It was a farm house and it was a rooming house

and the front yard was yellow weeds and dust

with a massive gnarled stump of oak that I

must have somehow cracked my head on when the dude

I'd been drinking with that night at the Mercygraft

Tavern dumped me out the passenger side

of his Ranchero. Or maybe he threw me out.



I slept for I don't know how long in the yard

until Myra, the landlady, came out at some indeterminate

hour of the pre-dawn and threw cold water from a pail

onto my head. I sputtered awake and lay there looking up

into her owlish face with with the huge bifocal glasses

and nest of steel wool hair. Old before her time,

she said, "Why do you do this to yourself?"



"Sorry, Myra," was all I could manage. Ordinarily,

I guess I would've been a candidate for eviction,

but I'd been living here longer than anyone and had always

paid on time. My head was pounding. In spite of this,

I felt another beer and a smoke would've done just fine.

I was giving up, had been for a while, yet it was a pain

in the ass, sometimes worse than trying .



"There's a letter for you," said Myra.