I’m here at Crush on Morrison and 14th street. There’s a dubious bald man with glasses going over his papers, possibly he is a writer or an accountant.
The bartender calls me brother. There is nothing going on here. It is six thirty
Monday.
A young man with black jeans walks in. He is the bar tender. A morose woman broke her foot in three different places.
I have no idea when the transsexuals arrive. A woman with short white hair plays on the video lottery.
The bartender is very helpful and cute. I kind of look like him but much older and bedraggled. He too has a beard and a baseball cap on. When I was twenty I would have made an impression, not now at 44. I’m glad for the anonymity age engenders.
I think it probably is unusual for anyone to be here on a Monday.
I’m having a Budweiser and it feels good to be here and not in a staid bar.
I feel sad and nervous and happy. I wish there were performers on the stage.
I like being here alone. I want to tell Anne about it but i will have to control myself.
Another woman is on the second gambling machine.
I guess we always have gambling. Gambling is like sex addiction my doc said.
Maybe I can find work someplace around here or across the river where there is another bar I want to patronize
Y said he was worried about me. He said I should write him about my activities.
Nanny 6 called me and said that Y wanted my account number to deposit twenty thousand dollars.
Y runs the lottery in Oregon. No one ever wins without his blessing. He knows the numbers.

A dead woman with crosses on her forehead in blue marker is on a lit wood chair on the stage. She was a schizophrenic and bi polar. She said her bf had poisoned her. The staff hadn’t bothered to investigate her case. They thought she was lying. Her liver had gone to shit.
A woman with curly white and orange hair and blue Tenderloin district eyes checks the dead woman’s underarms, the heft of her breasts and her genitalia and then recovers her eyeballs with a small scalpel.
A radio is on in the kitchen.
The technician who recovered the eyeballs wants to know where I have been.
She wants to police my body. I call her the body police. She is grave. Her lips are masculine and very thin. She has Marilyn Monroe’s body. She found it in the morgue with president Kennedy’s shot head and co opted it. I beg to play with her fine white breasts. I play with them for hours without getting hard. I felt guilty because I want to hurt her with my impotence. I have no idea how to assimilate my sadism.
Why are you mean, the technician said.
I’m stubborn, I said.
You’re insane, the technician said.
Some think so, I said.

My mother whiled away the time reading and writing about famous men. I knew she would never be happy if I wasn’t famous or maybe she would be happy if I wasn’t famous but either way i was screwed without her love.
I pity you because you will never know love, the technician said.
I know, I said.
The technician would never know my love because she doesn’t know how to address a
doomed man. All the doomed are tragic. And the tragic are alchemists.
Do you mind if I have another beer, I said. I have the feeling the technician is an alcoholic. She is always laughing at herself and at what is said so that I feel that she is an addict or a suicide.
A voice on the radio in the kitchen sings: Je ne veut pas travialler, Je veut seulement oublier.
You are a mean drunk, I said.
I was never mean to anyone when I was drunk, the technician said.
No one was there, I said. You were alone.