Please don't tell me I've never given you anything
- Temmer
West Coast Motel
Sunshine is blasting through the unwashed window in the bathroom. It’s falling in torrents on the floor faster than the cracked and faded linoleum can drink it in. I’ve got a feeling that time is flowing through me, that nothing ever changes except the furniture; sunshine can do that.
Staring down at my writing – is the page half empty or half filled, I ask the author. Both of course – you can’t have one without the other, I reply. Damn good thing too because there’s more to be written. First a drink through.
The ice is melting fast in my mini-bar freezer. With only one outlet in the room, my choice is two of fridge, fan, television or radio. The fan is a must, day or night. Music keeps me sane. The ice will have to be sacrificed to a greater cause.
Damn, no mix.
To the Complex for relief and sustenance.
I got three steps out of the door and had to come back for shoes. The ancient asphalt outside is bubbling like a primeval tar swamp between me and the lurid draw of quazi-air-conditioned Bliss. Work boots and five bucks more for supplies and I can make it on the second go.
The door of the Complex has a bell attached to it. That bell is the exclusive charming thing about the whole place. The floor has greenish-grey indoor-outdoor industrial-type carpeting. Caked into the carpet’s impermeable surface are leavings of bubble gum, car oil, beach sand, ice cream, faeces, ceiling paint, sealing wax, blueberry pie filling from the time the redneck managers left their six year-old son Wiley with the teenage store clerk while they went to the Thursday night drag races; chew tobacco, gas, French fry smash, melted crayon, oil spill cleaner, moonshine, Windex, shoe polish, coffee, vinegar, more coffee, India ink, WD-40, even more coffee, cream of chicken soup and all sorts of remarkable gunky, gooey, staining, sticky substances that get tracked onto the main thoroughfare in front of a diner slash gas-station slash motel counter. Even sunshine seems to stick to that carpet.
Keep telling the story asshole.
I get chatty when I’m drunk. It’s a strange thing because I’m not normally a very friendly person. Small talk makes me uncomfortable. I’d much rather just be quiet and watch other people writhe in silent agony – awkward and expectant. Sometimes the line between hangover and drunk is heavily blurred by the booze. I chatted up the seventeen-year old gas attendant when I paid for my supplies. It started with the pack of Zig-Zag Whites – slow burning – and went down hill from there. His innocence was as refreshingly painful as jumping into a glacial lake. A candle in the window of a haunted house. I looked up at the clock and it’s red lined magic read eleven:eleven. I smiled, paid and fled, bell clanging charmingly behind my back. The sunshine hit me a heartbeat after the heat. The tag-team tang of Asphalt and Gasoline stung my eyes. I wandered wearily back, working for the words.
I’ve lived in the West Coast Motel for the better or worse part of some days, depending on how you look at it. Time stretches out before me like the blank lines in my Spiral notebook – waiting to be filled. I am filled with emptiness – a barren vessel like the cracked, moss-grown swimming-pool behind the low, ram-shackle excuse for a drive-in motel, that I call home. The mangled trunks of three long-dead trees stand grudgingly erect in the grass enclosure between the round-about driveway and the road. Redneck art. They wait patiently for a highway crew to come remove their obscene corpses.
Screamers. The pool is filled with sunshine.
Every time I move to a new place I adopt a different drink. At the West Coast Motel my erstwhile time-wasting concoction is equal parts necessity and convenience. Jack Daniels and Orange. It was, and is, all I have. The bourbon cut strongly through the bitter chemical taste of Kool-Aid that a handful of sugar packets did little to improve. That was Tuesday.
By Wednesday afternoon, the heat was weighing down like the hind teats on the redneck managers’ ancient she-hound Dolores. The bitch, and she is, hasn’t pupped in near a decade but her tell-tale saggy nipple-sacks drag in the dust as she waddlestalks between shade patches in the July glare. I woke up enveloped in damp. The salty sheets smelled faintly of whiskey that had mingled so pleasantly with my body fluids the night before. Those cowardly fluids, afraid of a little hardship, fled in the night while I slept, abandoning me in my time of need. My hangover conspired with the oppressive heat to thwart any plans I may or may not have had for the day. I knew the best way to avoid pain was to move and think as little as possible. Fortunately, enjoyment of daytime television is inversely proportional to the amount of brain power available. Bob Barker and his lovely ladies came over for a rousing afternoon – sprawled and drinking luke-warm water through a straw. That was yesterday.
I found myself this morning, more wet than usual from an overturned glass; in the same clothes I’ve been in for almost a week; still sprawled in front of the television which was broadcasting a spunky spandex-clad couple doing aerobics to an out-of-date tecnho-pop version of an 80’s hair band tune. Glass Tiger eat your heart out.
That was about noon.
Perhaps another drink would be in order. The ice isn’t getting colder.
Orange: the package of orange drink crystals I bought at the Complex must be referring to the colour of the liquid it produces. The flavour surely has no relation to any citrus fruits I’ve ever tasted. Thank God Jack Daniels neutralizes any other would-be taste-bud stimulants it encounters. Jack Daniels tastes like sunshine.
I should probably get on with it. This is today, now, the time I’m living in. July – fucking hot. A broken, battered, used, sullied, congealed motel room on a butt-fuck nowhere highway on the outskirts of an even more backward, backwater small town. The sunshine is the same here as anywhere else though; so is the booze. I came here to get rid of some things, demons mostly. Everyone has demons: old, young, poor, rich, fanatic, moderate, protagonist, antagonizer, mediator and medium. Some people are just more in touch with their inner expletives than others.
I was shining a flashlight around the dark attic recesses of my psyche one afternoon when I came across a box of inclinations I’d put aside for other pursuits – drugs, sex and ambitious exploits, mostly. It was a couple of hours post-coitus and the euphoric achievements of my previous night had worn off. I was stoned and sitting in sultry yellow light on the back lawn of my parents’ house, thinking to myself that life seemed to be going nowhere – slowly. The drugs were getting in the way of my ambition but I had no care to do anything about it. I couldn’t go forward. I was stuck in the present; sunshine bouncing off the tops of my thighs and running down the insides of my legs. When the world exterior refuses to give you any help, the best place to look for an answer is in your own psyche. I found darkness there, the shades of childhood nightmares, the pitch of the things that went bump in the night, the shadows of the forested depths of summertime.
Do you know the taste of water that’s been warmed by the sun? The sunshine seeps in and the sweetness of it rests on your tongue. The Tupperware pitcher that held the water must have soaked up a thousand gallons of sweet kool-aide into its durable brown plastic. Perhaps that’s where the sunshine got it’s inspiration. Sugar and sunshine are so close to one another that the trees can barely tell them apart.
“fresh fuckin Champaign powder”
