I started spending a lot of time with him. It just kind of happened. I don’t know why, except, maybe, it had something to do with John being gone. Alan told me after he returned home from the hospital he and his wife gave up alcohol and snorting cocaine. They stopped the sex parties with neighbors. He was sure the rabbi would have wanted it that way. After that, he said his wife was driving home one night and her car was run off the road. “Our neighbors were angry with us when we stopped the partying. I always brought the cocaine.”
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Throughout April she raked and pulled and hoed. Patched up the stone borders to keep the dirt in. Mixed coffee grinds into the ground. She grew to love the dirt. The way she could smell it, dark and feral, through the open windows after it rained. The way it collected in lines under her fingernails and, if she bit them, the way it crunched between her teeth.
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It looks as if it was built in the same era and with the same stuff as my apartment building. Sometimes I find it difficult to tell the difference between the two. Of course, the hours I spend here don’t do much to change that perception.
It’s a strange place to make a living, but somebody’s got to do it.
Somebody, yeah.
It should go without saying that I didn’t dream of this as a child. At school, my guidance counselor told me I should become a seal clubber or a proctologist. He made other suggestions too, but those are the ones that left an impression.
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This is trouble, and it is going to end badly, was one of the last things that rolled through the noggin. She had gone there, to the land where there was nobody, in order to clear her mind. It’s a common thing, she had thought then, in books and films, and perhaps in real life.Read more →
The faster you can do your route, the more money you make—per hour that is. Anyway, it’s money. And as my old man used to say, once it’s in your hand, you forget what you did to get it.
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No one at Waits seems to be able to articulate exactly what Waits does. Responses vary between, “We’re a solutions developer” to “government contracts,” to “consulting.” This in itself isn’t surprising. All positions at Waits are specialized, all employees are experts in a thin slice of the grand design.
“We’re all specialists,” Barbara says.
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