A Personal Inventory

Here I am, full of days. Maybe you know what I mean. You let enough time pass through you and pretty soon you start to feel the world within you winding down. There’s this greater, increasingly unfamiliar friction to your days, and the appetite packs up its bags and goes looking elsewhere for its beefsteaks and fine times. One day soon I’ll go gladly, and with any kind of luck it’ll be some sort of Egyptian scenario, with a decent moon and a jackal-headed character leading me along a dry, familiar road toward a light in the distance.

I could really care less, but feel entitled to bray some all the same. I for damn sure didn’t need this many days to come to a few conclusions, and I am one man who didn’t need his instructions printed on the heel to tell him how to piss in a boot. So listen up, you snug pups and whine-baggers, and let an old man set his story straight.

I have been many men, and there were at least a few little things about each of them that I liked just fine. I have been disheveled, certainly. I went away to prison on two occasions, and on two different continents, and once spent a stretch of nice, quiet time in a state hospital. I fought a war or two, without question. I lived in Europe, and sold combs in the Metro and hustled and scrapped and worked my way up until I was –I think it’s fair to say– something of a subway produce mogul. Plenty of confused men worked for me. Plenty of others dreamed of working for me and never passed muster.

I flat out never believed that romanticism was the ‘malignant fairy.’ Not on your life.

I owned for a time a peculiar bar in the Wild West. Here is what would happen to my customers, more or less: they would gain weight. That much was certain. No woman would love them long. They’d live long enough to wear out a pair of boots. And they’d for damn sure turn up dead in either a ditch or a motel room.

I played piano for a spell in the bar of the Winnett Hotel, this when it was still a swell place crawling with oil money.

I once drove two hours behind a truck huddled with bodies. There was barely a road. Twice the ruts sprung bodies from the truck, and the truck would lurch to a stop and two young boys would lug the bodies through the dust and fling them back aboard. I’d honk my horn, never quite certain in my mind whether I was conveying good work or hurry along.

I have been the archetypal Greyhound poster boy, precociously gaunt and tattooed, temporary sweetheart of more loose women than I care to remember. I’m telling it to you straight, because I flat-out don’t have the time to pull your leg. Surely there have been fits of liquored spasticity, but other times I had no truck with the bottle. I’ve trafficked with demons and had aspirations of sainthood; show me a man who can’t say the same and I’ll show you a damned fool or a liar. I drank with my old mother until she didn’t have a penny left to squeeze out of her life. There was never a doubt in my mind that she died thirsty and died unhappy.

I’ve seen things in a demolition derby where other men have seen nothing but car crashes and dust.

I have been called breathless. I’ve known dust devils and waterless wastes, worked at a Kentucky Fried Chicken and spent one hundred dollars on a Vega that lasted me seven years and took me into Mexico and madness.

I traveled for more years than was proper with a haggard, Rasputin-looking fellow who called himself Reverend Hungwell, this a man who walked with a limp and carried with him at all times a stuccoed briefcase decorated with shards of colored glass. I once saw the Reverend shoot an old woman in the back of the head over a parakeet.

I have snared more women than I can remember with the line, ‘You know, honey, a man loses an awful lot of heat in this world to atmospheric friction.’ I have three tattoos: Born Once is Once Enough; Convicted by Whom? And: Fearlessness is next to Godlessness. You know damn well the truth about tattoos, and I’ll tell you up front that those tattoos might as well be in a lost language for all the sense they make to me now.

No doubt about it, I’ve had what people today like to call issues, but let’s all just face this fact: this world would have been a whole hell of a lot better off if they’d killed Socrates before he ever had a chance to open his fat yap.

Marital status? I entered into the holy state of matrimony on one and only one occasion. This was in some Florida swamp town. I stood in the murky basement of a county courthouse and exchanged vows with my beloved Taberah, who is my wife to this day, thirty-five years after she cursed me in Latin, stabbed me in the cheek with a kitchen knife, and disappeared from my life forever.

As far back as my memory will go I have scrawled the same message on restroom walls all over the world: Blame Zeus!

I played the trombone for a time and learned to play only one song well, ‘The Lion Sleeps Tonight.’

In the right moonlight, as God is my witness, the right cow will burn the eyes clean out of your head.

For a number of years my parole officer was a Yale man.

I have always tried to walk exactly as if I had a dog, or even a beautiful, inebriated woman, right by my side.

All of my life I have carried around with me a smell from somewhere down at shit’s sweetest end.

The only men I have ever killed have been slanderers and false accusers.

Lest you think it has been all brass bands and roses, I will admit that there have been down times, exhausted lulls, and it has been a comfort to me that I have always been able to locate something dull, confusing, and sufficiently diverting behind my eyes that enables the wait.

I like music heard from far away, preferably through the trees.

Favorite lines overheard in a bar (tie): ‘Bring me the fat of a dead redhead.’ And: ‘You have to love erosion when it’s done right.’

The saddest thing I’ve ever seen was miles of white crosses along a dark highway.

This much, at least, I know is true: Gravity acts, mister, and that’s all there is to it.

And if you’re looking for some last words, these here will certainly do: Good Boy, Orestes!