7/17/98 2:21 PM

Today was scary cigarette day, because I almost ran out! Isn't that frightening? Let's go over the day so far:

Got up at 8am and drank coffee. Worked on outlining 'The Visitation' for a few hours when I found myself running dreadfully low on smokes. (It's physically possible to write without drinking, but not smoking is another matter entirely!) My net worth this morning was 84 cents, which is 96 cents short of cigarettes. What to do? Oh my God, I can feel fresh air leaking into my lungs as we speak! I needed to go to the library anyway (to kill some time and pick up a book for Diane - she does so much for me and asks so little) and I figured there'd be at least $1.00 in cans floating around the house somewhere.

The reason library and recycling center are interrelated here is that both centers are over West off Center St in Mesa. I dug in the shed and dug in the trash and looked under tables and in the back yard and dug in Wendy's trash can 'just for cans' (it was empty!) and after all this great effort, all I had to show was one small plastic sack of cans.

Now on a good day when the International Aluminum Mafia is in a good mood, cans go for 45 cents/lb. Therefore, 2 lbs and a few prayers to "Bubnaphant", the great transient god of getting stuff you don't have money for, and I'd have my smokes. Right? Well…no. Apparently there is a conspiracy between the aluminum barons and Bubnaphant herself to make sure your bunny lives the smoke-free life of some freak-of-nature marathon runner or other warped sports enthusiast.

Ok it's hot. It's July and therefore hot (Noon Temp: 112 F) and I tool off down Broadway (still in Mesa here, stay with me) with my happy sack of cans which I'm assuming weighs around 4 or 5 lbs. I weighed myself. (Body Weight: a strapping 130lbs) I weighed myself with the cans. (Me plus cans: 135lbs) Allowing for miscalibration of the scale and my own unique ability to spontaneously lose or gain up to 7 lbs in under a minute, I came to a cautious estimate of 4 lbs of cans. Thus yielding 4 lbs X 45 cents/lb= $1.80 or the exact amount necessary to purchase 1 pack of GPC 100s in a box at Walgreens. I said to myself, Bubnaphant is on my side this fine hot day.
Broadway Rd between Solomon and Center streets is basically populated by Mexicans. One room taco houses are plunked out here and there with names like El Taquito and Tres Amigos and there's an elementary school across from a gun shop, an old paperback bookstore by the day old Dolly Madison store, a carpet warehouse and a pawn shop shaped like a castle with turrets and everything, a Circle K and a train yard full of migrant citrus pickers. Right before the tracks, on the corner of Broadway and Center in beautiful downtown Mesa sits the American Recycling Center. This is about a mile from Diane's and my eyes are already dried up and going out of focus; yet, I see the giant entrance sign that posts the going exchange rate of garbage for cigarette/beer money that day and my lungs give out a little peep that sort of sounds like help me but in reality is saying shit! 29 cents/lb. My tiny heat wilted brain goes to work. 29 cents/lb X 4 lbs = $1.16. $1.16 + .84 = $2.00. Over the top with 20 cents to spare! Bubnaphant loves the bunny, right? Well… no.

I pull in with my one measly sack and avoid the enormous pothole in the drive around. The scale and the crusher machine stand in a broken cement field of large-holed wire-mesh containers about the size of regular trash cans. There are bees all over the place. Bees love sticky-sweet beer and soda can run-off and they're not all that stupid when it comes to finding out where human beings keep this kind of stuff. So I'm dancing around trying not to get stung and die of anaphylactic shock in pool of month old beer and coke slime that smells like rotting fruit stirred around in a Red Man spit cup, and I dump my sack in the wire basket. There's barely 6 inches in the bottom and the technical support manager/machine operator/Mexican guy standing there shakes what looks to me to be a good 3 lbs of liquid out onto the ground. I'm standing barefoot and downhill in the hot rocky dirt and the can ooze starts running between my toes. Now I've got half my profit spilled out (needlessly in my opinion. Why can't they recycle that stuff too? Just pour it back in the vat. Who'd ever know?) and it's been super-heated by the sun to 8000 F and it's gooey because it's syrup, so it's sticking to my feet like some kind of sadistic Anheiser-Busch/Coca-cola jelly-gas napalm crap that won't come off and the nice man gives me my yellow ticket and it says… 3 lbs. Shit! 87 cents. (Net worth: $1.71) 9 cents short. I suck and Bubnaphant hates me. Right?
I take my yellow ticket over to the office and get in line for my being-kind-to-the-environment reward. There's a preppy 40ish mom-like-looking-woman at the front who's bitching cause they won't honor their own coupons or something, and she says it Q-pons which means she's stupid and I hate her and I wouldn't mind it if she died, because this was the first time I'd ever seen her and if I never saw her and her dumb-ass mini-van with her two stupid children inside wearing these freak Grranimal mix and match goober cloths for Mormon teens and wannabe ethnic haircuts again, I don't think I'd miss her. I wanted to ask her if chickens lived in Qps, but I didn't because ever since I saw "Terrence & Philip's : Not without my anus" I just give the people I hate cancer with my mind. She'll die soon. So will her kids.

The next guy in line was quiet and Mexican and got like $22 or some insanely large amount and climbed into his beat-up pick-up with his 7 kids who were all under 5 years old and drove off without a word. My turn! Me now!

I hand over my yellow ticket to the old woman who's been working the cash drawer there since you could get 30 cents/lb recycling rocks and 22 cents/lb for dinosaur shit and she's all shaky with fine-motor tremors or continuous petite mal seizures and she's punching the numbers into a calculator with this pen because her fingers don't work anymore and because she went to school before the advanced mathematics of addition was invented and she pushes out my receipt to sign. I have to sign a piece of paper for 87 cents. I do and she slides out my copy of the receipt with the change on top of it… 87 cents, right? Then she slides out three fresh'n'crisp $1 bills, because her brain works like a broken lawn sprinkler, sometimes it just turns off for no reason whatsoever. Dood-de-doo. I'm not home right now, but if you'd like to leave a… So I quick take the money and turn for my truck, thinking Bubnaphant is going to want to do me in the butt for a favor like this, when…Ding Ding! The sprinkler comes back on. "I think I gave you too much money young man." The gods hate me today. They mock me out of jealousy though. I say, "That's ok!" She takes back the bills. (net worth: $1.71) Shit!
Here's the little play I thought of on my way up Center street to the library. It's about this old lady at a recycling center, who I'll call Miss Ima (which is short for Miss Ima Bout Dead) and Methuselah. It goes something like this:

Methuselah stands in line for 20 minutes listening to a preppy bitch yammer on in pidgin English about having inoperable cervical cancer while a homeless man murders her children with an ice pick about five feet away. Methuselah finally gets to the window and sees Miss Ima sitting there with a big soaking wet stain down the front of her clothes.

Methuselah: Here's my yellow ticket.

Miss Ima: Excuse me young man, I've spilled my catheter bottle on myself. Will you help clean me?

Methuselah: Shit!

I cross over 1st Ave and pass the bank on Main Street, where I know they've got to have an extra 9 cents laying around, but they're just too fucking stingy to hand it over. I have one cigarette left. One. I know there ain't no 9 cents laying around Diane's house, because I already looked. That's how I got the 84 cents I started with. I sit in the heat waiting for the light on Pepper St to either change or melt right in front of me, watching these two corporate types in suit coats cross the street. 112 degrees. Suit coats. This is the Arizona mind at its finest moment of absolute obliviousness to its surroundings. Suit coats.

I see the Post office on 1st St and pull into the library parking lot. I park. (bored yet?) Another play pops into my head:

This one stars Miss Ima, a 4000 year old reanimated Egyptian mummy and the melted remains of two dumb-ass bankers. Miss Ima is roaming around lost inside an industrial size bread baking oven covered in her own feces. It's 600 degrees and the bankers just climbed in to do a quick depreciation calculation for the loan the Baker has taken out on his oven. They instantly melt into runny puddles of goop and slide down the sides into a coagulated mass that looks like the bottom of a porta-johnny at a badly organized county fair. The mummy reaches in to get a loaf of fresh bread for a tuna sandwich he's making.

Melted Banker #1: (to Melted Banker #2) Nice jacket.

Melted Banker #2: (to Melted Banker #1) Thanks. Nice suspenders.

Mummy: Grrrrrrrrrr.

Miss Ima: (to Mummy) Excuse me young man. My colostomy bag broke. Will you help clean me?

Mummy: Shit!

Melted Banker #1: (to Melted Banker #2) It's not that hot in here.

Melted Banker #2: (to Melted Banker #1) Not at all.

So I go in the library, blah, blah, blah. Nothing interesting happens. They didn't have Stephen King's 'The Stand' which is why I went there in the first place. Which they said was checked in, but which wasn't on the shelf and nothing else happened so I went back to the house hoping MA was there and would give me the 9 cents. Nope. My life sucks.
I lay around drinking more coffee and eating cheese popcorn I bought with food stamps yesterday and watching Christopher Plummer play Vladimir Nabokov explaining The Metamorphosis to a Lit class at Cornell in Nabokov on Kafka. I smoke my last cigarette. Impending doom looms outside the window. No, that was the mailman. No mail for me today!

I need 9 cents in real cash money and I have $53 in food stamps. (big shopping day yesterday) So I go down to the Texaco on the corner to buy something that costs say $1.15, then I'll get 85 cents back in real change money and can go buy smokes. I pick my purchase carefully, not wanting to go too far over $1 but at the same time not too close either. If it comes out to $1.03 or something, there's a good chance the cashier would throw in the 3 cents and I'd get no change back whatsoever. I took my super jumbo Butterfinger bar up, slapped it on the counter and whipped out my official USDA play money. "I don't take stamps", the ugly cashier woman I'd never seen there before even though I'm in there all time said to me. I said, "Thanks anyway." And wished her face cancer as I went back to the truck.

Kitty-corner from the Star-mart on Stapley and Broadway is a Circle K which I know takes food stamps because it's like the Mexican meth-junkie AT&T phone center. I pull up in the parking lot and there are clusters of people checking their pagers with one ear in a cell phone and the other pressed to a pay phone. (fond memories of my wife flood by) Outside there are Monte Carlo low-riders gassing up and homeless illegals passing out from the heat; inside there's Goya rice and Goya beans, the Pamper's 5000 for $5.99 econo-packs and a six-flavor self-serve slurpee machine. This place will definitely take my gubbamint food Q-pons. I browse, selecting slowly. They know the scam here. Nothing has prices on it. Ah-ha! The mark-down bin! Spoiled and dried up food at a price everyone can afford. Dolly Madison apple pie: On special - 69 cents. Between the words apple and pie sits the phrase- 'artificially flavored real fruit'. I love the American language. What else? I need another 69 cent something. I browse again. Ah-ha! Indy-packs of Kellogg's pop-tarts (frosted brown sugar cinnamon yum!) - .59 cents for two. I have my purchases totaling $1.28. Perfect. 72 cents change. There's no way in hell a minimum wage cashier is going to throw out a free quarter to a scum bag like me. They just don't care that much. They've been hardened by all the evil they've seen. It's sad, but it's a fact of our decadent modern world; although in here, I look quite respectable. Cha-ching sings the register and Ba-bing out comes the change. (net worth: $2.43)

I dash off to Walgreens and who's there behind the liquor counter…? She's blond… She's got the tiny rad butt… She's a cashier… I'm in Walgreens… It's my dream girl. I knew she was working, but didn't want to try to bum 9 cents off of her right before our date. She asked about the show. I said, "We're in on the list and we'll be too drunk to drive by 9." She rolled her eyes in mock annoyance and smiled. I asked her if she liked apple pies or pop-tarts. She asked why. I said never mind, I'd pick her up at 7p.

I gave the apple pie to Wendy in partial restitution for all the money I've borrowed that she'll never see again in money form. She got taller today or I'm shrinking. It's weird. Gotta go wash my dick now, just in case.