someone come suck the snot from my nose, please. i am SO sick. i haven't shot my set yet cos right now i look like this: there is a strike, too. no subways or buses. fine with me. i have a lot of work to do on my book and dude, we're getting cable today. HBO on demand. six feet under. i will be watching a sexy redhead driving a hearse while i eat blueberry waffles for the rest of the day. strike all you want. i'm going on strike from ugly people. and most of the MTA workers are well..........
here's more Boys Town. my agent's sending Boys Town to publishers! sweet.
i heart you guys. i will post pics of me as soon as i'm better.


Boys Town
(December)
Pale light from the fridge hits our bodies, making us look dead. It is morning but it doesn’t seem like it. The sky refuses to release the sun.
“You hungry?” Jack asks.
I say no, not because I’m not hungry, but because there’s nothing in the fridge but a few crusty condiment packages from take out and something that cannot be food. When I close my eyes all I can hear are the flapping of pigeon wings.
We smell like the places we sleep. We smell like hell.
There was a mouse in the toilet this morning, dead. After I used the toilet I wasn’t sure if I should flush it or not so I didn’t.
I left it there emerged in my cloudy piss.
I just want to leave.
Jack takes a slice of ham, the last slice, and rolls it up so it looks like a pink cigar and sticks it in his mouth. He must be starving; even so he offers to split it with me before devouring it. I shake my head.
I tell him I’ll try and pocket as many fives from selling bouquets and we’ll try and eat out tonight.
Where we are is somewhere I’ve never been and somewhere I never want to come back to. We hike through a cornfield. I feel caught between paper hands and a blanket of clouds. Up ahead is an old train station. Jack sees a train and takes my hand. He is late meeting Mike. Some guy wants a blow job on his lunch break.
He makes me run with him.
We have no money. We have to jump it. I do my best to climb up a fence and squeeze through the railing of the stairway. We slip through the open doors just in time. The conductor sees everything; he glares at us with cold blue eyes but never says a word.
We have steak at a cozy restaurant on Clark Street later that day. Jack orders his bloody as hell.
I can’t get over how pink the insides are. I watch as grease puddles around a couple of ignored olives stabbed on toothpicks.
“Your boss seems to like me,” he says.
“Yeah, well, I don’t think she’s been laid in years. Maybe if she got lucky she’d stop being such a bitch.”
I look up and catch the dirty glimmer in Jack’s eyes.
“What?”
“Where does she live?” he inquires.
“Michigan Avenue, Daddy’s little girl. She keeps asking me over. I think she’s lonely.”
“You think we could crash there tonight?”
I know what will happen, but our options are running out. Hostel, the pigeon coop, or maybe the laundry room in my building that’s sometimes unlocked, but it’s December and there’s a blizzard on the way. Jack is sick, too. If he’s sick then I’m sick because we’re lovers and that’s just how it works.
“I’ll see what I can do,” I tell him.
I know Jack cheats on me. He kind of has to. It goes along with crashing at his friends places. Girls expect it, the punk girls he hangs out with, like Leslie, the girl with the death spiked Mohawk that looked at me that night she took him home like, ‘come here girl, try and take him back, and it’s all over.’
So tonight when he fucks my boss I know it doesn’t mean anything to him.
I pretend it doesn’t to me either. We are sleeping in a warm place.
The fire’s crackling.
I stick my hand in it for a second cos I want to feel something, too.
Then I fall asleep with an ice cube in my hand to ease the burn.