[She sits there, struggling to observe]
"Well somehow, Client Leon, I've conversed with
everybody in your house -- EXCEPT your wife. Although I've encountered her several times, and she seems sweet, we've never actually attempted an introduction: what's her name?"
"Oh . . ." Leon begins, only pausing to insert this dismissive jewish handwave, "She's got Alzheimer's."
"Oh, I'm sorry to hear that . . . but what's her name.?"
A pause, then his sweetest recollection: "- - - Carolyn."
"Well, I'll be sure to introduce myself the next time Carolyn and I cross each others' paths."
"she's really sweet -- well she was . . . I can tell you as a writer -- well, I guess I was a writer…"
----
Explaining to this established writer, eighty-five: the desire to "live fast[, and] die young" -- familial cancers / heart disorders / &whatnot -- not wanting kids and
just unimaginable the attempts at living beyond graves -- particularly with the state of my own twenty-seven-year journey, far from tangibility, slipped drillbits [and all].
"When I was twenty-seven, I suspected I was 'shot,' too -- what's under the electrical tape?"
Holding up my *good hand*, today, offering this non-fiction writer's *opposite good hand* the opportunity to experience a seemingly-new sensation:
SRC
We take turns
stroking paired-fingers, equally mesmerized with such delusional tactility.
"This," it's begun, "is how my finger currently feels. Half-innervated, yet an achy-dullness (all-over):
Had you been paying attention, you should've noticed: a teensy tip warning of imminant penetration... instead just overhearing a mother coo her one year old as three year old "why,
why,
but why, WHY'd" at the silly sight of some careless installer's bleeding.
Not a word, other thans "just need to walk this one off downstairs for a bit" -- no curses, ouches, swears or goodbyes; just genuine contemplation on
what the fucks, held in silence at the sight of my own bones, again.
Us both just hoping to survive the next big thing -- earthquakes, x-actos, drill bits (and all!) -- maybe we were ready, once way back when; now, shaking in our shadows, just trying to make it past yet another San Francisco day (with IT seeping in, taking permanence, reminding you the essential bitterness of general negativity). Fortunate to them, houses don't often get time to think, much.
We stand.
----
The next day, Carolyn greets me at the door, her live-in clutching into listlessness.
"Hello, Carolyn!"
Perplexion of her name, or maybe of everything -- at my attempted coordials.
----
"Well, that'll be two-thousand dollars, please…" and I didn't even have to take my shirt off [link to unwritten story on perks of TaskRabbit'ing].
