running water, a refrigerator, and in front there’s a kitchen
counter and in front o f that there’s a single bed to sleep on, a
sort o f sofa maybe, flat, no headboard, no cushions, no back,
nondescript, covered with cloth, it’s a couch or an old mattress
on springs or something. Way in the back, to the left o f the
kitchen, hard to see, extending behind the kitchen but you
can’t really see how far, there’s a kind o f cage, it’s chicken
wire, it goes from the floor to the ceiling, and there’s a double
bed behind the chicken wire, and I ask what it is, and he says he
sleeps there with girls, some girls like it, it’s his bedroom, he’s
got cuffs for it that fasten on the chicken wire but it’s got
nothing to do with me, I can sleep on the sofa, and I’m feeling a
chill, m y blood goes cold and I feel a certain fear I can’t define
and do not want to think about, and I’ve tried to shake him all
night but there’s the fact he’s sort o f stuck on, I can’t shake him
loose, and I’m feeling like I’ve been traveling a long time in a
foreign place, the land’s strange, the natives are strange, it’s
been a long w ay up the mountain and you don’t know if the
w ay dow n’s booby-trapped and you know the sidewalks are
roads o f windswept death, they’re not harboring no lost souls
tonight, you ain’t going to make it some hours out there. I am
fucking blind drunk, asshole drunk, dumb bitch drunk, and
I’m figuring he’s Jill’s lover w ho’s got to be back because it’s
her opening night and he’ll go back soon, it’s just a matter o f
time, and I don’t look at the cage, like he said it’s got nothing
to do with me and I try not to think about the cuffs and I stay
w ay on the other side o f the place, near the single wood chair,
m y solace, m y home, the place I pick out where I’m staying as
long as he’s here and I can sit here the whole night, just sit, and
he says hey it’s no problem you sleep on the sofa here see and
he makes some tea and we take the tea downstairs to where the
paintings are and I think this is the right direction, at least he’s
on his w ay out, and he shows me the paintings, one by one, he
shows them to me, it’s sort o f amazing, it’s like being scraped
up o ff the street and suddenly the Museum o f Modern A rt’s,
open to you, a special honored guest, he shows them to me
one by one and I’m pretty awed and pretty quiet except he asks
me questions, what do I think o f this and what do I think o f
this and I try to say something, I say things about poems they
remind me o f because I don’t know how to say things about
paintings and there’s one a little different, it’s an emotional
upheaval, not intellectual like most o f the others, and I like it a
lot, it’s brazen and aggressive and real romantic and I say so
and he says well, it’s named after me then, and I think it’s
probably because he’s drunk and he’ll change it back
tom orrow but tonight it is named for me;
nickname I hate. I say I’ll lock him out and he says he’s going
