Extended-Stay Motel Story

Jim poised his killers between two existential fears—
that of remaining unknown and unseen,
and that of being known so completely they couldn’t escape.
Nothing quite like schadenfreude—
the fun of watching people make mistakes.
Only readers who weren’t suckers
could grin meanly.

And one hung-over morning, his second week
at a motel beside an interstate,
he recognized his neighbors for what they were—
a couple of gay men loudly fucking
on one side (tv evangelists who’d kill each other in bed)—
and, on the other, a Hispanic father and son making
cockle-doodle-do sounds in Spanish (cockfighters
who’d deep-fry anybody who didn’t pay up).

No wife or editor to tell Jim some day was not
a day of the week. Get the vomit draft down on paper.
There to sober his thoughts—Hopper’s honest sunlight
on a plain, white wall. For the first time
in a very long time, they were.

Then all day his mind had nowhere to rest—
like a man homeless and on the run,
like a man who never felt at home in his own skin.
But he made his killer wait for the gray-area moment.
More than anything, he made him want to face something
he was not really equal to—a real 3-D job—
dirty, dangerous, difficult.

More than peeling a chicken’s foot,
stuck with dried blood and sinew, from the windshield
of his stolen car—more than emptying a bottle of tequila,
sitting midway down the stairwell with a hooker
on a Jenny Crank diet—more than wanting to be
the next great ex-con author to grace Oprah’s couch.