For years I saw him once a day with his after-work drink and loosened tie, desultorily watering the lawn with his free hand. After a few minutes she’d join him, in her Jackie Kennedy white pants, smoking a cigarette and regarding him through narrowed eyes. When he’d finished his drink he’d throw the ice in the bushes before they went back inside. I never figured out if they hated each other or were deeply in love.
A summer day in the late sixties. The rusted 409 is up on blocks next to the driveway. Dad is out back drinking and rage-mowing under a blackening sky. It feels like something bad is about to happen. Within a few months you’ll be hitching to LA. You think you’ll be able to outrun your sadness, but in this life you can’t outrun anything.
Drawing: a record of its own making.
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He gave me a toll-free number for government auctions of cars and boats confiscated from drug dealers. Mercedes $300. BMW $250. He seemed unnaturally concerned that I write it down.
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Later it occurred to me: R. doing coke again?
He had, without realizing it, absorbed the professional trick of imputing grave urgency to statements of no importance.
It was a period in history when, for whatever reason, people by default ended up in Portland.