Il Bacio

Rotten mood. The one thing I haven’t written about because it makes me feel like such an incredible fuck-up – dig: I’m fifty-one years old and I don’t own real estate – is that at the beginning of August, we were served with an eviction notice. "You have been wonderful tenants," said the letter. "The property is in need of repairs and these repairs cannot be made with your occupancy."
That’s a lie, of course. Though it is true that the property is in need of repairs.

The house is actually being deeded over to the crack ‘ho Cardinale daughter so that she’ll drop the wrongful death suit against Mark Doyle, her brother-in-law, who rolled over on her three year old in his sleep and crushed the kid to death. That’s Doyle’s story at least. The cops found sufficient grounds for a homicide investigation but the DA declined to prosecute. This is Monterey, after all, and the DA is probably Mr. Cardinale’s cousin.

The crack ‘ho daughter, her biker boyfriend, and a waif-like eight year old boy are presently squatting in one of the back garages. They stare at us balefully as we make trips back and forth to the dumpster. We found a new home without any trouble, a house two and a half blocks away from this one so that Robin can keep his neighborhood friends and still walk to school and we can retain our phone number. The new house is smaller but nicer than the old house – higher ceilings, modern wiring so that – gasp! – we won’t have to turn off the refrigerator every time we run the drier. It’s a definite improvement. Goodbye House of Usher, hello Craftsman Cottage with high ceilings. Still, the net effect of seeing all your earthly goods packed into brown cardboard boxes is despondency and a sense of utter dissipation. So much junk. So many years dedicated to the accumulation of this junk. And all the junk really does is hide the dust balls.

I can’t believe I’m this marginal.

But I suppose all of us are marginal because guess what? We’re all going to die eventually, some sooner, some later. So what does any of this matter?

Doesn’t help that as soon as the calendar flipped officially into fall the marine layer came hunkering down. I’ve suspected for years I have moderate to severe Seasonal Affective Disorder. Gray skies suck the life out of me. Make me want to run away to the tropics.

The store is going reasonably well for a new business. Not making the inflated sales forecasts I provided to the Cannery Row Company to snag the lease, but making the marks I devised for my own projections. Yesterday John Cerney dropped by to show me the photos from the Max shoot. First male I’ve been attracted to in a billion years. Bluest eyes I’ve ever seen. Very easy rapport. We babbled comfortably together for many minutes.

"So how’s Max’s leg doing?" he asked.

"Oh, you know. We went to the doctor yesterday. He’ll be off crutches next week, then he starts physical therapy. He wants to play football this season. I told him if he wanted to play football, he was going to have to take a yoga class. Something to get him more in touch with his body. You can imagine how that went over."

"Do you do yoga?" asked John.

"Sure," I said. "Yoga’s better than Prozac."

We continued to stare at each other.

"Do you have kids?" I asked.

"No kids, never been married," he said.

"Sorry," I said. "Didn’t mean to pry."

"Oh, I don’t mind talking about it. I’ve been in love a few times. But you know when it comes right down to it, I’d rather be working. I’d rather be making art."

I nodded. "Heidi told me you have a twin brother."

"Not a twin brother." His mouth did something wry. Ancient rivalry exhumed. "Younger brother. A year younger. I started kindergarten late so we were always in the same class. He’s an artist too. Or, at least, he was an artist. Did some very interesting ceramic sculptures. Has a Masters. But you know there are only so many grants given out every year. So now he works for State Farm Insurance, a comfortable job. A comfortable life. He’s married."

"You were very smart," I said softly. "You figured out a way to do it."

He smiled at me.

I sighed. "Such a hard row to hoe. I have a friend –" thinking Lucius – "who occasionally calls me up late at night to check on the progress of my various writing projects. He’s a rather well known writer with kind of a cult following."

"A successful writer?"

"Successful in a way," I said, wrinkling my nose. "But always wobbling on the edge of destitution. He’ll be worth a lot to his heirs when he’s dead. That kind of success. Anyway, my friend will call me at eleven o’clock at night, hear me babble about all the various crises in my life that are preventing me in this present moment from writing. Then he’ll laugh. ‘You must be cruel,’ he tells me. Cr-r-r-ruel –" Trilling the "r."

John looked as though he was going to say something else but at that moment customers wandered into the store and the conversation ended.

Also yesterday…

Early in the afternoon a group of ancient, doddering Italian-speaking tourists wandered into the store. All of them left after twenty seconds except one old guy who stood there for five full minutes in complete silence staring at me. Their Italian had been peppered with Sicilian dialect though my own quasi-fluency – I can understand the distinctive Sicilian dialect though I cannot speak it – wasn’t good enough to tell whether they were Sicilians or transplanted Americans.

Before the old guy finally left, he turned around on the threshold of my store, smiled at me and blew me a tender, romantic kiss.

Very weird.