It may give you some pleasure to hear that news of your next life has left me dangerously unhinged and helpless to occupy a moment of your time with this runaway truck of emotional waste. A more nuclear calamity than Montana berry wine could not befall a sophisticated palate. I have been drinking in the snow and firing antique six-shooters with a local named Hap, and should married life boost one’s concern for the environment, I assure you that all the wild beer bottles in Montana have little to fear from my accuracy. Hap believes the new state leash law to reflect the growing pussy-iness of America and feels sorry for the control agent who comes by to confiscate his dog or the dog of anyone he knows. Unlicensed with a cataract in his left eye, but won’t be told what to do even when one politely observes that it is best to drive on the correct side of Interstate 15.

My fellow residents would serve nicely as the contents of a sack tossed into the river. There is this one, an owlish nitwit from Bangladesh who without solicitation has been generous enough to lend me a copy of his book published by Penguin India

Penguin India

Penguin India

Penguin India, which if you recite a dozen more times you will be halfway to the number of times he drops it in conversation. Posing hipster LA trash inhabits residence #2, talks through walls, talks to Don DeLillo once a month (You’ve never met Don? Oh Don is a roar, an absolute roar) in between work on her WWII novel about moral Nazi wives who sabotage the war effort somehow, maybe give their husbands syphilis, plus an Estonian poet who writes about alabaster dildos and Carpathian sheepherders and is perfectly companionable because she never leaves her studio except to except buy more almonds at the general store, the only thing she’s eaten in two weeks.

The minerals are gone in Montana. Kay Jewelers weeps. Old mines have been converted into health dungeons where you can play five-card draw with two middle-aged lesbians from St. Paul absorbing heavy doses of radon. Fifty dollars and two hours later you walk out of Sunshine Mine full of beans and hornier than hell, according to Jez and Cathy, though I admit to only a barely diminished urge to phone his office and confess a flaming STD and our long history of irresponsible screwing.

You were right about New York. My grit was too thin to succeed. Now I am in a place where grit is a natural enzyme and every cattle hand schizoid and prairie town barmaid walks around like they ate a barrel-full of alligators for breakfast. A tiger-striped hound won’t stop clawing at my door because when I first got here I didn’t starve the hell out of it like everyone else. Yesterday a girl on a pogo-stick called me a faggot for wearing mittens. Tomorrow I talk “structures of poetry” at a Meth clinic for women who just want to stop trembling for an hour or grow new teeth. And now a fat woman in Nebraska is going to pay ten thousand dollars for Justin Bieber’s chopped locks while I start my second bottle of Rodeo Red and get ready to call my brother who’s soaked in Demerol and getting wacked in his divorce by a woman who blows strangers in front of their baby daughter, because California is a “no fault” state.

Your writing is irreparably fucked for letting me go. Who will save your blushing grammar when two nouns possess the same entity, and I am the only one you’ve ever met who knows that only the second noun takes the apostrophe. But I do hope you two enjoy Siegfried’s and Roy’s show this weekend. I still find your hairs in my shirts.

It is one of those nights when the wall has been hit so hard, and thoughts of you hang down over me like broken chandeliers in a bombed-out cathedral and I want to drink myself asleep but can’t even do that. So I write people; I tell them there are 250 people in Basin, Montana and that National Forestry has tagged 300 moose. Moose by nature are cranky and isolated and should I ever meet one I am sure we’ll get along fine.

Pretty little shipwrecker.  I will wait until you are halfway across the last bridge back to us, then blow it to the gorge.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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