Much can be said about shy people, but shy people are the best. And the sort that look at their boyfriends/girlfriends slyly as if their amazed that they got them in the first place, they’re even better.
She was a skinny thing, terrifically shy. She came into Los Angeles by train. She told the first person she met that she hated traveling on the train at night, not because it was dangerous but because by the time it was night the train was looking rather worse for wear, strewn with litter and covered with fresh graffiti. And that person she met, well, he said he also hated traveling on the train. Period. But because it was full of Blacks and Mexicans.
She stayed in Los Angeles for a while, running on fumes – two dollars for a cup of coffee, free re-fills and sugar for energy. After tiring of being tired she drifted down south into sunny California and picked fruit for a time. She didn’t have to work when it rained but she wouldn’t get paid either.
Down South she saw someone she liked. She spied him through the long fingers of the trees whose fruit she was pilfering, and then she did something that was decidedly out of character: she became pregnant to him. Deciding that he probably wasn’t a suitable father but that she wanted to have the kid she went East into Nevada and blew into a monastic town.
The Benedictines made her welcome, but they weren’t sure what to make of her: her talk of fiat currency and the evils of leveraging; the way she used to lift her shirt and sun her pregnant belly; her propensity for Swedish snus; and that t-shirt with a picture of an owl on it whose eyes sat flush on her tits that, whenever she wore it, had the Benedictines self-flagellating all through the night.
After a while, though, she tired of the monastic life, of the people there that were shyer than she was, and she packed up her kid and came home.
Written on Monday, 18 April 2011