Day 1: 560 words

Made my word count... just barely!

Like a surfer who's spent a couple months away from the water, my timing is ruined; my endurance, non-existent. Near the end of the day, I resolved to put down anything, just to break the 500 plateau!

But this game is a marathon, not a sprint. All words are good words. Progress is imperceptible, but for today, I'll put my faith in the value of my dreams.
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Arizona

At sunrise, we piled into my car and drove to the Buffet. True, we were hungry, but none of us were brave enough to try the pickled eggs. We ordered PBRs, then made our way to the shuffle board. Oh, what sensations: the salt, the smooth plastic, weighted metal. I felt like I controlled that disc, like I could slow its rotations with my will.

By eight, the heat was already filling the bar, bringing out the smell of stale beer, while outside, the pavement turned sticky. Those of us who had stayed up all night drinking felt the rightness of the place. I don’t think anyone showed up to the Buffet in a cap and gown, but I can’t be sure. There’s not much I remember clearly, and yet, it’s easy enough to guess what was on my mind. In those days, I was either thinking about it, or trying not to. I was twenty-three, and yet, I was certain I’d ruined my life.

Not because of money. Not because I was all my weaknesses were coming to the fore, a lifetime of cut corners and dependence on maids, parents, my brother, and my girlfriend to take care of me finally catching up. I was receiving an education in my own inadequacy. For four years of college, everything in my life had seemed to go right. Now, nothing was right. But it wasn’t the failures that hurt, though some successes would have been nice. The pain that was with me, sickening, had another cause. Love. At 9:30, when everyone left to go to the ceremony, I went home to take a nap.

It was Ric who woke me. Ric was my best friend in Arizona—part role model, part cautionary tale. Forty pounds overweight, alcoholic, thirty-four years old, he was subsidizing my MFA by losing to me consistently at poker.

Once, during a game of poker, Ric fell over in his chair after making a bet.

“I think drunk Ric is here,” I said.

“Who’s John Crick?” he said, righting himself.

But above all else—he was a stellar writer, full of humility and sympathy, and utterly, unwaveringly, devoted. Complete in his dedication.

Remember the belly of the whale read a scrawled note on his wall. There was a drawing of Sisyphus, pushing his boulder up the hill. Pencil on parchment read the attribution. If writing didn’t work out, he wasn’t going to fall back on anything. This was it.

He told a great story about his ex-fiancé, and it had, I thought, all the elements of my own story, at least as I conceived it. He and his fiancé had gone out for drinks. This was around the time Ric did his first master’s in literature. At the bar, Ric happened to meet another young writer. The beers were flowing, and at some point, as they were talking about books and literary things, he stepped on his girlfriend’s toe.

“Owww!” she said. “Ric, You really hurt me.”

At closing time, Ric invited them back to their apartment to continue the party.

She pulled him aside, “This is going to be different, right?”

“Are you giving me an ultimatum?”

“Yes,” she said.

“Well, I guess that’s it then!” he said

I answered the phone, and it was Ric on the line.

“Dude. I woke up on some guy’s porch!” he said. “Listen, can you pick me up?”

Ric was the star of the class above me. The winner of the prestigious Associated Writers’ Press Prize. But open graduation, deep in debt from a summer in Mexico and various indiscretions, he’d taken a job as a night clerk at the Flamingo Motel.

I parked my car, and took out my camera. There were homeless people, maybe three of them, in an ally.

When I reached Ric, his hair was matted up, and he looked crooked. He was with a guy. His friend had an Arizona hat, which initially made me mistake him for a much younger man. When he took the hat off, he revealed a large bald spot. He was overweight, and slurring his speech.

“I see what you’re trying to do here,” he said, marveling at the camera. “You’re trying to do something good here.”

“I just want a place where I can be comfortable! I’m looking for a place to stay,” he said, the drunken jocularity giving was, on the turn of a word, to tears. His arm was across Ric’s shoulder. “I’ve already been in sobriety two years.”

“Woah. We’re not sobriety,” Ric said. “We were drinking Mad Dog 20-20.”

“I woke up on some guy’s porch!” Ric said, laughing

“God woke me up.”