The Determination Is Reversed

I appealled the unemployment decision.

The telephone hearing was on a Friday. That Monday I had the written decision. The very next day there was a neat pile of stubbed envelopes waiting for me on the dining room table and the junkies, drunks and ex-cons I live with---the Semper Sci-Fi, the steamer, the head-Ubangi, and Chunk--- were all scratching thier whiskey beards as I made my way through.

They kept a respectable distance as I approached and then thumb-flipped the checks to my ear. They pulled at their collars, they raked their chests and waited for me to speak.

Should be a check for each week. Each week I spent being joyful, contented, free and jobless.

"Men." I finally announced, "I've found my lost shirt."
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"Chunk, I can replace that jar of marshmellow creme I mistook for bad mayo and threw out.

"Semper, I told you I'd give you ten dollars if you'd stop talking to me about the novel you wrote. I'll make that good.

"Steam, I've had a change of heart and decided to pay my rent after all.

"James, old top, I don't care how much money is here, you still owe me twenty bucks."
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I didn't count it all up. Didn't bother to make sure every week was covered. It was flow. Flow to last to the Spring thaw, by god.

I wrote to Anonydoc, "The point is the money. Then the principle of the thing, the vindication. That's sort of like the icing on the cake."
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During the dicey days I was staying over with my good-night nurse. In exchange I de-Christmased her elaborately decorated apartment. I even got the huge tree out, with my backwards reasoning pushing it top first through the entry-ways and around the corners .

Got it outside, came back and what was this. It took me an hour to clean up that mess but I couldn't boast of my work without revealing to her how stupid I was.

But then she likes a good laugh so I did tell her.

She works long days, sometimes 13 hours, and since she is upper-class she doesn't have the internet. (That's for proles, like me.) Only books.

I enjoyed Roth's "I Married A Communist". I wrote her love poetry which went into the waste-basket. My infatuation is deep and sweetly sorrowful. I worry constantly that she'll return to the Mississippi coast. She misses the smell of the ocean, the sea breeze, her "bubbahs" and her grand-Aunts.

Meanwhile I'm running out of illness, and only have moods. She won't stay for moods.

I've got to find a way to take care of her instead, but this damnable self-sufficiency of hers. It makes me brood.
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After the checks arrived I was driving back --- accustomed to the luxury over there--- when the sky suddenly went in nearly full eclipse and the tornado horns blew like a battle-cry.

Batten down the hatches, there's a hook echo somewhere. A surprise in January.

The radio said the storm was approaching from the south-west at 45 mph. Ten miles from town and I was about ten miles from her house. I was coming from the north-east at 55, 65, 70. Half way, one fat drop of rain on the wind-shield prompted me to hallucinate aqua-green.

The sky was closing over us too low, too close.

Into her hilly, forested neighborhood with the winding roads. It was raining hard and just as I reached her parking lot everything went white and it began to hail. I turned and six cars followed me into her lot. Anxious voices on the radio. I was only 20 yards from her back door bay but I thought if I got out and ran, all these strangers might mistake it as another signal and run with me. And then there we'd be.
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The next day my bookstore manager asked me into her office and closed the door. She said I was hired as a seasonal temp and they'd be glad to see me again next Christmas.

The well is still deep after a life-time of drinking. Drop a stone in there and it's a moment before the emotion. Then I notice that I brace against the echo, still. It's hard to swallow grief. And that's what it was, because the bookstore wasn't about books, it was about the people, especially my co-workers I barely knew. I stood up to go and it was like my legs might not work.

The manager had said "Of course, everyone loves the atmosphere here." So I was angry too.
I'd be happy to have me around. Idiot managers.

Earlier I'd told Katie and Christian about P.G. Wodehouse. They'd never heard of him or Jeeves, Bertie Wooster, Freddie Widgeon, Aunt Agatha. Not even Psmith. So this was my good deed. Maybe in ten or twenty years they'd stumble upon "Psmith, Journalist", and remember me.
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Anyway, the books are balanced, the cupboard is full, and I'm recovered already. It's marvelous how so many of my dreams come true, sober.