So Rafe could speak almost fluent Spanish and he was using it with everyone and whenever he could...and I, half-tongued from raunchy thought Spanish teachers in high-school, tried to ebb the brain peristalsis come on from that new language panic of new place new face syndrome...same as trying to talk to Ramona for most of my words get their real meaning in poetry and the stout twine of my dad’s voice--how mine now sounded like his in my ears --crest-fallen, egregious, and thin but more than that, the feeling of slippage when you’re in a dog town small talk bender with a bore, and you’re thinking the end of the world, 1997 but it seems song is nothing but slippage but it’s that sinking and helio-tropic tractor-beam lock of a dud hounding your sensibilities away from verisimilitude and somewhere towards mass production and false flatteries...
As I looked around there were people lined up getting familiar, to themselves and to me, and my eyes rolled over them like a glissando, a slide by each guffaw and cherry bomb outburst, many a soak-sheet drinking game and pick-up in progress…Rafe talks to me in his affected “hey brother”; “that’s cool” kind of way making everything he hears or reacts to “cool” which makes it not cool, makes it banal, makes it a waste of words to bother...and Rafe he’s a traveler, one of the ilk who follow Dead shows, who ‘splay their wares, kick the cloth rock and do LSD...he’s been to Seattle, Santa Barbara, Tuscon, Vermont, DC, Portland—rock and gear shows, crafts fairs, art marts, a super brigand of left super economy, like Renaissance Fairs and Dungeons & Dragons—Ah, Spiritual Irritation! Raph’s seen the hustle in money, the disadvantage of night, the over-under of his next score—Raph was running on and I was fading—but he did get on a subject I was happy to consider…he was already being bounced around in his efforts to find lodging that he could either work for or trade for...Peggy’s Hi Lo Hotel, owned by the Texan sisters, couldn’t run him and his insufferable mouth out of there fast enough…I knew he would be angling to find out if he could stay at my mom’s house, could feel it coming like headache in march, so I went further ahead to cut him off at the humid pass, telling him—my mom thrilled to be living completely alone now that she’s the joy of unruffled mind and unemcumbered by marriage license...on her own, Rafe, and man is she beaming with joy in her own house...
--so she wouldn’t be cool with someone living there?
The Fucker. This quick dentist of the soul. Atrium hanger. Mute in a sunbeam. Dirty mote...
--Naw, see thing is she doesn’t take well to a stranger’s Rafe, and I don’t know it’s really none of my business...her house you know and I’m squatting myself and with no ceilings and the noises humans are apt to make in the bowers...lime trees, prisons, you know what I mean?
--that’s cool, man...I understand how it is...
-Michael Price
