Gabriela because somehow this goes back to Gabriela, of course, and the book on love and longevity minus fluid exertion, but to the woman herself, whom like I said, I had met through Aaron Daney the summer prior, just before or just after encountering the Jewess...I was thinking of falling for her Italian beauty and I had managed to get a copy of my book of sonnets, Doombook, into hers and her father’s hands while Gas and I drove my father’s green truck about town looking for her...on her street, Gabriela approaching my side of the truck with a smile from 1945 saying all I needed it to say along the lines of “Plan A, the original plan, to smile” and so that’s where the romance started one hot afternoon mid-street, the father daughter best friend place of intricate meanderings graced with Chinook wind...So I got her phone number and address from Daney and upon returning to San Francisco, commenced to write and call with delicate uncanny patience, a subsonic latitude, a will to win this fair-hearted dolce gabbine, with her good strong Italian nose, golden hair, and sweet eyes...I was ready to win Gabriela’s heart and start my married life anew...this time with too beautiful daughters aged six and ten! Here I was! The principle of Fructification, ever from above sunshine, rain, etc...I think I thought I had it figured...So I sauntered right into my old usual habit of obsessing daily about her, her love for me, her hatred for me, how long she might love me, how my vaunted friends would receive her and she them... my moods from September to late November, when caught up between Gabriela’s ploughshare dedication to me and my own sense of growing foreboding, got worse, feeling my inferiors drag and push around my heart, which was calmly, quadrilaterally beaming its manna message “follow me, thus The Path”...Daily I was asking the I Ching what to do, where to point, when to do whatever it was I was about to undertake...
I had reached that point where I couldn’t force myself any longer to stay with her just because she was dead-on gorgeous and generous...on and on went my wayward nerves & I could feel the repercussions of my family and friends when with plumb crazy enthusiasm I would relate my plans with her...thankfully, their looks of doubt and care became teachers of the highest order, teachers willing to let me hit my own walls... I still made a plan to travel out to Colorado for a few days with my mom, who was living a mere five minute walk from Gabriela. Then there was the question of how I would find a way to make money in Colorado, where mountebanks were few and corporate cutthroats were aplenty. ”Was it not my privilege to demand work, I a full-fledged American Citizen, the heir of respectable parentage, a devout worshipper of beauty, a democratic hooligan? Hadn’t I gone to college to learn how to die, die like miserable coward, die with stub tail betwixt my legs, die the slow joyless death of samsara?”
Sometimes it was a conversation with my father (verbatim) “I don’t know five jobs that would fit your lifestyle in Colorado,” other times I just thought of cancer housing developments and the resignation to unhappiness that would proceed buying and moving to one...and how did I manage day to day, month to month, to keep up my eat out/buy books/live large lifestyle? Debt and reckless abandon. Debt in the form of credit card/student loan and the downright blessing of my family...I spent way above my means, entirely, cosmically beyond my meager salaries, yet somehow made it work because ultimately, finally, I get the sense to stop before it gets out of hand, borrowing money from friends, dad, sister, almost always paying back and trying to offer something above and beyond cash like the proton charge of loyalty or good advice...money has always been this thing for me, and ONLY now am I learning that it need not be worried over like driving directions or the checkbook—
Fact is money & cunt are the two dirty sot stories left to be told of the liberation of bug-eyed glint reaper ME, save the big dark holding room windless Ten eyed death of this body...at least in San Francisco I was making thirty K and had not a one woman to support and half a rent owing to the move in of Sim Flyer, whom I’d asked to share my apartment when the wifey moved out...
-Michael Price
