dispatches #1

It's beautiful outside. Joseph the would-be-novelist is sitting at a table with his cigarette and black coffee and looks like a lonesome cowboy who might be interesting and have a lot of ruggedness in his life. He writes longhand with a sharpie pen. He produces these perfectly spaced and indented paragraphs in consistent typewriter script. He looks like he might have killed a man, maybe two. Maybe he was a rebel or a revolutionary and now he writes poems. Maybe he's wanted on ten outstanding felony warrants for twenty crimes he didn't commit. He has a beat-up lighter and an old leather bag to carry his manuscripts in. He's written a trilogy of journey novels. Think Cormac McCarthy. Think soul. He looks like someone who would write something like that -- multiple times if he had to.

He has all the accessories to signal a life lived out in the dust and under the sun in a place with too much sky where men are cruel and women lie through satin lips. Bones bleach there and cheekbones stretch out under skin like wings. Joseph looks like he knows something about cliffs and cars and the ways of hearts, bar fights, empty rooms, dead towns and America. All that stuff.

Looks like.

Joseph is not a cowboy, is not a rebel. He never joined the revolution or ever saw a motorcycle he would know how to ride. Joseph is a would-be-novelist who has written a mind-numbingly dull trilogy about journey and youth with himself as the template -- odd since the tail end of young is several decades back and he never was much of a traveler until the gangs in Los Angeles threatened to kill him and drove him north to my town where I met him in front of a coffee shop and he told me his life story in such a dizzying fog of words that I didn't surface for two hours.

Joseph lives in a low-income housing unit with a fabulous downstairs and series of upper floors crumbling into nothing, propped up with thin walls and the desperate funds of people who can't afford to live anywhere else. Joseph is an aspiring racist who blames Mexico for most of his troubles, everything from a broken typewriter (not to mention his inability to type) to why he had to leave California (God rest her beautiful southern soul). Joseph is an old man and I've noticed he looks older than he did four months ago. He looks like people I've know who got cancer, who died from a sudden chill, who are on their way out. He's also a little bit crazy. Probably he needs a friend.

He doesn't remember me and I haven't reintroduced myself. When people start talking to me for no reason other than they're drunk or crazy or have no brain cells left, I say my name is Kay and I will sit forever and listen to them, paralyzed by my curiosity. Who are you? I have to know. We all have such stories to tell about ourselves, most of them are lies but even we don't know that.

---

"I killed women and children over there and I enjoyed it. Hell, I'd do it again," says the man who I'll estimate at 5'7", in the neighborhood of 300 pounds. His gray hair twists like a pelt down his back. He may or may not be wearing a hat.

He is telling a tiny Hispanic woman that his friend is being held by The Coyotes for $3,000 and they're going to behead him in the desert if no one sends the money. They're going to mail his eyes to his mother. He is telling this small woman (with tea cup thin wrists) that he was in Vietnam, that he slaughtered people, killed them when and where he wanted.

"Oh, no, you didn't," she laughs.

And that's where you came in. He is saying,

"Yep, children.
All the time.
I killed women and children over there
and I enjoyed it.
Hell, I'd do it again."

---

Embrace a good friend, tell her goodbye. In the sun and the remnants of summer, walk across the street only looking the right way once. Do not expect to be so suddenly accosted, literally you blink, and there's a man with a sponge face and splinters in his eyes who holds up a shaking finger, cracks his face into a sideways grin and says,

"Deal or no deal."

Just smile, keep walking.

But like that neighborhood cat who follows you halfway to work and is always leaping ahead and getting underfoot so you fall down the steps cursing, he side steps with ballet swiftness and is dancing on the balls of his feet in front of you still.

"Deal or no deal."

He sees something in your eyes, decides it's hesitation and, being a good salesman, he pounces, shaking his hands to dispel your fears about the deal. "The answer," he assures you, "is already decided."

Someday you will die.