My Former Life

I have a friend who works in downtown Detroit, in an office across from the Fisher building. Hearing from him makes me miss Detroit. If I worked in his office I would look out the window a lot.

Once when I was living at the corner of Boston and Woodward in a carriage house (with my girlfriend Holly Body) and shooting dope at every opportunity, I took a job as a car park for the Fisher building. I remember the office was a little hut off to the left of the building and if memory serves there was either a vacant lot or a parking garage behind me. Anyway, my hours were the midnight shift and I was very excited because I knew that Kesey had written One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest while working nights.

Of course, I never showed up for work. Therefore I never wrote a good book while working nights. I did, however, get to keep the red vinyl windbreaker that would've been my uniform had I been less addicted and more industrious.

In some remote part of my mind, when things are going really bad, I promise myself that one day I'll move back to Detroit and become a junkie again, and I'll live in a little apartment on Woodward with neon light shining in the windows and I'll buy my clothes at Goodwill and I'll go see the Dope Lady every day. And in my spare time I'll go to the art museum and read books in the library. In that imagined world I have a small TV that only shows boxing matches and footage from World War II. At night I fall asleep in an old recliner and in the daytime I walk around in a cloud of loneliness that only the city, only being in the city, can cure. When things are going bad that's what I tell myself.

But things aren't bad now! Congratulations on your words on the plane. That's never easy. And speaking of writing at night, that's my new routine, so I'd better get cracking...