The idea that it can’t be written any other way because it is complete, permanent, and stoic. A kind of formalism I guess. The first word births the next word births the next, and then the last word births the first. You lose the rush of spontaneity, but then you lose the gibberish of it also. Because it can’t move any other way, it must move forward, and it moves like a heavy rusted gear that wrecks your back. I like that. This though, is not that.

I come from a place with lots of trees where the grass stays green all year round even with snow on top of it. My insides shrivelled when we ran over some tumble weeds and they took a spin in the wheel wells of the minivan. There are more miserable locations, like federal penitentiaries, concentration camps or Somalia, or, if you really want to chase this unlucky rabbit, maybe go down into a hole in the rubble of a collapsed building. A lot of places where one could be thirstier and lonelier.

They took my suitcase and said I needed only my toothbrush. I couldn’t have a book, and anyway, I wouldn’t have time for it. At night I opened the window but there weren’t any trees to listen to, and I missed the sound of them more than the greenery. The mornings brought nose-bleeds, which I learned eventually to promote my blowing violently to get out of breakfast formation at six.

My roommate was a girl from Las Crucas, New Mexico whose mother had died, replaced by a beautiful but evil stepmother who forced her to eat food scraps off the floor, so she said. She was so fucked up it was hard to decide which of her stories were just made up in order to be wound tightly, like a tourniquet, around her wounds and their seepage of the unmentionable abuses. Her name was Micaela Heller. She slept on the bottom bunk because she didn’t want to fight me for the top.

I told stories too, about the reason I got sent there. I said that my mother was so selfish that when I outgrew my sneakers, she wouldn’t buy me a new pair, and I had to wear them two sizes small with my toes sticking out. I said that she had no problem blowing wads of money on her gigolo boyfriend, and had gotten him a Porshe for Valentine’s Day and a cottage on the seashore where he could work on his horrendously bad paintings of ducks. I snuck into her room and stole a diamond bracelet which I pawned for five hundred bucks which I used to buy a plane ticket to go visit my Cousin Liza, a heroin junkie in Toronto. My mom found me there after three months seriously messed up and weighing seventy pounds. We had a big fight, but she promised to set up a trust fund for me if I got cleaned up. I moved back in, but a month later she caught me blowing her boyfriend, and that was the last straw.

In fact, my parents were quiet people who were still married, and Dad drove a minivan and Mom couldn’t drive and didn’t own diamonds. The baddest thing I had ever done, in their opinion, was refuse to clean my room for a month. They wanted Jesus Christ in their lives, but not me.

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