It felt very good to be without a rifle. And to shower with hot water rather than freezing my shrunken testicles, washing dirt off in a cold, fast flowing creek near the pot field was a relief. I would never again undergo the stress of having the responsibility to act as a henchman, a hired gun to keep away poachers from that field of dreams. Maybe peasants in Central and South America would relish that duty, but I was too soft. I had no perseverance, no stoic endurance as Indians with an unrecorded but sustaining genealogy of persistence and tenacity. Lucky to have money earned without getting killed or cheated, I was determined my windfall would last a long time in spite of the outrageous rent for my tiny room. But, soaping up, I never banged into the shower stall, which felt spacious.

I had guarded a pot patch, living in a tipi in southern Humboldt County. My home had fourteen poles and was staked beneath a large outcropping so no DEA flyovers could spot me. It was a Sioux tipi with Cheyenne smoke flap extensions. Nomadics Tipi Makers designed this one. They also had made all the tipis for the movie, Dances With Wolves. I could not compete with Kevin Costner, and did not wish to try, but knowing how close I was to that film greatness kept my spirits up since I had to be alert and amphetamine-like quick for anything resembling an intruder stealing plants. The property owner who had rented out his land to a dope-grower syndicate had even worked on the film shoot and had slunk away with this tipi after shooting. I liked its famous provenance, its being something. I heard a knocking at the bathroom door, but ignored it.

Seated alone with a borrowed thirty-ought six Remington rifle, I had the superficial necessities to feel like a Native-American, especially when the inside fire lit up. Coming back from an inspection of the land and a piss, I saw the glow emanate from the outside. The beauty of the tipi, its colorful designs of buffalos ringed by brilliant greens, red and blues; but getting inside my sleeping bag, zipping it up, I felt like I always had: alone, once more without a woman. My genitals had been thoroughly scrubbed, gritty no more.

I had had premature ejaculations and had gone many times soft due to barbiturates or crashing coming off crank. Or possibly it was the jagged, dark, red scar zigzagging across my cheek that accounted for my lack of success with willing females. While working as a choker setter for a big logging company, I nearly got decapitated when I put the choker through the bell, with the crew boss shouting to speed it up. When the cat dragged the
logs uphill, and though the choker had been cinched very tightly, the logs snagged on a stump, and a giant limb slingshotted at me, a broken branch ripping across my face. It required forty-six stitches. My wound would be indelible. I thought thrashing restlessly in the tipi that I had had only unfulfilling relationships with females, so working alone simplified matters. An angry, hoarse voice joined the rising noise of pummeling the door.


The only trespasser I spied had been a fawn nibbling at tender seedlings. I fired two shells into the side of the animal, and it bled to death. I slit the little thingâs throat, having read that was the first step when field dressing a deer. I punctured the intestines, failed to sever the windpipe, and cut through the liver, heart and spleen. Blood lined the carcass cavity. Blood also coated my hands, arms, face and clothes. I dried off, and put on a robe.

A fellow crewmember told me I had done it all wrong. He said to me that I had tainted the meat and that I was a careless fool. Though I had not wanted to kill an innocent fawn, nevertheless I had been hired to watch the patch. The associate snapped that guys doing outdoor work should be more attune to nature. Guys like you should be horsewhipped,ä he said. Goddamned that guy who rattled the bathroom doorknob!

At harvest, my payment had been a kilo of high-grade marijuana. I manicured each flower cluster, separating them from stems, leaves and branches. I graded them so that I could take the primo for myself. Just to be certain my clusters would not be mistaken for the larger portion, I placed a large piece of cardboard with the letters, NFS ( Not For Sale ) on the ganja. After the pot dried, I put about a half pound in four separate plastic bags and left quietly. The cacophony of both cursing words and door thudding increased.

I had only one friend in Los Angeles, a dealer, and decided to sell my stash to him. I bought a round-trip ticket, took the Dog south, and I was satisfied getting $9,000 in cash for the 2.2 pounds. I needed time to think about what I should do next, so I traveled north to Eureka. I suppressed the kinetic energy of my fortune, not blowing it like others did. I read a for rent ad in the Times-Standard, and walked from the bus depot with my backpack and duffel. I had zippered the cash in a pocket at the bottom of the pack, and rented a room at the Comfort Villa. I opened the door, almost running down a craggy senior.

I made tea in the community kitchen, standing, waiting for the water to boil, seeing locks on all the cabinets. Suddenly, a petite woman with thinning gray and dyed red hair entered the kitchen. I observed her knee-length nylons, a key attached to a large safety pin on her blouse, rouge and lipstick making her face look like a Halloween harlot, and her white, thick-soled shoes. She saw me look at her feet, and made a goofy smile.

“Nurse’s shoes”, she said quickly, and I heard a slight speech impediment. “I was a nurse’s aide for one week, then the buggers told me to go home.” I told her my name was Vic; hers was Rita. She actually batted her eyes at me. Who was this, Betty Boop?

I complimented her on the shoes, imagining them part of a porno woman’s outfit on an adult website. She giggled, guffawed and cried simultaneously when she identified her formal self; four long Italian names, though she preferred to be called Rita. Anger rippled through her voice, then gleeful, childish embarrassment as if she were ashamed of her lineage. Giant shotgun blasts of words, verbs and nouns exploding at me as if I were skeet to be scattered to the winds. She edged closer, rubbing my forehead, telling two roomers seated at the table that I was a smart man. Was it plain flattery or word salad?

In fact, I almost got a degree in forestry management. But the political magnetism when I was in college downstate pulled me in, protesting forestry practices such as intensive road building through pristine wilderness and letting Big Timber have all the trees they wanted to harvest. The movement swept through universities to renounce pro-business, anti-environment policies by dropping out of school, demonstrating how much conviction students had with their pro-ecology stands. So, I quit with only one semester to go before I graduated with a degree, allowing entry into a steady government job.

Rita introduced me to Paul, a retired, very old ex-mill worker. We had met outside the bathroom in the hall; we both sneered hello. His throaty, gruff, surly insight that the Villa was a house of whores surprised me. He slurped loudly coffee from a saucer, dribbling it down his shirt because his hands shook. The other table-sitter, Sophia, drinking hot, foamy chocolate and eating Triskets, Rita whispered to me was the best crab picker in the
world. Rita’s face reddened, and each word came out thick and slightly mispronounced as she labored to be coherent, finding speaking a chore. Maybe my unaccustomed presence among thoroughgoing, unambiguous proles had made her take notice and be extra aware of choosing her words carefully, mindfully, and put pressure on her, perhaps because ordinarily she would never have made contact with a déclassé man such as myself in the
small, claustrophobic kitchen. So far, she had not inquired about what kind of work I did, but she felt no qualms about naming others’ occupations.

My room was tinier than the tipi. I had to escape or the walls would collapse, crushing me to death. I knew no one in Eureka, so I wandered the streets through neighborhoods with Victorian homes, and fantasized living in them, feeling comfortable and secure, knowing I had both property, a steady income and family, all seeing me through to a sweet and gentle old age. I placed myself behind florid windows, peering in, feeling smug that my life, surrounded by turn-of-the-century architecture would embrace me, allowing all insecurities to be snuffed out. Hours of traipsing through time, I beheld the brightly painted turrets, bays and towers, the massiveness of the structures with flowery carving and ornate designs. I sauntered, yet the image of Rita’s rouged, polished cheekbones kept streaming, like a cam girl’s face, through my brain.

My introspection turned towards base thoughts, like what should I do when my money drained away. My untaxed cash would not last forever, and, in fact, I truly had no idea how far it would take me. But, as soon as the money question stirred around in my mind, I drove it away with memory pivoting towards childhood, when time seemed like cyberspace and there were limitless keywords in which to choose. Now, I often drank Drambuie, ‘the drink that satisfies,’ falling asleep drunk, staunching anxiety, yet at early light first I felt the hangover, then the discontent no alcohol could shroud.

Sunday, the worse day, a moment in time when the flow of strength subsided, distractions virtually gone, I paced, like striding through halls of fanciful mansions, the sidewalks on the north- and southbound sides of Highway 101, cars and trucks making a dogged, intrusive noise. I felt I had fallen into an enormous sinkhole, and dying would have to be better than hearing the perpetual traffic. Vehicular movement seemed the farthest thing from music possible, and I enjoyed singer/songwriter CDs. Life without
music: botched, wrong, boring, suicidal. I resolutely made it back to the Villa, hoping to find a good radio station, but was disappointed with Eureka: there was none. Even the university station seven miles south had nothing on it. I thought about buying a CD player and a lot of CDs, but my fear of going broke cursed my pleasure center, making me Scrooge-like, penurious, and even worse, the only Commandment I took to heart, covetousness, in the sense of longing for another entity, in this case making idolatrous my hidden cash. I felt I had a character flaw, something up until that point I had thought only avaricious businessmen and bankers possessed.

Walking through the Villa’s entrance, Rita met me. She waved, though I stood only a few feet away. She told me again that she once had been a nurse’s aide at a rest home.

People used to say, Rita treats all the old folks like they were family, “I had respect”, she said with candor, the afternoon sun slanting upon her face through the front door window. I saw veins bulge in her temples and forehead, then, after suspecting I stared at her too long, she moved her body until it squared dead-on with mine.

“Don’t make goo-goo eyes at me, mister,” she spewed out, my cheek catching a bit of her spittle. I had never been spat on before; that type of meanness had bypassed me.

I adored her high cheekbones highlighted with a magenta headscarf covering sparse hair, temporarily transfixed until she ripped it off, and tried to snap it at me, as if daring me to consider her a beautiful woman. “Please, I’ll be good,” I said. “No goo-gooing.”

“Rita’s clean, always washes her hands five times a day,” she said. She held up her thin palms, flipping them over many times so I could tell she had not lied. “And I wash my hair every day. See. Feel it.” Her head tipped downwards towards my nose, and I smelled her silky hair’s freshness. I saw balding spots, but this had not deterred my curiosity at what I had, up until that moment, considered unusual for a woman.

“A breath of pure air,” I said, forced to inhale her hair since she stuck it directly into my face. “Like baby’s hair.”

“Touch my head. Rub your fingers through it,” she ordered me to do. I did, but tentatively, waiting for her to drop an anvil upon my head. The ambivalence I found appealing since I enjoyed spontaneity no matter how it presented itself. “Harder, harder. Rita never lies,” she demanded. I amazed myself by kneading her delicate, fine-spun hair, never letting the fact that we were strangers interfere with our little ritual. We stood outside her room, the door open, and she invited me inside.

Cookie crumbs, smudged lipstick, sticky Kleenex, jars and tubes of every kind of lotion, cream, conditioner, balm, unguent, demulcent, emollient, cosmetic, and many different shampoos lay like talus at a foot of a cliff on her dresser, shelves and floor in the small room. In the midst of this Rita sat with her legs crossed on the unmade bed, then reached over and pulled from beneath her pillow a lime sucker. She gave it to me, and I put it in my shirt pocket, unwilling to eat anything coming from gelatinous ooze I imagined might lay under her pillow.

I noticed the white knee socks on her calves, and how the classic photo of Susan Hayward from I Want To Live tacked on the wall clashed with a girlish vision I had of Rita as she laughed, throwing her head back so far that all I saw was her throat. Females had small Adam’s apples but hers protruded, bobbing up and down with each silly, tittering spasm. The room’s tight quarters and the realization that she probably had not many visitors must have made her nervous. I stood on the sticky, linoleum floor, and watched her as she leaped from the bed, grabbing a tube, squeezing out yellow cream onto her hands as she intensely rubbed them. Every friction mearing, agitated motion of her hands made a slapping, suction sound. She patted the bed next to her, urging me to sit down. The door still was cracked open and I hesitated, but left it to her to shut it if she wished. I had become like an interloper, a male attendant in a rest home looking after a patient whose life depended on me. She had told me she was fifty-five-years-old to my thirty-one years. Rita jittered around her bed, making me uncomfortable, not because of no female contact going back to way before living in my tipi, but because I then rearranged my similes and conceived her as having the trust of a schoolgirl who put her faith in a crossing guard. I had no idea that I had what it took to master the pressure Rita engendered. And if I could, where it would lead me?

Just then, Paul limped slowly by. He turned to see us seated together.

“I know all about this whorehouse,” he said. “How much is a piece these days?”

“It’s none of your business what we do,” I said. “You better crawl back under your rock and get lost.” By that time I had bounced off the bed, shutting the door. Paul ranted, but walked away. He muttered, “Gals these days are an easier lay than hens popping out eggs.” I heard him slam his door. Rita stood up, and waggled her hands on either side of her ears; a passé woman. Her gesture reassured me.


“Rita knows show to take care of a man. I’ll make you pancakes,” she said. She bounded off the bed. “I’ll make you nice pancakes and eggs. I know how to cook.” I followed her to the kitchen. Raw batter stuck to the Teflon spatula she stirred with. Little cooking oil was used. Doughy lumps clung to the frying pan. Then came the eggs. She had failed to beat them enough with a fork, rather using the spatula, swishing it through the dish holding the broken eggs. She offered me the gummy, fried, agglutinated mass.

“Here’s food for a fancy, college-educated professor,” she said.

I ate tiny bits of it, not knowing how to tell her that her cooking was awful. Thankfully, she seemed to forget the mess, batting her eyes at me, an actress satirizing bad acting. I must have spent too long in isolation in the backcountry and found her homage to my vanity pleasing. Her actions I found grossly outdated and old-fashioned, yet nevertheless I gloried in her ill conceived preoccupation over me. After I helped her clean up, she asked me to come back to her room, and I consented.

This time she shut and locked the door. She smelled of drugstore cologne. We lay fully clothed first on top of her bed, then she urged us beneath the sheets. I had not wanted to take advantage of a woman so spastically out of touch with life, but when she stripped off her blouse and skirt beneath the sheet, she urged me to likewise take off my clothes. I peeled down to my briefs, feeling bobby pins and cookie crumbs at my feet, unlike the sleek, smooth goose down of my extra-wide sleeping bag.


“We’re a make-believe married couple, now,” she said, our bodies touching while we lay on our backs. Suddenly, there was a knock at the door.

“I’ve come back from the drugstore with the cosmetics you ordered.”

“Who’s she?” I asked. The landlady, Gina, Rita told me.

“Oh, silly, it’s only my girly stuff,” said. “Leave it outside my door, please Gina.”

“Why canât I come in like always, and put it inside your room?” she asked.

“Leave them in the hall,” Rita said. Would I get evicted for violating house rules?

I saw the knob turning and flew out of bed, crouching in my briefs at the door. Gina opened the door about six inches, seeing me hunched over. I stared at her as she gawked back at me while she bent to shuttle the small bag into Ritaâs room.

“Oh, hi Vic. I didn’t know.” I grabbed the bag, thanked her, and shoved the door faster than Gina could pull it closed. “All right, don’t be so pushy,” she said. I placed the small package in front of my crotch like a fig leaf protecting my privates.

“Darling, I’ll tell the Public Guardian that I want to get out of this old house and rent an apartment just for the two of us,” Rita said. Public Guardian? She was on SSI disability and required a legal custodian to manage her money. “He looks after me, but I won’t tell him about you staying with me.”

“What makes you so sure I’d want that?” I asked.

“I knows all about you men,” she said, tittering. “I don’t see no friends of yours ever visit, so you must be all alone.” She was right. Persistent observation beat intelligence every time.

The shabby apartment building looked like it might slide onto Highway 101. A homeless man sat on a riser and asked for a quarter. I gave him nothing, not wanting to encourage him because Rita’s place was meant for only us to share; not having an intruder planted outside our door seemed judicious. Rita double-locked the door, and it took extra effort to turn the newly installed deadbolt. I threw my things onto the linoleum floor. Ever since Eureka, why all these cruddy floors? We sat on a lumpy couch.

“I want to cut your hair,” she said. “You know I went to beauty college don’t you?”

I had not heard her mention that in the community kitchen, but now undisturbed with Rita alone, with the single bed in the middle of the living room, my mind fogged. All I could think of was to touch her breasts since the room in the Villa had too much traffic. She insisted that I sit on the kitchen chair she had placed next to the bed, solely to give me a haircut. She wrapped me in a checkered tablecloth that had been in a cardboard box. She petted my longish hair after she sprayed water on it from an atomizer. Short, even strokes varied with longer ones impressed me; she had actually retained what they had taught. I thought her incapable of learning. She purled, palming my hair with both hands.

“What a well-mannered man you are,” she hummed, burying her hands deeper in my collar-length hair, making furrows of my dark fleece with her slim, skittish fingers. Then, she began to snip, giving me a good trim. I had never been massaged and pampered like this by any other woman. Rita offered devotion, the closest thing I had ever come toreaching a true sensual plateau. I adored her breasts as they rubbed against my shouldersand arms as she delicately clipped my hair. Though she cut with a large pair of shears,
never did she falter and cut my ear as I feared at first.

Afterwards, we sat side by side on the couch. Her bosoms soon heaved themselves out of her bra. Lovely and huge, with large, roan areolas, a stark contrast to her petite, slender torso, I found them surging into my hands as if I were the designated man to fondle them as something archaeological, just uncovered and unearthed after so long unappreciated and obscured. She cried tears of relief because she had told me that no man in years wanted anything to do with her. And when I kissed those nipples, more tears glided down her cheeks. The unexpected jolt that came from her startled me because I had sat alone, always guarding something as Tipi-Man for many more years than I cared to count.

“If you keep crying, the ‘64 flood might come back to float you away from me,” I said. I had read about that Eureka disaster in the public library. She then withdrew, and went to the kitchen to make bologna and Velveeta cheese sandwiches. That evening she fried oily, undercooked hamburgers, baked crunchy, hard potatoes, and heated a can of beans loaded with lard. After eating, I sprawled on the small bed while Rita cleaned up in the kitchen. I posed like a sleazy male model would in Playgirl.

“I thought you were a gentleman, you know,” she said. “But I’ll come into bed with you after I dry my hands.” She finished up, moving towards me slowly, and undressed. “Use this Vaseline, my professor darling,” she said, after retrieving the jar beneath the bed. From her backslide I slid into her, sunny-side down. She did not move or say a word. My confidence had never been greater than with Rita; other women had not been so passive as Rita. I realized that might be construed as perverted and immature, but I could keep myself from ejaculating forever with her. Rita had been silent for about an hour as we had our first intercourse, but I wanted to sleep, so I let go. She wiped up with Kleenex, noiselessly, and I had nothing to contribute to the silence, so we lay cramped next to one another. I thought about this arrangement: I would pay $100 a month for rent, and the Public Guardian would never know about it because Rita had not told him she shared her SSI dwelling with me. If the courthouse guy knew, he would deduct money from the cash he doled out to her because Rita was declared to be incompetent and therefore unable to handle money on her own. I was glad to have left the paranoid herb plot behind, and took great delight in undermining bureaucratic legalities.

Breakfast the next morning consisted of two burnt-black pieces of toast smeared with orange marmalade, plus reheated, scalding coffee. At a tiny table I learned about Rita’s father, Franco, who had to work two jobs: his main one, a bricklayer, and a taxi driver until midnight. One day, Franco, after pulling down two jobs for three years, fell from a second floor scaffolding, and landed on the tines of an upturned rake, puncturing his aorta. He died essentially from overwork and fatigue, six days and nights a week, dragging and torturing his body just so his daughter could be tutored, and not have to endure prejudice, attending what in those days was called the “ungraded class” where slow students were placed. Last night’s great sex had concealed from me the obvious: Rita was retarded, mentally challenged the preferred nomenclature.

“I always spoke the language of queens,” she said. Her defense of herself, hoping expectantly for everlasting pride, made me desire her even more.

Shortly after Franco’s death, Ida, Rita’s mother, had been run over by a logging truck on 101, killing her instantly, “just like a poor, little sparrow,” Rita said, as I sipped a second cup of bitter coffee. Rita was crushed, and went cataleptic, feeling how her brain got hard as an apricot pit, and she went stiff all over. The Eureka doctors sent her away to a state mental hospital where she stayed nearly two years. “They put my head into the
electric chair like a criminal,” she said, her recollection murky. I asked how many shocks they gave her, and she flashed ten fingers many times. What was the number of infinity?

Upon her release, she had a $10,000 inheritance from the sale of their small home after all outstanding debts had been paid off. She blew through the money, spending wildly her once-in-a-lifetime bankroll, meeting men who kindly ransacked the money for booze, dope, and just plain getting free rides. Without any viable personality left after those electroshocks, she offered strangers money if only to staunch not so much her loneliness, but her emptiness. “Workless men,” she termed them, yet as she recounted them, “worthless” became the operative word. Tension swirled inside, but I had backbone to quash it.

I tried hard not to disclose my middle-class upbringing, but one night I slipped up, saying that I was deracinated. I knew she had never heard that term before, so when she jabbed me roughly into my chest with fingers of both her hands, I was not surprised. “Don’t be so high-toned,” she yelled. “I’ll get Sicilians over here, buster, then you’ll be sorry, bub.” My nightmare, especially down south guarding the marijuana, was to get involved with the mafia. I rubbed her smooth forearms with each poke into my sternum, and told her that big word I used only meant I was with a beautiful person.


Basically housebound, I went out for groceries and errands to the drugstore for Rita. I bought six-packs, and she cursed me out for drinking just like all those other “thiefs” who had stolen her fortune. I relented and bought a cheap CD player, but Rita had no toleration for Lucinda Williams, Iris DeMent, Patti Smith, and other singers I liked.


“I’ll turn it down so you don’t hear,” I said, appeasing her. “None of your showgirls,” she said, stamping her foot down like in some B movie. “What if I play guys, then,” I argued. The Pogues and Public Enemy I loved, but she snuffed out that line of give and take. She paused, tapping her forefinger on her lips; only when she went out could I play anything. But, that meant virtually never because she at no time left the apartment except to pick a little doled-out cash from the Public Guardian. I bought her a TV but she would only watch “stories about pretty womans,” the soaps, the Weather Channel and the QVC buying channel: all Mobius strips because they had one-dimensional, geometric surfaces, leading you back to where you started, forcing you to watch monotony again and again.

One morning, after a good set of lovemaking, I began reading Childwold. Rita came out of the bathroom, rubbing lotion into her facial pores, stepped over to my chair, and smacked the book out of my hands. Had she seen the title, and gotten insulted, or had she interpreted my plunging into another realm as a threat?

“What’s wrong with you?” I asked, retrieving the paperback. Rubbing the skin cream now more vigorously, fiercely, over her face, she looked at me with feral eyes.

“All men’s have to get a job.” Spit ejected from her mouth. Since she had once been a nurse’s aide, having to quit because of high blood pressure, why could not an able-bodied guy like myself work. I had no faith in her stating that her BP had anything to do with terminating that job. But, she wore those white, thick-soled nurse’s shoes all the time. I placed the book down, and stared at her feet. “Shoes make the woman,” I said, sarcastically, yet Rita had no ability to take anything except literally, so it went over her head. Instead of prolonging the argument, she hugged me joyfully around my neck, urging me to seek employment, kissing my eyelids at the same time, reconnoitering and changing the subject, asking me to take her out to a restaurant, that she had a favorite place to eat. I confessed I had enough money to buy a good used car, and then I would take her wherever she wished to go. I lied, and told her the money was deposited in the Bank of America, though in reality the cash had been sealed in four plastic baggies with duct tape, and lay at the bottom of my backpack. I took bills out when she bathed or used the toilet.

“You know me, sweety, I’m an old-fashioned Betty Grable girl,” she said.

I scanned the auto ads in the Times-Standard and finally came across an eight-year-old, two-door Toyota with low mileage from a private owner rather than a car dealer. I tapped the numbers from a phone booth down a few blocks on 101 since Rita had no telephone. First choice, best choice. Was not the way Zen worked? I explained to the seller that I had no way to get to Cutten, wherever that was, so he drove to the gas station where I called from. It even had a CD player. I took it out of town, going seventy on 101; it ran effortlessly. Coming back, I pulled into the Denny’s parking lot, and negotiated him down to $4,200. I had unsealed the cash before our deal, and handed him the agreed amount. I signed the pink slip, he telling me the car should have its oil changed every 3,000 miles and it would be unlikely it would ever need major repairs.

I drove back to Rita’s, went upstairs, told her about my new car, and we went to her special eating spot, a truck stop diner I had passed south of Eureka thirty minutes before test driving the Toyota. We ate cheeseburgers, fries, deep-fried onion rings, and apple pie a la mode. My mood had shifted into high gear knowing now I had wheels to get out of the apartment whenever I or we wished. I could not understand why I had not purchased a car until then. After the food, Rita said she wanted to see the monkeys at the zoo, and she giggled so much at their simian antics that she had to use the public bathroom. I had bought some groceries on the way to the zoo, so when she told me where the pond with the mallards and geese was, Rita had pieces of her dreaded Wonder Bread to throw them.

“My papa took me here just before he died,” she said. “I’m the one who killed him ‘cause he looked so tired driving me back home in the taxi before he had to pick up people.” I reassured her that she had never hurt anyone, and could not hurt a living thing because she was the black sheep Jesus counted as his lost children. I was sure that I had mixed up biblical parables, but Rita said she remembered a colored picture in the family Bible of the scene I had just described. She hugged me ferociously, and I could hardly wait to get back to the apartment.

Rather than her usual prone position during lovemaking, I insisted she lay on her back, and try something different. She balked, but I coaxed her, offering Rita a drive thirty miles north to beautiful Trinidad on the Pacific Ocean, telling her I would buy all the crab cakes she could eat. She immediately grinned, and squirmed beneath me, turning her head from side to side, never looking at my face as we initiated grinding our pelvises.

“Am I too ugly for you, She-Devil?” She had never seen that movie with Roseanne. I could have bashed her more with that film, but I forgot the detail of its exquisite images.

“No, darling, let’s stop now. I’m sick in my stomach.”

“It’s not my nasty scar, is it? What about you?” I asked. “Looking at your insane eyes, watching how bald you’re getting, smelling that shit-rouge you put on, listening to your babbling. You’re going to be worms pretty soon! Isn’t that repulsive, too?”

Her strength astounded me as she bucked me off her, and went into the kitchen. She grabbed the shears and snapped blindly at flies buzzing through the dim, ocher air. She slashed out with the blades opened, sometimes hitting the yellow bulb dangling from the ceiling. I knew what she really wanted to cut off. It all seemed so trite and obvious. I lay in the bed just feet from where she enacted the most convincing one-person version of complete derangement I had ever witnessed. I felt scared; she had become a liability.

“Don’t tell me ‘bout getting old,” she yelled, “I’ll never die! Never!”

“Liar! Have you taken a look at your mother lately?” Rita stabbed the tip of the shears into the floor, and stood over my nakedness which I quickly covered with a sheet. I had no idea what she would do or say. She moved her thumb and forefinger swiftly up and down on her ring finger, anger gathering in her red face. I first thought it was a masturbatory gesture, perhaps informing me that I had done it so many times I had become impotent. The crude rubbing of her finger proved to be a pantomime signifying my errancy.

“Rita wants to have you put a ring on me, get married just like papa and mama were,” she said, exhausted and hoarse. I had never contemplated marriage throughout my sexual life. Why should I let her few moments of terrorism overwhelm me in what only could be high drama on Rita’s part, something out of the Actors Studio? I had to persuade myself it had all been a great role, otherwise I might have overreacted, striking her physically, a first for me. Her demand could not be discussed because I knew now I must flee or get entrapped, possibly on a rape charge, or, in the case that Rita was legally judged to have the IQ of a moron, now called mildly retarded, then I could wind up in San Quentin, a short eyes, a convict so vile that every guy in the joint would screw my butt to hell and back and sideways. In the morning Rita could tell the Public Guardian that I had had my way with her, that she was taken advantage of just as when those winos and dopers stole her legacy. Why did I have to lie in a bed with saltine crackers and Kleenex wads, awaiting my punishment? Our three weeks stretched out like the time it took for the Galileo Probe to reach Jupiter’s orbit. Only that mission had gathered information about the solar system, the universe, the cosmos. What on earth could I glean in Rita’s rathole flat?

I carefully got out of bed and dressed, cautious now because she pulled the big shears from the floor, and stood trembling, jabbing the dusty air. I stuffed everything I owned into the backpack and duffel bag, and we stared at one another. I strapped the pack across my shoulders, then hefted the duffel in one hand.

“I’m not like your pretty-face, favorite actor, Robert Taylor, so I’ll leave,” I said. But repulsion had nothing to do with my quick exit; I had made peace with my appearance. Sorry to leave Rita, but gratified by the drama of pain and independence intermingling, I had to leave quickly now or strategic withdrawal would never again be possible. And that made all the difference; I now recognized I could weld the whip hand, also.

“You’ll be sorry, you, you just see,” she said. “You wait ‘til Rita finishes with you.”

I heard those words through the door after shutting it behind me. I walked down the stairs, my pack protecting me if she decided to plunge those scissors into my back. I walked down the steps outside the building, and a homeless dude, the one sitting on the inside stairs when Rita and I first moved in, sat drinking a pint of something. I reached in my Velcro wallet and handed him a $5 bill.

“Stay human,” I said to him.

“Is there any other way, bro?” he asked, slipping the bill into his jacket pocket.

I unlocked the trunk, and tossed my stuff into my new and perspicacious asset: the Toyota. I walked in the dark, it must have been three A.M. but I had no watch, to the same telephone I had called before about the car ad. I phoned my dope dealer friend in L.A.: I knew him and his wife well since we had demonstrated many times in forests protesting clearcutting by logging companies. Many rings later his wife picked up. I talked softly to her, thinking she must have just gotten out of the rack, but she had been high on meth and wide awake; that was a vast understatement. I wanted to talk to Jon, her husband, but she took ten minutes explaining that they broke up, making sure I heard all the digressions in the splendor of their nuances. Eventually, she told me that he moved to Seattle, giving me his address. He had plans to grow B.C. Cola, the stuff that was 25% THC, using the hydroponic method and get ultra-tripper weed. Then, she said someone was at the door and hung up.

I got back to the car and headed north on 101. I had a few CDs in the front seat, my small player jammed into the duffel. I put some in the car player, enjoying the freedom to hear music for so long denied. I would meet more women, and gladly. I listened to Townes Van Zandt: Sometimes I don’t know where this dirty road is taking me. Yeah.