novembre ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- sonny boy and the stealing of brautigan my next-door neighbor is strange. i'll call him sonny boy. sonny boy wears woven over shirts with tribal patterns. his room is a dark cave that he works out of, rubbing people in the dim light, blasting music. sonny boy is a masseuse. a bad masseuse. i know this thanks to a report from my roommate. she once paid him twenty dollars for half an hour's worth of massage. he turned trance up loud and ground his palms into her back in beat to the music. i think of this whenever i see him, which is not often, because he is gone for days and weeks at a time. i watch his half-lidded eyes float past and think that man is a bad masseuse. i wonder what it is like to be terrible at what you do for a living. or to be unaware that previous customers have judged him so, red-flagged him to their friends and roommates, securing less business. or to know and not care. sonny boy does a lot of drugs. silk scarves are hung in front of his windows. he went to burning man and loved it. once, while sitting in their kitchen, the neighbors and i were discussing a movie, and sonny boy announced his opinion on the subject, finally opening his eyelids all the way, daring us to challenge him. sonny boy's arguments are off-kilter and bland. he takes the devil's advocate approach at all times, even if it debunks what he stood by a few minutes prior. his efforts were to unhinge me. he likes to make people think, he said. he did not notice i displayed no annoyance, no visual representation of an ounce of thought over his arguments, and still proved him wrong every time. i am telling you this because i found his richard brautigan book in the hallway. i picked it up and took it with me, intending to read it and return it, wordlessly, noiselessly, the week after. i'll even leave the yellow post-it note between pages 20 and 21 intact. i leafed through his book and noticed only one marking in the margin, an arrow pointing to this passage: then they decided that the fleas that lived on siamese cats would probably be more intelligent than the fleas that lived on just ordinary alley cats. it only made sense that drinking intelligent blood would make intelligent fleas. 1:33 pm - 09.24.03 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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