Dey Yoomin. Like me.

…

My feet shoot out. I feel myself go.

I’ve run out of cookies too. Turn off the laptop. Fizzled. I want to walk around the book store. To the science fiction. Then the mangas. Look at the tarot cards and the feeling is strong so that I want to run. Maybe jump up and run in place. Fucking thing fizzled right out from under me. I thought it was something true and holy, but it was just ordinary. It felt holy because it was rare, writing in negative space like grass growing through cracks in the sidewalk, writing by divination and coin toss. I was going good, I know I was going good, and the whole thing it just fell apart. I lost steam. I'm confused. I'm freaked out. I’m scared the Republicans will win the house.

Here, look at this book. Somebody left this thing over here with half a piece of cheesecake, look at this, big damn book, a thousand damn pages. Left this Dune book by Brian Herbert. He’s not even that good a writer like his dad, how does he do it? Keep going, how? How do you bust out a thousand pages like that? And because why, they sell these books by the pound or what? How?

A young girl with hairy legs and a wool ski cap bunched on top of her head sits at the next table. The mermaids, they won’t sing to me no more either, Mr. Prufrock. Shit.

I waited too long, so it fizzled out from under me. Its like not talking to somebody too long, and they fade on you, next time you see them you don’t know what to say, stories you try to write, they do that to you. But faster. They fade out fast. They dump you. They break your heart.

I’m stealing looks at the girl with the hairy legs. I’m astonished that she doesn’t turn me on, not at all. How does that work? In Panama, they have these Pentecostal women you see on the bus who don’t shave their legs ever because maybe the Bible says they can’t and these women, these women with big hairy legs, they drive me wild. I want them fierce. I want to lick up their big hairy legs all the way up to the top. This girl isn’t sexy to me. Why? I hope she’s sexy to somebody who’s nice to her.

My imagination is fizzled out too.

I’m so glad I don’t this for a living. How do people do this for a living, day in and out? Like Joyce Carol Oates or John Updike? Well, he’s dead, but.

There’s a security monitor overhead. Why do they need that in a bookstore coffee shop? Who the hell steals books, anyway? The girl with the hairy legs gets up and goes away. Some hairy old creep, peeking up over his laptop, stealing looks at her hairy legs, creeping her out. Stupid old hairy creep. Well, you’ll be old too someday, my lovely. You wait.

A big black woman sits down there where the hairy legged girl was. She has a fancy tall clear plastic Starbucks cup. The cup has something beige colored and high caloried and expensive. It has whipped cream. It has drizzles of chocolate. It has a red straw. The woman, what she has is this. She has a big ass. A real tool shelf back there like she was magically drawn into real life by Robert Crumb. I’ve been reading old Robert Crumb comics a lot these days. When you read Robert Crumb’s stuff you look at women’s asses a lot.

So I’m thinking. I’m never going to write a novel, I’m thinking, I just don’t have the stuff. The big assed black woman comes up to me and stands right over me so close I can feel the heat of her skin coming off her, and begins undressing herself while I’m looking straight up the brown cliff face of her belly and feeling scared and excited and wondering if she’ll go on and if the security camera is catching this and maybe it’ll land on Youtube so I can keep this moment forever and she keeps going, and its all coming off, but nobody is looking at us and now she’s topless like an African woman in those old King Kong movies but without the coconut brassiere and her belly is big and her bare chest is big, and her tumescent nipples are astral and infinite and everything is huge and floppy and buoyant and totally primitive and out there. And there – oh my lord - she has hairy breasts. Lord have mercy. I have sinned oh lord, but not yet enough.

“So? You lookin at, you old hairy cracker fuck?” she says.

“Lookin’ at you sweet thing.” I say.

“What you doin’ there?”

“I ‘m writin’ a novel?”

“You ain’ writin’ no muhfuh shit. You think you some muhfah writer?”

"Well - "

"This ain't no place for novel writin' shit. This here's fo' coffee place shit. That all right wi' you, Mr. Highty Mighty muhfuh novel writer man? Huh?"

"Well - "

"Fuck's wrong with you?"

“Fizzled out.”

“You like my tits, you muhfuh cracker?”

“Yeah.”

“Finish yo’ nasty sorry-ass muhfuh novel then.”

“Can’t think of anything.”

“You scared? Think some muhfuh lady editor gonna read yo’ dumb-ass muhfuh shit?”

“Maybe I kind of hoped so, I think, yeah.”

“Fuck,” she says. “Ain’t nuthin. Dey yoomin. Like you.”

“So. Is it okay, you think, if I quit maybe? Call it a day?”

“Nah, no.” she says, motherly and slow. Comforting. “Wri’ mo’.”

“Okay.”

“Praise Jesus.”

"Yes, ma’am.”

The black woman who has been sitting at the table finishes her drink. She glances over at me. She gently scoots her chair out and gets up. She leaves her table, tosses the drink, gives me a funny look. I stare when I day dream. I move my lips too. I was probably moving my lips just now.

"Sir, are you all right there?"

"Yes, ma'am. Thanks."

She leaves.

Okay. Nah, no. Wri’ mo’ then.

. . . here we go . . .


C. Sanchez-Garcia