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.

Tonight R. called from California. He was shouting over loud voices and sounds of things breaking. I mentioned a dream about Dad. Somehow R. seemed embarrassed by this confidence. He quickly changed the subject to an incident in high school when someone had blamed him for something he hadn’t done. After all these years, he still seemed pissed off about it.
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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.

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