I’m moving, which means I’ve started taking the boxes that I never unpack out of my closet in preparation for their trip to a new closet. One of those boxes is old and has made its last trip, so I’ve unpacked the badly damaged box and transferred its contents to a fresh new box. As I unpacked and repacked, I found many years worth of journals inside. I dug out one from a decade ago and started reading through it.
Ten years ago today, February 23, 1999 I sat and free wrote a romantic and sexually charged one-page piece about the music I was listening to. I later read it to various women who came over to my apartment. That’s not what I’m going to post though. What I’ll post is one of the very short stories that I found.
From 1-14-1999:
A man wakes up. Nailed to his bedroom walls are posters of men in makeup and leather. Tight leather. Sequins and rhinestones. Microphones, guitars and breasts and lights and glitter. His tired eyes look to the posters and his mind feels their power.
He gets out of bed in the sweep of an arm and cranks some music that I’ve never heard. The music feeds the images on the walls as they feed the man in the room. His output is rejuvenated. He finds a pair of jeans and squeezes them on like a layer of stone washed skin. Then a belt with a skull for a buckle. A dirty tee shirt, also advertising the image of a skull. He finds his leather jacket slumped sloppily over the back of a chair. He likes the feel of disorder. No hangers for this man. Fuck folding.
He looks in the mirror, examining himself. He sees long stringy brown hair that he should wash. He curls his lip into his ratlike mustache and strokes his face. he should shave, but that can wait for another day. He doesn’t give a shit that the women on the outside won’t like his unshaven look. But no woman can change him, and his woman – he knows she’s out there – would never tell him to shave. She’d like him fine the way he is.
The man walks out the door.
