I went back to Ohio

cleveland is supposed to be rock and roll. mostly it's just flat and grey. for years i've been trying to get away from winter and i just keep stepping right back into it like dogshit in the grass. lake erie freezes over during the night hours and then the ice breaks and floats away from itself under the afternoon sun. the lake looks the surface of the moon, and that same otherworldly type of landscape that was the clouds i saw from a plane going to rome. it's disorienting, like when i was a kid and would hang upside down off the edge of the bed for half an hour at time, imagining the whole universe upside down- having to step over the ceiling fan and the arch of a doorway to get into the hallway and sliding down ( crawling up) the ceiling over the stairs to get downstairs.


i've been painting the landscape here. the bridge over the black river and the old riverboat that rumor has it a crazy rich guy is rehabbing. our first night here we went to a bar on the ghost town of a main drag in Lorain. i took a shining to the place rather quickly, which patrick likes to say is a bad sign. they had teal booths, a great jukebox and a wide stage in a larger anteroom. there were biker guys and older women regulars who smoked marlboro reds. we tried to play pool and a drunk hispanic man argued about the quarters on the table. we acquiesced instantly, patrick agreeing to play the man.

we are always the outsiders, the passive watchers in these small towns. we know not to pick a fight in a strange place.

i began to suspect that my first instinct was right- they weren't his quarters- as he stepped into our doctor friends face and the doctors face went sour. Doctor Pav stepped back, clearly sublimating his drunken streets of southampton, england urges to jump the guy. we stepped away from the game and i could see patrick was already in one of his drunkenly oblivious states- the kind where the conflicts of the world disappear under a thick wool- as he analyzed the balls on the table. the hispanic man flashed us his concealed weapon. the good doctor and i glanced at each other. pav is often incapable of not jibberjabbing in situations like this. he was telling me what the man had asked him. "are you puerto?" meaning was pav from from puerto rico we supposed. pav had said no obviously. he was british by birth but indian by race. that was when the man told him to back away from the table and shutup.

so we were backed away from the table but pav continued to jabber about the guy being crazy and the man continued to flash his weapon at us whenever patrick wasn't looking. patrick worried the pool balls into their homes while the man looked me up and down and winked at me. now it was my turn to get my dander up. he clearly was too drunk to realize patrick was my boyfriend, or just too fucking much of an asshole to care. we waited out the game at a table, changing the subject away from the threatening hispanic man in an effort to dull our instincts to start a bar fight. patrick won and i momentarily lost my stomach as the man leaned in close to patrick but then they're solid faces broke into laughter and the man patted patrick on the back.
strange. he wanted to hang out with us. we deferred to each other continously to make a decision about staying or leaving and moved around the bar, taking trips to the bathroom until the drunken bully seemed to have given up.

the doctor and i had taken a seat at the booth near the bar and patrick had gone to the boys room. we ordered 3 more beers. the man approached the table. he spoke to me and winked. none of us really understood anything he was saying, between the drink and the spanish accent. something about making it out of the projects alive. i had respect for him for that i guess, but nothing else.

and then he touched my hair. he took a strand of my dark hair that is perpetually falling in my face and tucked it behind my ear. i wanted to beat the crap out of him. it was a dirty move. a crossed boundary. he was staring at my tits pretty blatantly and licking his lips. the doctor was a bit too stunned at the man's balls to say or do anything but watch to see how i'd react. i turned to the drunk and said "if you have something you want to say to me you can look me straight in the eyes and say it, otherwise you need to back the fuck away from me." i'm not really sure who i am when i speak that way. the doctor says i'm more of a boy than both he and patrick, but i don't ever understand such statements.

the man returned to the bar and patrick returned from the bathroom.



patrick and the doctor are gone now. i am temporarily alone again, staring out windows at construction workers on plots being developed into new expensive homes. if the lake is the moon than the land is mars. i'm looking for work and pray i get a call from a respectable establishment before the denny's around the corner calls. the place had felt like jar of vaseline, and the workers like flies trapped in its impasto.

i saw a seagull the other day missing a foot and thought of the war.