Girlie — Part 4 of 4
The one-word letter
Of the previous four jobs I had over the last three years back then, three of them were in retail. Two of those jobs were at bookstores.
When I was a little kid I used to love to play store. I would gather a bunch of toys and arrange them neatly (merchandise them) then try to rope one of my siblings into pretending to be a customer so that I could pretend to sell them something. That’s how mentally sick I was.
My childhood play was a foreshadowing of what was to come as an adult. Retail came naturally to me. I was good at it. And retail jobs were usually easy to come by and very easy to quit. I’ve worked way too many retail jobs in my life than I care to admit.
The new job I got in Southern California was at a large clothing store. Clothing! Yuck! How boring! I wear clothes according to my own personal taste and need for comfort. Most everyone else wears clothes according to the dictates of fashion. They wear exactly what everyone else is wearing and they have to change their wardrobes constantly to keep up with fashion. I find the very concept of fashion to be abhorrent. It’s a matter of handing over one’s own power of choice to the collective herd mind and the corporate powers that run that mind.
Working in a bookstore isn’t so bad. I’m a book junkie. As I’ve said many times, books are my cocaine. Having books in my hands for eight hours a day can be a great pleasure — even though it’s a job.
But clothing?
I’ve always told myself that it’s good to try new things. So I stuck it out and I ended up learning more than I wanted to learn. There were large windows in the store that allowed me to connect to the outside world. Thank God it wasn’t in a mall. And the people were fun. It really wasn’t so bad even though I was soon bored out of my ever-loving noggin.
Another negative aspect of the job is that it was a day job. I worked eight o’clock to five o’clock with an hour for lunch. Usually I preferred afternoon/evening jobs that left my mornings free for writing. I do almost all of my writing in the morning. I was born in the morning and it is in the morning when I have all my creative energy. After two in the afternoon I am completely worthless as far as creativity goes.
But for the time being that was okay. I wasn’t writing at the time anyway. The new novel had not yet come knocking at my door. The important thing about that job is that it allowed me to stay in California.
After all, there are a lot of things to see and do in Southern California, right? Thanks to the power of mass transit I saw and did a lot. I was really enjoying it. Of course my favorite place was the beach. I had Sundays and Mondays off from work so almost every Monday I would hit the buses and head for the ocean.
There were way, way, way too many people at the beach on Sundays. That was one of the things I didn’t like about Southern California. There are just far too many people. Sometimes the collective energy of all those people would literally make my skin crawl.
Once I rented a car from a co-worker and drove out past Malibu until I could find a beach that was deserted. I spent the whole day there playing and meditating. I must have had a hundred epiphanies that day. It was without a doubt my favorite day in the year I spent in California.
I also kept reading like a mad man. With a full-time job I couldn’t binge read like I had done with Girlie at the guest house but I still read in the evenings and on my lunch break. Novel after novel after novel. If you could gain weight from reading books I would have weighed well over 300 pounds
And then one day everything changed…
With my apartment being so close to my job I usually came home for my lunch hour. I would check my mail then go upstairs to the apartment and fix some lunch and then eat it while I read — keeping a wary eye on the clock so that I wouldn’t be late getting back to work.
One day — I think it was around seven or eight months into the job — I checked my mail and there was a letter for me. This was quite alarming. The only mail I ever got was junk mail or electric bills. Remember, when I came to California I was disappearing. Not a single person I’ve ever known knew where I was.
There was no return address on the envelope. The post mark over the stamp indicated that the letter came from Denton, Texas. That’s when I knew who it was from. Apparently, my ex-girlfriend was still going to college there.
I raced upstairs then tore open the envelope. There was just a single folded sheet of paper inside and on that sheet of paper was just one handwritten word.
And that word was, Yum.
That is when I knew with full certainty that it was from her. A month or two before she dumped me we had read a book together (aloud). It was Tom Robbins’ book, Still Life With Woodpecker. In the book the character Bernard Mickey Wrangle told his girlfriend that there are only two mantras to live by in this world; yum and yuck. Yum represented living in joy and yuck represented living in resistance to that joy. It was one of the most profound things I had ever read.
And she remembered it! And felt the need to remind me of that.
But how in the freaking hell did she get my address?! No one, and I mean no one, knew where I was! I had disappeared. This baffled me almost to the point of completely losing my mind. (To this day I still don’t know how she found my address. She would never tell me.)
I was utterly beside myself. There was no way I could go back to work. I didn’t have a phone so I couldn’t call them. I just never went back to work. (I went by work the next day to tell them I quit.)
My heart was racing. My mind was utterly blown away. I couldn’t be bothered with lunch. I just paced back and forth in the apartment wondering how the hell she got my address and what else she might have meant by it.
And then I spied the electric typewriter in its case sitting on the floor against the wall. I bought it a few weeks before at a yard sale.
I opened the case and placed the typewriter on the kitchen table. I got the ream of typing paper I recently purchased, opened it and set it on the table. I then poured myself a glass of water and plugged in the typewriter. I then started writing and didn’t stop for seven weeks.
The new novel had arrived.
I had just paid for a month’s rent and with my last paycheck I paid for another. I had around seven weeks before I would be facing homelessness again. I had enough money left to pay the electric bill and some food. But I could not think about any of that. I had a novel to write.
After breakfast each day I started writing and I wrote until I was utterly exhausted and ready to pass out. Rarely did I stop for lunch. Day after day I did almost nothing but write. I didn’t shower much or shave or do anything with my hair. I had turned into a madman. I was binge writing and had no time for much of anything else. At the end of a writing day I would take a short walk then go to bed. I did no reading at all.
Never before had writing flowed so intensely for me. I could barely keep up with the words. It was so profoundly euphoric. I became a lunatic writer who wrote non-stop for seven weeks. I was very, very close to finishing the novel. I had no idea how many pages I had written but the typewritten manuscript was very close to two inches thick.
But then one day it suddenly stopped. It was like someone had turned off a faucet. I was almost done with the novel but it abruptly stopped flowing.
This happened right about the time that the money ran out. The flow was replaced by intense anxiety. I was only a few days away from becoming homeless yet again. Why does this always happen?
But I knew what I had to do. First, I held a little yard sale and sold my beloved typewriter and a few things that I had collected while living there. This at least gave me some money for food for a little while and some pocket money for when I hit the road and stuck out my thumb.
It was at the grocery store that I ran into Walter. He asked how things were with me and I told him that things had been supremely fantastic but that I was leaving; headed back to Texas.
He then invited me to come over for dinner before I left. A free meal? Hell, yes. Plus it would be a chance to be with Girlie one last time.
When I arrived at their home I could barely say hello to Walter and his wife before Girlie came running toward me at full speed. She jumped up on my legs begging for a hug. I knelt down and hugged and rubbed her and told her how much I missed her.
Walter spoke up, “You know, ever since you moved out of the guesthouse Girlie has been going out there several times every day looking for you.”
“She really loves you,” said Walter’s wife.
“Really?” I looked up at them then back down at Girlie. I told her how much I loved her, too. As I realized that this would be the last time I ever saw her, some tears squirted out of my eyes.
Finally, I stood up and wiped my eyes.
Walter leaned in toward me, “Can I ask you a question?”
“Sure.”
“Who the bloody hell in their right mind would choose to move to Texas?”
I chuckled. I had been asking myself that very question, “Well, I might be an idiot but… but there’s a woman there that I need to find.”
The end.
Copyright by White Feather. All Rights Reserved.
All of Girlie: Part 1 of 4: My One and Only Dog-sitting Gig Part 2 of 4: The Second Best Job I Ever Had Part 3 of 4: When My Paradise Vacation Ended Part 4 of 4: The One Word Letter
I hope everyone enjoyed Girlie despite its interminable length. I would like to thank Lindsay Lonai Linegar and P.G. Barnett for their inspiration.