, everyone of course knows about how I threw up all over the table. I reply always, "Yea, it was great, I've never felt better."

I've gone off again, I don't know how I manage but I do and I've gone and gone off again. I don't remember what about, what it was that set me off, but it doesn't really matter, off off off; I was sitting in the livingroom on the couch and it just descended upon me, fell on top of me with a sudden crash and the walls were four sides to a box with a bottom and top and the door the only way out so out I ran, not having time to bother with what everyone else in the room thought. I'm walking down the street in the night that's dark and warm left with this vague sense of worthlessness and hysteria that drives me to walk, walk, try and walk it off so I can't sit and brood and kill myself for something that makes no sense that makes the only sense in my head right now.

Up the street, way up the street, it's calm and quiet, thickly treed and residential, calming myself, try so hard to calm myself down, it's okay it's okay, it's going to be okay it'll go away, I amuse myself inventing distractions, looking in lighted windows without caring what's inside and watching how skillfully my feet maneuver the cracks and buckles in the sidewalk--it's almost amazing until I look up and stumble.

Sometime between then and now is how the years have passed, and between now and then how the rest will likewise be wasted.

We can sit and wait and watch, maybe act, and the days of no-future will drift by with the same apprehension that greets each new scene of a complex and tortured night-long nightmare.

We sit on church steps, at tables of late-night dives, on park benches, on curbs with our heads cradled in our hands, waiting to die, wanting to cry, smoking one cigarette after another until we know it is time to go home. It is winter, it is cold; a cool breeze blows through our legs, maybe it is summer. Of course, it is all the time.

I sit in a laundromat as it approaches closing time. I am so glad that it closes at nine instead of staying open all wretched night. The other people eye me out of suspicion or curiosity, children and adults. The attendant is a withered old troll with few teeth and a hunchback.

A three-generation black family with more clothes than a cheap department store does their wash. Mama is programmed routine, and the little girl attempts gymnastics as her underwear peeps out from the top of her tiny pants. Grandpa with two legs that bend at the knee becoming brown plastic is as sour as his many years.

A young white trash girl with barely budding hints of puberty does the family laundry, with her younger sister in tow. She does the job stoically, in her long worn handed down coat, and my rare sense of protection flares forth in an intense desire to marry her, take her away from all this, and give her all those there good things in life. But I know my situation is no better than hers; we share a common element, for which we were seemingly predestined, and from which there is no escape.

Where do we go when there is no place to go? I always want to go home, but it too is nothing. No home is the proper answer. At home I want to go again, but there is nowhere to go.

Last night I stared for hours at the pipes running along the bathroom ceiling, wanting nothing more than to be hanging from them, life drained away. Another night has fallen, and action and inaction are futile. I want to be of a race that sleeps dreamlessly forever.

In a mediocre book I read, the disturbed young boy of attempted suicide found the ending happy in the form of a loving young girl. A friend and I laughed at two in the morning; we knew it was boyfriends and girlfriends that made you want to die. No solution, just another facet of the problem.

Several hours past midnight, and the cold darkness bites viciously. It hurts your numbed face, and your numbed mind screams out an abstract string of whys, echoing from day to day.

The street is a narrow beach of inches of fresh snow, disturbed by only a few tire tracks and your footprints. The traffic is way less than occasional, and every step you take is yet another to be retraced when you turn back home.

The cold and wet climbs in through the holes in your shoes, and the chorus of tomorrow's whys echo down the street just ahead.

Cathy clambered from her mattresses in the cellar about the time I shucked my sleeping bag in the livingroom. Nobody much else was around and neither of us had anything to do that afternoon, so we started drinking wine. It was doomy gloomy outside, not quite raining but looking like the death of the planet. We figured maybe the vino would lift our spirits, play some records; maybe we'd get out the paints and have a play-day.

Instead we got really drunk really fast. It was an accident. It just happened. But that was okay. We both got wildly excited. Tari started being around, giggling at us whenever she passed through the livingroom. We started dancing really punk rock, shoving each other. I wound up staggering into the kitchen, and on my way back in I stumbled against the door frame, bouncing directly into Cathy and we crashed to the floor in one heap, where we started sort of wrestling. I suddenly started thinking that maybe we were supposed to start making-out, which scared me witless. It seemed like maybe she wanted to be making-out--I knew I wanted to. But I was so drunk I wasn't sure I'd be able to remember how to make-out. And definitely in case she didn't really want to make-out I didn't want to be the dumb drunk jerk who suddenly tried to start making-out with her. She probably wouldn't want to be my friend anymore, which would suck. And I didn't want to become one of those stories about guys who get drunk and then start trying to make-out with girls who don't want to make-out with them. I'd have to do a better job of killing myself if I came down to that.

She didn't try to kiss me or anything that I could tell, so after a few minutes it seemed appropriate to disentangle and try to stand up again. Which was just as well because there was Chile coming in through the porch door.

"Awwww, what are you two doing? Losing some mystique?"

"We're drunk!"

"We're falling-down drunk!"

"Weeeelll, are you ready to drink some more?"

Chile came bearing big jug wine.

"But we don't have any straws," I wailed.

"You are drunk!"

But not as drunk as I was going to get. Same with Cathy. Chile could drink the entire gallon and it'd be hard to tell. The only time I'd seen him as obviously drunk as he'd just found me was the Endtables show at the Louisville School of Art. He'd taken a wrong spin that night and went down heavy, twisting his ankle, trying to stand back up only to collapse again to the floor. He sang out the set writhing like that, humping the linoleum, flopping around lewdly like a beached whale in heat.

After a few rounds Tari came in to join us, and together they decided that Chile should indeed tease up both Cathy's hair and mine. Cathy and I looked at each other. If it was such a great idea, why didn't either of them have hair as long as ours? Not that we had any real say in the matter by that point.

"But, but, what does it do? what do you mean?" I slurred.

"Weeeelll, it makes you look glamorous," Chile replied.

That sold me. So they started ratting us up. It wasn't until they were well into it that Tari thought to mention, "Of course, it'll take you a couple of weeks to brush out the mats." But that didn't matter, we always had mats anyway, and I could see how Cathy was growing more glamorous by the minute.

Then Charles was coming in the door.

"My lord, what is going on here?"

"Glamor in the making," Tari quipped.

You could see he was glad he'd gotten on that bus. Not that he had much interest in mutilating his own hair. He had natural poof.

Once they were finished and we'd gotten lots of looking-glass time it was decided that we'd all walk up to the Purple Plum and try stuff on. It was a bit of a walk up the street, but they had the best used clothes. I was enthusiastic, and sure of my footedness. It sounded like a grand outing. We had to go show off, promenade up the strip, otherwise what would be the point? Glamor means more than mirrors.

I was wearing my hospital pajama bottoms and decided my shirt should be Tari's zebra-striped plastic raincoat. For shoes I wore her white rubber go-go cowgirl boots. Fortunately these were a little too large for her which meant they were only somewhat too small for me. And they stretched!

As we hopped off the porch I insisted that we first stop in next door and get some R.C.s for the walk. I could not be dissuaded. We got some heavy stares from some of the customers, but all the people behind the counter just sort of giggled or rolled their eyes. They whispered back to their friends back in the kitchen to have a look out front. We were just the latest variation in things they'd all seen before.

But once we got inside the Purple Plum all the wine turned so sour. I couldn't think of any place I'd rather be less. All the positive energy short-circuited and I felt myself plummeting. The place was claustrophobic with clothes. I didn't want to try anything on, I didn't even want to accidentally brush against any fabric. All of it had all these smells. I could think of nothing but closets, the closets of so many people I wouldn't even want to know. How did these people get their clothes to smell so weird? I was like a spring wire, wound and wound, and then I bolted for the door.

I went out and sat on the stoop and smoked cigarettes. I waited there for ages.

Sam didn't have to talk me into joining him, nor Charles over visiting escaping for the day his parents' downtown, but no amount of cajoling would tempt the others. Tari was keeping clean and Hondo was trying to shake a hangover, while Barb was more interested in housework--some motivating factor I didn't understand ritually drove her to take the forty-five minute bus trip in from her family's East End box house, just to get high and clean our house, spend the weekend to do it, sleep over and wash the dishes, wipe down the appliances, clear off the tables, sweep the floors, vacuum the carpet, take out the garbage, mop the kitchen and bathroom, scrub out the toilet and tub.

The three of us split the five tabs we had between us, shaving a third off the two odd ones with the single-edge blade I kept in my wallet, the essential implement for art death and drugs. We sit in the livingroom for the thirty some minute wait. Barb crossed back and forth through the room, dull and earthy in the print wrap-around Tari had given her, beige with brown curlicues and maroon dots, like a throw for a worn sofa, and a loose chocolate gauze peasant blouse. When she was out of the room we ranted in low voices about her obsession for cleaning, she was just getting bonkier by the day, Sam couldn't stand it anymore when she came to his house, she would badger him with her piteous miseries and then go on a cleaning rampage, and after she'd leave he'd never be able to find anything he wanted, nothing was where he normally left it. "And look at the way she dresses, can you even believe it? Where'd she get that match up?" The first tinglings were starting, Sam's mouth moved fast and clipped, my brain felt puffed up to the size of a loaf of bread. "I swear every time I've seen her since Tari gave her that thing she's been wearing it. You'd think it's the only thing she owns, except those blue jeans of hers. And god, it just looks like a cheap tablecloth you'd find at a K-Mart in Shively. Brown earth mother or some Indian squaw wrapped in that tablecloth doing the dishes all day long. All shriveled up from dish water like she's a dried-up old apple doll. She looks like the mongoloid daughter Little Joe keeps locked in the root cellar on Little House on the Prairie." A shriek and a giggle and he'd coined the phrase proclaiming her The Prairie Housewife. She made it worse and better returning through the room from Tari's changed into her bathrobe. Only her head hands and foot-tips peeped out. With the tub freshly scoured it was safe for her to take a bath. Sam laughed at first glance. The robe was some old ratty faded light brown terrycloth, long and wrapped tightly around, she looked like a gigantic gnarled corncob doll. She smiled at him and flashed on in to start the bathwater. She came back out right when he was going to say it again anyway, so he shirked and shrieked, crying out, "Oh no, it's the Return of the Prairie Housewife!" She stuck out her tongue and continued on into Tari's. When she came back out with her two towels, only halfway across the middle room, Sam was crossing his arms in front of his face, writhing and whining, "Ahh! ahhhh! Here comes The Prairie Housewife!" She had to go back to Tari's to fetch her shampoo and hairbrush. Then she went back to smoke a cigarette, out to check the bath, turned off the taps and went back for her cigarettes and an ashtray. Sam couldn't stop howling he was on such a roll, I shielded my face with my hands and laughed my insides into cramped knots of pain. Charles rocked and smiled and grinned while she first thought us cute and drug-addled making silly nonsense, but the nonsense continued, only growing funnier to us when she began taking it personal, "Shut up!" as though we were making fun of her. That she got so upset put an interesting edge to the humor of the situation. She went back for her plastic container of special soap, the first snort on her return set her off shouting, then an earnest series of questions. What funnier thing than to have her turn immensely stupid in defense before my once adoring eyes. She thought we were tripped out of our minds, she addressed us as though we were, stripped of our decency, she probed relentlessly for the obscure reasons we were having at her, but the drugs were just beginning to kick in only right about then. She neither understood nor believed that we'd been seized by the giggles simply because in that robe she looked like a prairie housewife, instead demanding to know what was wrong with her robe, she couldn't help it, it wasn't her fault, what did we mean shaking our heads like that? We were glad when we finally managed to laugh her out of the room off in a huff to her bath. Her baths always lasted hours.

Now that we were really sparkling we decided that we should go up front and visit Tari, see what she was up to. She was just lying on her bed flipping through her Glamour collection, the way she smiled looking up, we were probably more interesting. She giggled recognizing how our eyes crinkled and glittered, we fidgeted around three rockets roaring, dancing the wit around while we all ragged on Barb. Nobody liked her as much as they once had, say last spring or even six months ago, we laughed but pretty quickly savagely she became, in discussion as in person, boring. Sam put on Amii Stewart doing "Knock on Wood"--cranking it loud enough to abuse the speakers--and started dancing for us. I jumped up joining him to do our routine, ending with Sam begging to use Tari's make-up. Then he began insisting that they should do me over, Tari should do a full number on me. The warmth of their voices sapped me, I sat on the edge of the bed flaccid and eager. She bent over close, a smile of charm as she looked right at me, appraising the planes of my face turning my head in her hands. I was wearing briefs underneath, but my hospital pajama bottoms were so flimsy I began panicking that it might start getting noticeably hard. Tari was wearing just a short haltertop day dress, tight around her bottom but loose and open at the neck and arms. Sam was standing facing the mirror over the mantel working up a vampish blush. Charles had brought his camera up with him, loaded with a fresh roll of color film, he went into the livingroom to get it. Tari arranged the eye shadows on the carpet and knelt down beside me. Each time she reached down for one I could see her breast through the slackened armhole. Busty though she was, she was relaxing at home without a bra. Most of my direct view when her face concentrating on mine drove me self-consciously away went right down her front as it billowed with her every leaning, a whole stretch of cleavage and an ample eyeful of each breast swaying with the movements of her arms. I realized I didn't have anything to worry about, I lacked some span of attention, I could completely relax. My dick had decided to behave. To do some subtle eye-lining she pulled a milk crate on over in front of me and while she sat down and got settled, I got shot several long looks down the tunnel between her thighs to the soft wall of her panties. Her legs were just as nice a sight, as pleasant as the water stains on the wallpaper, the light cutting broad swathes through the windows, Sam at himself in the mirror. Pretty soon she finished with me, standing up by the mirror to have a gander at the new me, gawking and strutting like an excited peacock, pretty and glamorous the way a drag queen is and a horse-faced girl all made up isn't. Tari helped Charles smooth up his eyes while Sam and I danced.

Barb came in the room slick from the bath, Prairie Housewife fished out of the crik. Even Tari laughed so she had to as well, after a mild protest. The bit dampened her enthusiasm at our display but not for long. Her touching at me gave me the shivers, the way an aquatic mammal flapping me with its flippers would. Thankfully it was time for us to leave Tari in peace, she wanted to start getting ready for her rendezvous with the bath now, "Okay," she shooed us, "it's time for the boys to get out," so we decided to revisit the livingroom, see what'd been going on out there. Nothing much happening, so we sat down. I hopped up right away to make sure I got in a piss during the bathing intermission.

Tari paused on the way in her kimono to say something about us twinkling like stars, gleaming like a row of polished teapots, we beamed we grinned, I could hear my teeth grinding. Hondo passed through a few times without stopping or talking. Finally Barb reemerged, now in those blue jeans so the joke didn't work, she just pushed at Sam's shoulder and then sat down. She wasn't mad anymore, but she didn't stay very long, our conversations simply wouldn't mesh. Hondo was more fun than us. We talked and marveled about the lovely day outside and decided we should go to the park and kept on talking and remembering we had decided to go to the park for almost an hour. There were more immediate things to consider, down, my hands, random blotches of colors, fingers knotty jointed and distended, greasy with black gunk under the nails no matter how often I wash them and use the nails to pick each other white, twist my wrist and be astounded as always that that turns my hand upside down, and there's the palm the exact color and mottling as salami, the same fingers from this side embarrassingly thick and stubby, hideous holding the perfectly cylindrical cigarette, the smoke rising straight up in a solid line two or three inches where it mysteriously explodes in sworls, and I bring it slowly to my lips and inhale, it doesn't taste like anything and the smoke catches like dust on the cobwebs inside my mouth. I scratched at my head some more. So we were going to the park weren't we? We were going to pile in Sam's car and drive to the park. Walk around, it was getting late in the afternoon. Strangely, Hondo had taken up with Barb in a wide-scale assault on the kitchen. The drunkard's penance. They didn't bother speaking to us, only an occasional glance that made us feel in the way, jerks for not joining the effort, three piles of filth impeding the next front of the war. Time to get out, the bathroom was clear, Charles and Sam took turns, coming back fresh-faced and ready to go. I stood up ready and they told me to go change my pants. "What? why?" I refused. "Because they're not pants, they're your pajamas." "So? That never stopped me from wearing them outside before. It's too hot. Besides, we're going to drive, so what does it matter?" Sam answered straight, "Because I'm not going to be seen out in public with you, you look like an old drag queen, the morning after a long hard night, and hon, I'm talking rock bottom here." "Well fine, go without me then, I'll have plenty of fun hanging out here by myself," but we were all still sitting and it took another ten minutes to reach Sam's compromise, echoed by Charles, "Well, then, at least go wash your face off." However reluctant, I knew that made sense, that much make-up would be pushing the limits for some skags we might encounter, though I wasn't going to risk soap in my eyes. That's what I said when I returned. Charles replied, "Hey, why don't you change your shirt and let's get rolling." My shirt was my favorite of the batch of old V-necked t-shirts I'd acquired from my dad's drawer back in the old house. The area the shirt covered was more holes than fabric, the whole effect in anticipation of fashion but purely from rot. I obediently changed realizing I couldn't go out showing that much flesh.

Charles climbed straight in the back. He could quell his distrust of cars by avoiding the highest casualty front passenger seat. That's where I sat. He wasn't concerned about death, it was losing a limb or two that paralyzed him. I agreed, but I liked looking out the front window so much I didn't care, a dog sticking its head out into the wind and drooling. I wanted to be able to see the crash, and it seemed reasonable that if I woke up in a hospital with something horrifyingly wrong, it would probably be easy enough to find some way to get rid of myself.

We took a secondary street to avoid the hassle and terror of the traffic on Bardstown Road; also the police in case the car decided to start swerving on us. We almost died only once, when Sam head-turned chattering melodic babble forgot that there were intersections, some with a suspended red eye glaring at us while other cars crossed out path. Charles and I screamed, "Whoa!" and his head twirled around shouting, "What? what?" All the cars honked and skidded and we managed to say alive and laugh, remarking for the next several blocks how much the car was just like being at an amusement park. Up Cherokee Road, a two-seventy around General Castleman's statue, down into the heart of Cherokee Triangle slipping past the scalene sliver of Willow Park where old people sit and talk and young people walk their tots and shit their dogs, under the sprawling gaze of the huge old house the Moonies bought, up the hill where the road sweeps along the park's perimeter and then back down, disregarding the stop sign at the bottom as well as the traffic circle around Daniel Boone's statue, zipping with the downgrade's momentum through the intersection right into Cherokee Park, up the winding road towards Hogan's Fountain. Halfway to the pinnacle, a strip of gravel on the drop-off side of the road, Sam pulled the car across the opposing lane and jerked us to a dusty stop.

We walked alongside the curves up the remaining incline, the cigarette I lit coated the inside of my mouth with moth wings. Whirls of breezes tickling up my legs taunted me that I was really way out in public, really way off my head, strolling around in my loungewear. Too late now. No sense worrying, if the carful of skags drives by and scream faggot! they'd be doing it anyway. When the cop drives by and sees me in hospital pajamas, he'll stop and try to talk to me and my tongue'll be making no sense, so he'll take me down to General and by nightfall they'll have packed me off to Central State. Then I'll be beaten, locked in finally falling asleep, and wake up really pissed, and committed.

So surprised we were upon reaching the top without incident we had to sit down and rest on the cool carved stone or cast concrete fountain rim. The road split caressing around the fountain, a safe little island unpeopled save us, no chance of somebody weird suddenly popping out of nowhere to be real scary. But after a short while we started getting nervous, restless, we were on exhibit for every passing car, and some walking guy weaving aimless arcs on the outskirts where asphalt met grass had begun swinging onto the road, coming closer on in to us, probably he was watching us. Sam had a joint, he thought we should smoke it, we thought we should smoke it. The fountain was the wrong place, so we marched off, in the opposite direction from Mr. Crazy, across a sloping field of freshly mown grass to the wooded area where the ground dropped twice as sharply. A walk along only ten yards of the edge of the clearing before we found it. Though I've never found any teepee evidence, it is true that every large, partly wooded park, in any fair to huge sized city, is criss-crossed with Indian trails. We followed the path down the hill at a forty-five degree pitch, stumbling sliding along root stubs and rock stumps, loose gravely dirt, until a fallen tree lay across the way. Everything back behind the crest of the woods was out of sight, the trunk was soft and decayed, melted sturdily into the embankment, facing downhill a rather nice natural bench. In the middle of smoking the joint, a couple appeared on the horizon, two giants lumbering at the top of our world, probably wishing we weren't there so they could come down and fuck. We discreetly finished the joint, passing it in the shadow of the log. They lingered like nature lovers while the pot seeped slowly then struck with a thud. They still hung around, surely watching us while we worried about it. Time to be off, wander the trails, but I kept insisting hold off, wait a few minutes. Finally the couple went away so I could go have a quick pee. Wait, just a minute. I stumbled through the brush for privacy, and when I returned I was alone. I couldn't see Sam and Charles, or anyone, nothing at all moving against, between, through the trees. I called their names. No answer. I scrambled up to the clearing. No one. I set off back down the trail, at a fork going left because it didn't plunge farther down the hill. At a second split I did the same for the same. Concern with finding my party wore away as I started enjoying walking in the wilds just for the hell of it, readjusting to a ground not hard flat and concrete, but then I began wondering if I was getting myself lost, somehow miles from the starting. Shortly after I became convinced I was lost, my path took a climb up a quick bank and opened out from the deciduous rim, about twenty sheepish yards from the car. I shuffled over to the car, of course they weren't there, so I sat up on the hood, securing myself to a ride home. My spine, tired, ached, so I leaned back like in a fancy car seat and just lay down, legs rising slightly to crooked knees, feet resting on the bumper, closing my eyes when looking past the ring of tree tops down into the bottomless sky made me dizzy. In a bit I heard voices I pretended were in the dream of the sleep I was pretending. My eyes wouldn't stay closed. The voices were my friends. We asked what had happened to us. They hadn't understood that I was dashing off for a pee, they'd turned and continued down the trail assuming I was right behind. And when I wasn't, they had no idea where I was. Now we were all at the car, but across the road, up the long steep grassy hill were the swing sets. We hugged up there and played around, swinging way up high watching the sun set over the city spread out below. The slashes of magenta, orange, rose and lavender gracefully decayed into a flat even black navy, still always the unnatural burnt flesh tone hovering at the horizon. We decided to get going. All the family picnics and volleyball games had become loud packs of guys and solitary lurking shadows. Every now and again some girl turned up in the park naked raped and dead, softly decomposing among last year's leaves or bloating obscenely in Beargrass Creek.

At Sam's suggestion we would drive through the Highlands to his house in Irish Hill. The core of the acid was dissipating, leaving us with the dirty edge, a feeling of being too thinly stretched and fragile to face the straight folks at 1069. We stopped there just long enough for me to run in and change out of my pajamas into corduroys. At his house he had some food we could throw together to appease the weakness of rediscovered appetites, that's how it felt, and more importantly, a big bag of pot to continue the magic, soften the ragged come down, prolong the ride in a lower gear.

We sank down in the softness of cushions, on the floor, a guest bed, an old easy chair stuffed with sighs, we sat, lay, lounged basking in the dim yellow washes of low-watt lamplight, warm and wombish. At his tabletop Buddhist shrine across the room Sam kept a dozen or so candles going and at least as many sticks of incense. Instead of rolling joints, Sam decided to teach us how to smoke out of a chillum, pulling two out of his paraphernalia cigar box, finely carved and patterned ivory or alabaster, filling up the bowl of the cleaner one while we admired the other. The first few go rounds were more amusing than effective, effective trial and error, my fingers bloating to seal up the cracks with practice. After awhile I realized in a spontaneous jerk of my head that the shift had occurred, I was now a thick stoned cloud vaguely underscored by the wakeful acid dregs. I felt too sweet to talk, my brain was enjoying itself too much to be bothered with figuring out things to say. Any foul thought that crept up got kicked out of the house. I was having fun, listening to them talk, playing Henry Mancini theme music, latin beat, old calypso, part of a scratched punk compilation, Hank William's best, ABBA really loud . . . mastering the chillum albeit two-fistedly. I was happiness oozing, fanning out from me, the shaded lamps dispelled a light casting everything glanced a muted color warmth, the yellow high spots softening in rings to the general tone, shadows cutting out shapes jaggedly across the room, even the darkest corner seemed a cozy little nook. I grasped it all a sudden. I was pretty amazed. Here I was, steeped in contentment, happy and having a blast. Stuff this girlfriend frenzy, this existential hysteria that seemed to rule my life--I was by myself and having that good time. Just some good friends, and if you can't stay high, mope about that instead of the dumb shit. That made me sit up and light another cigarette, grinning with sense, really too banal to talk about so I couldn't answer what was so funny, except for an infuriating smile broadening to lips' limit. Sam started jabbering about how I looked just like Dick Van Dyke with my face all asmile, no news to me, "Shut up and fill that bowl," I demanded, "I'm ready, I am feeling too good tonight."

It kept getting later really fast, whenever anyone got up to look at the clock in the other room, another hour was gone. Around eleven-thirty Charles began announcing that he'd be leaving pretty soon, but then we had another round and the next time it was almost one, he'd missed the last bus home, might as well stay and smoke some more. The last stop on the bus for us was another hour and a half down the road, where it was pointless to do anything but go to bed. We would open our mouths but our conversation was a hundred variations on the word yawn. The last round clanked the knell, time for sleep, this wasn't an all-nighter, the dawn would be ugly and scattered, the tortuous prelude: the green dinosaur industrial dumpers sweeping through the area, waking up the birds singing in the dark, twittering hell, blues emerging and then the long low rumbles and hisses of the first buses. Same kept offering to let us crash there; I was ready for him to turn out the light. Charles wanted to hit the road. I knew he was going no matter what, but I changed my mind anyway to go along and head out with him. It had gotten cool, the dew long fallen. I had been sitting with my arms pulled inside my t-shirt, wrapped around under and over hands tucked in the pockets of my underarms. Same gave me breezy dress shirt, pink with sets of thin white stripes, his mother had made for him, he gave it to me and told me to keep it. New shirt, I was ready to roll.

We walked out of Irish Hill with no problem, even white trash have to sleep, on up Bardstown Road beautiful when deserted, arc lam lit like a night movie set, the signals changing green yellow red out of habit, the suspended green arrows and red Xs of the lane indicators strung festively around like Japanese lanterns. When we got in front of the house we came to a pause. I was surprised, I told Charles he was more than welcome and probably should spend the night, that forty-five minute walk downtown on Oak Street was pretty weird even during the day. He shrugged off, he'd done it a fair amount of times this late and'd never gotten hassled, besides, the walk up from Sam's had woken him up. Mostly he just wanted to sleep in his own bed, primarily so he would wake up in his own bed. He'd just wake up in a few hours all groggy and miserable on the couch, and then he'd have to bother with getting home to his bed for the real sleep. We waved off and went to our separate beds.

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