MY FRIEND
The best part about seeing my friend is looking forward to it. She lives at The Castaways apartments—a decrepit nautical affair with peeled paint and broken-out first-floor windows. She’s the last one there—gets eviction notices—ignores them. I think being evicted is just too much like going somewhere to suit her. Befriending my friend is like getting a leech to treat your attachment disorder. Today she thinks maybe she got bitten by a sea snake—she says It’s one of the worst you know. She says she may not make it. She’s not going to talk about it much more unless it gets much worse she says. She sends me out to find a tourniquet though. Mostly friendship is something you seek then seek to escape I’ve noticed—the way fame is for some. I didn’t know my friend had ever even once been in the sea.

EEL
My friend is effervescent and inert—like a dozing electric eel. She went to one of those schools for making handmade musical instruments and felt and dolls. It was almost too rigorous for her. I had some business cards made for her birthday—self-unemployed they said.

CRUMB-TRAY FIRES
My friend is like one of those naps that makes you feel like you’ve given three quarts of blood and then got handed a cup of orange juice. When she has me clean her kitchen—I don’t get paid you understand—she never fails to remind me that toaster crumb-tray fires cost lives. She’s over on the couch—wanding me around with flicks of her wrist and vague pointing gestures—I think you missed a spot—Don’t forget the toaster crumb-tray—those fires cost lives you know. I’m thinking she can clean her own crumb-tray but she’s the kind of person if you ask her to do anything—even something that benefits her—she says I didn’t ask to be born. That’s the kind of person she was and I was the kind of person who would have that kind of person for a friend which doesn’t speak very highly of me so what.

Just so you know—three quarts of blood is half the blood you have.

WAKE-UP CALL
Getting my friend to get up in the morning is like trying to make flowers open in winter with a blow-dryer. She says she wants to start a dog-hauling business. You know—for people who need their dogs moved across town and don’t want to drive them themselves. I won’t be doing the hauling myself, she says—as if it weren’t obvious—You can’t make money working—it’s all contracted out—I’m just here at home leveraging my idea.

MOSQUITO
Being at my friend’s is like being a mosquito on a camping trip—every time you eat someone’s trying to kill you. From her freezer she took a ziplock bag of desiccated waste-meat with which she proposed to make soup for an early supper by adding water and more water and salt and lettuce and then boiling and boiling. She said the soup would go well with the cinnamon toast end-pieces she’d found I think in a breadbox she’d bought as a collectable at a yard sale and she asked if I’d set the table. I think the idea was next time—maybe even every time—I’d cook.

LIGHTING FIRES
I don’t know how to be mad at my friend for being the person I always knew she was. She performs a kind of effortless psycho-ventriloquism where my own worst thoughts about myself come magically out of her mouth. Have you ever noticed how with some people you’re trying to stomp out fires while they’re always lighting new ones? My friend has a thing for setting fires like that—always another combustible thing alight in her life—always someone else’s job to put it out. Maybe you’ve had a friend like that or maybe many. Maybe some people make problems and other people solve them in a kind of perpetual motion like that black-white sun-driven whirligig in the sealed glass bulb that people used to put on their desks at the office or on their windowsills.

Never get between someone and the trauma they’ve fastened to. I’d wanted to be the knife-thrower, I think I told you. At least when you’re stomping out other people’s fires you’re not thinking about yourself.

MOTEL RADIO
My friend is like one of those motel radio alarm clocks that the person who had the room—before you had it—set and left and now it’s going off in the middle of the night and you don’t know what it is at first and you’re struggling to find a way to turn it off and the song is loud and always something about a man who did his woman dirty wrong and wants her to take him back I would never take him back I would beat him to pulp with the handle of the payphone he’s calling from I would beat him down in that phone booth I would break the glass with the back of his head I would break his ankles to bits in the collapsing metal door I would steal his car and wreck it and pull myself out of that wreckage and walk away and I would never take him back. 

I walk the side streets littered and shining. I wander through overgrown gardens. I go to the ocean some evenings—one step—one step—one step along the shore. The somersaulting waters of the waves remind me how foreign a thing it is to be alive—how strange. ■

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