Down & Out in San Antonio (Part III)

 

 HONEYMOON’S OVER

 

          Sept. 20, 1962
 
On Monday, September 10th, I received a letter with my unemployment check. No foreplay, it got right down to business: “Mr. Squires, you are in receipt of your final unemployment check. I hope you continue with your efforts and are successful in securing employment.”
 
What it didn’t say, but implied, was, “You are now another state’s liability.”

THEN AND NOW — PART II

[This blogster is getting frugal in his retirement.  If this post looks familiar to any of you it is because it was posted in my once lively, now defunct,  Jay Squires Writer’s Workshop Newsletter.  I think it has enough general interst that it should be included here.  Curiously, I had an earlier blog post entitled THEN AND NOW (A WRITER’S LIFE) — a title which I totally plagarized myself by using in my Newsletter (fortunately, there’s a law against suing oneself or I’d lose what little income I have in my retirement — I had that good a case against me!)  Even more curiously, I apparently had forgotten I used this same title, though the content in the two articles was entirely different.  Anyway … hence the PART II here.]

 

*     *     *

(A Writer’s Life)

   It was about 1961 or ’62.  I had just moved from a comfortable room in my parents’ home to a flat in San Francisco I shared with three others, only one of whom I remember.  His name was Joe, and I remember him because he, like me, left a comfortable home in Santa Maria, California, to experience life in San Francisco.
   We were oh so ready to begin our suffering.

THE LOVELY YOUNG LADY

There is a lovely young lady

(you know her), the one

In whose soul you’d swear

Ambition speaks in such muted whispers

You might take it for selflessness,

Until, she deems you, like me, benign

Enough to offer a glimpse within,

And then you’ll see…

(As I saw, you shall see)

How, in fact, her soul shrieks,

Indeed, incessantly shrieks

For its elusive reward;

Pitched, though – as from one

Of those curious whistles –

So high that only dogs

And I (and, perhaps you) respond;

Still, she fancies those sacred vibrations

Resonate in her alone.

Oh, never do I tire of studying her:

Obliqueness and indirection

Are essential to the game –

Detachment vital.  For it would be

Like studying the foam on a wave

As it swells to sweep over me,

If I am passive to the charm

Of her lassitude.

So, ensconced behind doorways

Peering from many a discreet angle

And at carefully chosen moments

I watch her loll

Her solitary body on her solitary bed

With that indolent sensuality

That one lover for another reserves.

How wondrously curious she is:

Savoring through distended nostrils

The warm fragrance of her mouth’s exhale!

How thoroughly content:

One moist inner thigh coupling the other.