A Quick Story about Alcoholism, Amanda and Writing

Time and space are constantly affording new opportunities to each other. 
Just a year ago I was living in an ugly place called Amenia, drinking 
myself to death, working at a Tractor Supply to pay the rent and 
car insurance, and boycotting any personal temptation to write. 

I lived with this squat demimonde of a person named Amanda whom 
I was originally pleased to be moving in with on account of her 
being friendly to weedsmokers and being outright desperate myself 
to move out of my mother's trailer in Dover Plains for the fifth 
time in about as many years. 

The first week I was there, I met Amanda's boyfriend, 
a demure guy about my age (we were both slightly younger than her) 
who didn't say much but according to Amanda was a childhood friend. 

A couple weeks later, there was another guy, definitely taller, darker 
than the boyfriend, who Amanda introduced as a friend. 
He didn't say much either. But I'm sure he was fucking her. 

I guess after having two kids who were both in their 20s at that point, 
and not having much self-esteem or character before that, she'd 
let about anybody stuff themselves between her legs. 

She was always leaving too many lights on, and humongous gobs of her 
waist-length hair clung to the wall in the shower, and wrappers 
for individually-wrapped candies and iced-tea littered the kitchen counter 
almost every night, and she cooked almost every night but only washed 
the dishes about once or twice a week, and in very little time 
I limited my personal use of our supposedly shared kitchen/living room/ 
bathroom just about as far as reason would allow. 

And something else happened: 
I started writing some poems 
and then some short stories again. 
Just to be clear on this: I've quit 
writing many, many times in 
the last twenty years. There 
are great creative floods and 
there are droughts of the soul 
where not even nuclear insects 
could survive... And then, 
concomitant to nothing, 
the fingers conveniently find a pen 
and begin etching a few lines on the page. 

It takes little more than a pulse and a dream to keep this going. 

As far as Amanda went, well... Her boyfriend got tired of being one of several 
on her lecherous carousel, quit her, the second guy wasn't coming 
around anymore, either, and she eventually replaced them all 
with a single dad that Amanda eventually ended up living with. 

But this had to happen first: Amanda wasn't supposed to have 
longterm guests at the apartment. She and I had our own 
bedrooms, and neither of us were forbidden to have overnight guests, 
but there wasn't supposed to be anyone staying there for longer than that. 
So, at some point after I quit my job at Tractor Supply to have more time 
for writing and therefore restore my sanity and personhood, Amanda's mother 
and her two siblings were being evicted on account their previous landlord 
had sold the property and the new one didn't want tenants on welfare, as
they were. Officially, what's supposed to happen in these cases, 
is the welfare recipients use the money given to them by the state 
to pay for a motel room until they can find a new landlord 
who takes welfare. But Amanda's family wasn't having that. 
Why should three full-grown people have to sacrifice their share 
of public assistance and stay in a motel room when they could 
just as well pocket the money and sleep on the floor in 
Amanda's living room? Why should they have any respect or courtesy 
and quit bickering amongst themselves for more than ten minutes? 
Why should they spend less than the entire day with two other people 
who all clearly resented sharing so much as a surname with these delinquents? 
Why? Why, why, why? 

They were originally supposed to stay a couple weeks, but after just one 
I called the landlord to see if she could get them out sooner, and 
that's when I learned, in obvious contradiction to what Amanda'd 
told me, that her family wasn't supposed to be there at all. 

And that meant Amanda was getting evicted. 
And that meant I'd be responsible for the full 
fourteen-hundred or have to move out myself. 
And so I ended up back with my mother again. 

But I still had writing. Hundreds of pages and several 
moves later, the money comes and goes, people come and go, 
and whatever time I have left is a little less than the day before. 
It is very quiet, however, sometimes. God leans across the horizon, 
across the nothingness that separates ideas from the individuals 
they belong to. God tells me stop drinking for a little while, 
find some other form of divinity: there will be time yet later. 

****