Thursday the twelfth. It's getting hotter. The big tarps flap in the cooling breeze, our truck is totally hidden under it's blue house, held up by tent poles, guy-wired and secured with fat long nails pounded into the rocky ground. Clear Creek. Motorcycle country. All day we'll hear the gravelly-throated insects bounce by on the road, very near, very dusty. Tomorrow they'll be gone, most of them, back to work or school, caught in schedules that won't let you stay up all night writing, or playing music or working out some amazing new invention to help you finish a project you've been stewing with for years: the robot, the play, the books, the songs to be written and learned, the fingers to reconnect with the brain so you can play a clean steady scale, oh God I could go on and on.
The first day. The first great day of liberation from driving around from here to there and there to someplace else, every night move the truck, hide from the police or some nosy person peaking out the window because they (she) has nothing else to do (do you really think we're going to rob you and kill you?!) The box is going up, the big shiny box Tim's fitting up under the truck to carry paint until we get the truck painted, and then some of this hardware that breaks your toes and skins your shins and gives you little slashes now and then because there's little room in this truck. This house. We've lived here four years this July. We bought it from old Robert Trueluck (that's another story) and we've lived here ever since, except for the time it was broken down (which is more of that other story.)
I woke up from a dream at 2:30 in the morning, Friday the thirteenth, freezing and fevered, the thick blankets choking me. I was lying in the exact same position in the exact same place in my dream. I was dying with a hundred and eight temperature, chilled and shaking, trapped, suffocating. When I woke up, Timothy woke up. I told him about my dream and took my temperature. Almost a hundred and two. Only a few hours before, on the other side of the world, the great jazz trumpet player, my friend, Chet Baker was found dead on the street in Amsterdam. He fell out of his second-story hotel window. Or was he pushed?
~ Frances