Dollars Per Hour Chapter 11

    Tuesday: My day off. I get up at noon and check the mail. One rejection from an agent who says no publisher would ever want to publish my book about school violence. One rejection slip from a poetry magazine in Boston. They don’t bother to correspond at all, just wrote on the back of my cover letter a long list of established poets I should be emulating if I ever want to make something of myself in the harsh poetic world. In my head, I compose a nasty letter that I will never write, ball up the rejection and send it through the circular file with the remains of the fish I ate last night.

   I check my e-mail, and there are two humorless forwarded jokes that everyone's mother sends them when they first discover the Interwebnet. I delete them with the one porn ad. There is a reply from a magazine in Sacramento, answering my request for their submission guidelines. I select five poems to send them, put together a package and get it ready to mail. With it, I package up a short story to mail off to another magazine I have been interested in. I make myself a breakfast burrito, shower, and take my offerings to the post office.

    I spend most of the afternoon like a proper art fag, reading a book about Burroughs in a coffee shop, hopelessly scratching fragments of poems in my notebook. When I get home, there is a message from Dr. Filth asking if I want to go to the bar tonight. He sounds concerned. He spends a lot of time making plans for something we do every night.

    I spend the next few hours staring at an empty computer screen, wondering what I should do with the story. Then I spend half an hour furiously typing how I think it should be, only to get pissed and delete it all when Doc Filth calls me from work, telling me to meet him at the Spot in forty-five minutes. Then he convinces me to pick him up in half an hour.

    I find it hard to get out of the house, but Chloe forces me along when she gets home. The bar is dark and empty. Chloe and I split a dozen chicken wings and we get a pitcher of Moosehead among the three of us.  No sooner has the pitcher hit the table when Tommy Guilt shows up with his new girlfriend, who is fucking him for coke, and we all split another two pitchers. She’s wearing a shrunk and faded Rob Zimmerman High T-shirt, my much-maligned Alma Mater.

    “I take it you never went to R-Z,” I tell her, filling her pint, following with my own.

    “No,” she answers in a bubbly, absent voice. “Why?”

    “Do you see any of us wearing R-Z shirts?” Doc Filth grunts.

    Right after last call, some guy that Chloe knows comes over to try to barter for Tommy’s girlfriend’s shirt. It’s funny at first, but he won’t take a hint and leave. Tommy starts to get pissed, and even though I don’t really know this girl or care about this random guy, I’m drunk enough to think a fight would be fun. Even though I try to bring Doc Filth into it, he is content to just stare down into his beer and shake his head. There is a lot of macho posturing and bad noise, but his friends are doing what they can to get him out the door before either Tommy or I stand up and make a brawl unavoidable. The adrenaline burns away most of my buzz, and leaves me in a pretty good state of mind.

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