"Los hombres pueden ser analizados, las mujeres meramente adoradas."
"Men can be analyzed, women... merely adored"
Here's a wild thought. What if I wrote this book in Buenos Aires. This story of winter. Sure, I realize that was the whole point of this excursion, to squeeze this out of me, this awfulness. I get that. What I'm saying is what if I wrote this in the present, not the past like I planned. Well, in the past too. Mostly, in fact. But so that they knew I wrote it here. In this city. A California cowboy story written in the true South, way south, Latin south. So they know what I know now, right alongside what I thought I knew then. All mashed up.
No, not mashed up. I already did that. Back when I didn't know a damned thing, and I thought I knew it all, and I was miserable, living on a mattress in a living room, working at a bakery, and telling myself that this whole writing business can't really be that bad. Back when I used to love writing, before I knew how everyone died. I thought it was the bee's knees and that I was some renegade literary rockstar type like Hank Moody or Kerouac. I'd just get high, write a book and be famous.
That's always the way dreams go though, isn't it. Most times they're just too good to be true. They aren't realistic. It took the truth crashing down on me to get that. Matter a fact, it's always crashing on down. And look at me now. Writing has become the agony of my life. Because of what happened in Santa Cruz and Paris and LA that year, and all the places in between, before, after and what's always happening to me.
I'm shitting letters into pages on the goddamn train to Retiro right now. I mean, who does that? A crazy person does that. A bearded crazy person in second-hand clothes. Lucky I have good tastes in thrift stores and a sharp eye at passing yard sales back home. The stylish lunatic, these Porteños must be thinking as they chance glances at me. "Where's he from with that beard? And what the hell is he doing here?"
It's all Callie's fault really. And Max's too, for telling me I could do anything. I can't even feel the pain in my writing hand anymore. We're here now.
[to be continued]
