Member-only story
Simple Tasks
I was 22 and living with a guy named Sprink. He was my father’s age and was the bartender at the restaurant where I worked as a dishwasher. I always had nightmares about the jobs I had. I dreamed the dishes kept stacking up and stacking up and would eventually collapse onto me. I dreamed there was a fire and the water ran out. I dreamed I was washing dishes and suddenly forgot how to do such a simple task.
Sprink had black hair except for a streak of white like a skunk. When he was in high school a cop had grabbed his hair and ripped a bit of it out, and it grew back in white. He loved telling that story almost as much as the one about escaping from a Montana jail, back when there was still possibility in the world. He had a sympathy for young misfits and let me sleep on his couch in exchange for doing small jobs around the house like cleaning and taking out the garbage. He told me his last roommate was a poet who would sit up drinking wine and writing poems on an old typewriter. He would rip the pages out of the typewriter and leave them on the floor. One day the guy lay down on the railroad tracks and got his legs cut off by a train. As I cleaned the house, I would find his poems. Behind the fridge, under the sink, under the couch cushion, in the dark corners. The poems were not insane at all but instead quite clear-headed and beautiful. I don’t remember his name.
