Curtains

[Robert Crisman]

My room in the house on the hill used to shift: sometimes to the second floor just to the left of the kitchen; other times down on the first floor in back of the stairs and you had to come in the window.

Inside, the front of the house was dark like perpetual evening, but much, much lighter in back, as if somehow the sun shone its way through the roof, giving a sort of an open-air feel to the halls where the homeless passed through.

I kind of liked it like that, light and dark, yin and yang, but I liked the light best because of the way it streamed through my used-to-be-white gauzy curtains and cheered up the high-ceiling'd nicotine walls of my room as I lazed on my mattress, dreaming of three-ways with punk chicks, their boyfriends, and toys that made the walls sweat. And if I was a prisoner, and prisoner I was, of what or who I wasn't quite sure, I knew nonetheless that this room was soft time; other places I'd been in, the punishment places, crumbling hotels trapped in '60s dream time--those places assigned you rooms bled of echoes and then aged the flesh off your bones, yanked all your teeth out, and sucked out your eyes, and then sat you up on the side of your bed with the door left ajar, a medicinal reek in the air, as testament maybe to every last horror a celled-in existence inflicts.

I'd once been the freest man in the world, answered to no one and nothing at all, my freedom a cell that encompassed the world...

And now in this dream, in my room in this house, on my mattress, naked and smoking my last cigarette, the sap of last night's adventures still on me, I suddenly felt the skin on my face being baked to old age, my eyes being lifted right out of my skull, and me being whisked off to live with old men who stare out at nothing as rank isolation brings down the curtain on what they'd called love in the fast lane.

[Jamie Hogan]

Damn.

[Mike Handley]

This is one of your finest, Homes. I know it would piss you off, but this ought to be discussed in lit class. :-)

[Teresa]

I don't even know what to say.  I love the rhythm, the melancholy feel, the hot line Joey mentioned, the image of you naked on the mattress smoking that last cigarette.  And not to be morbid, but fifty years from now it's easy to imagine that last line being the Robert Crisman trademark, maybe even on your tombstone along with the picture of you smirking.  Why not?  You'd be famous and not know it, which would really piss you off.  There'd be writing scholarships in your name; that's where all the money would go.  And every young writer would try to emulate you.  Imagining this entirely possible scenario makes me less sad.

[Joey Delgado]

'...dreaming of three ways with punk chicks, their boyfriends, and toys that made the walls sweat.'

My God I'm in love with that line. The whole story is great, but that line I read fifty times because it is just so perfectly Crisman. 

[Paul de Denus]

Man, you can pack a lot into six sentences- like a chapter all to itself- that last line, a fine movie-ending scene.

[Angela]

Ahh, Robert.  How the rooms we inhabit and the light we rest under shift their way through our lives.  Who but you can say it so?

The last line terrifies me, but not as much as the slow wither of reality.

Extraordinary.