Gone & Gone

What Matters (1984)

43 What Matters (1984) March Outside this borrowed room with its single blaring square of light, people phone the station with news of the storm. Warm, reading, what do I care; I’ll exit this rooming house soon. June Downstairs, the junkie’s friend with the Nike t-shirt & tiny duffel has been pounding for an hour to be let in. Upstairs, the junkie cranks “What’s Love Got To Do With It” even louder on his boombox, & I wonder if I should turn my stereo up. Below my window the friend screams “I won’t be fucking seen with you. You’re no fucking friend of mine!” Above me the junkie rails at his ceiling until the moon slaps through. 44 July We are always feeding at something, be it the quick nip of a piranha or a slug’s slow sucking at the back steps. We each of us leech & let & lean to home. I look up to where the roiling clouds summit, struck by the way the roofs impose upon that sky— the summons of it, the strain. August A stream of boys wends its way upstairs —the charge of the night brigade— ferrying beer & gin & wrapped-in-wax sandwiches; each bogged down by an immense cassette player. What pandemonium these creatures portend! Pasty wastrels & tape-decks all . . . I come home & can’t get the front door open. A stranger is tending the weeds, a rake sprouting behind her back. I tell the landlady my key won’t work & she trumpets “That’s right, I changed the lock!” & frames me with her bright bad eye. 45 September Labor Day, but it smells like fucking Christmas. As I empty my drawers, throwing away insurance receipts from 1975 & photographs of people I never liked, the house is completely & strangely silent. I listen to Tina Turner, 45 & strong, & wonder how I’ll do that old. Sorting through the letters & cards asking me to come back for once I wish the junkie was screaming away, ducking bullets & clutching blankets, making me hate it here. But even the street outside my little building is empty & dark. I’ll sleep here one last night, jamming my head under the leased pillow— knowing we are each of us looking for a little grace, a little time, a rent that never comes due. ...