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9/8/96 15:55 It's pouring rain outside. Sitting at my desk--Coffee cup, remains of a ham sandwich wrapped in foil, bag of pretzels. I've been writing into my Empty Book a lot lately. It's a book I bought for $1 at a Mini-Mart in Ohio. The Mini-Mart was a second-hand store, and I bought lots and lots of cheap, old magazines and ratty old shirts there. When I was captain of the bowling team, I bought bowling shirts for everyone on my team. They were terribly uncomfortable, worse than the uniform shirts I wore as a McDonald's employee during the summer of 1986. The bowling shirts were all stained with God-knows-what kinds of liquid, and mine felt like it was made from balsa wood. Can't remember for sure whose name was embroidered on it, but it might have been "Ned." Our whole bowling team wore shirts with the names of strangers on the lapel. Matt, Warren, Suzanne and Mark could easily have been mistaken for Ricky, Walter, Marion and Ned, 4 college sophomores wearing dollar shirts and 50� bowling shoes handed down from another generation. This Empty Book, though, this is where I've been putting my mind the last few weeks. When I bought it at the Mini-Mart that day, it was not because I needed another blank book. I own many, many such volumes, and have filled several hundred pages of these books with things I seldom look back at. I always found that odd, actually, see know that people spent a great deal of time reading their own diaries and their own correspondences from years past. My approach has always been and continues to be that I write this stuff once, look it over a couple of times, and carry on. This Empty Book and the 2 others that I bought with it are different from the other ones that I have, because this one used to be owned by somebody else. This is why I bought it.. There are a few pages with writing on them, and there are some pencil drawings, and there are a few receipts from 1975 stuck inbetween the pages. The previous owner was named A. Edward Major, and he seems to have been a truck driver. The book contains receipts from Sunoco and Union gas stations in California and Arizona, and they show that he purchased 85 gallons of gasoline at a time. I imagine him traveling alone, but maybe this is because I'm thinking of my own trip to California in 1994, when I drive from San Francisco to Seattle in a rental car, blasting music of Dvorák and wildly imagining myself driving off the cliffs and into the rocks. I have placed the receipts I still have from that trip into this book. My stay at the Driftwood Motel in Fort Bragg, California; ticket to a Sedge Thomson radio show; ice cream cone... The book contains a few pages of expenses and notes written to himself.
And there are drawings of his which took me a few moments to figure out. One that I thought was a view of a naked woman lying on a bed as seen by the naked woman actually appears to be a drawing of a mountain road. I was looking at it vertically, and it should have been turned horizontally.
I look at his notations and drawings, and I see where mine are slowly surrounding his, and I wonder what it is that he and I see in these things. These Empty Books. Do either of us expect that the files and notes we take on this matter of our daily lives will ever reach out to any other person? I think this is why the book wound up on sale at the Mini Mart. Maybe someone wanted to make contact in this way, and maybe that's what I should do next. I should fill the book with only a few dozen pages, and then pass it along to someone I don't know. I could leave it on the shelf at the New York Public Library, and let those private thoughts and manic outbursts of writing quietly slip into the circulation of someone else's in this city, a person who would then understand the meaning of communication and would then write in their own secrets, stash a few of their own receipts, jot down a few important social events, then quietly leave this Empty Book on a bench in the park, where the conspiracy will grow. So much of my life feels like a message in a bottle. That sounds corny, but for the first time in 10 years I picked up some of my old blank books and read the things I was thinking about and writing down back then. For the first time in my life a definite past is opening up behind me, filling my closets and pockets and wedging itself into the pages of all the books I've never read. When did this start to happen?
Here is a receipt from a Motel 6 in Indio, California. A. Edward Major stayed in room 112 on 5-27-75. A Tuesday. It cost In 1991, when I lived at 166 West 75th, Street, I woke up at 3:45 in the morning when someone was trying to open the door to my room. The doorknob peacably rattled and the door politely stayed locked as someone feebly tried to force it open. I could hear a key being thrust into the lock, and a voice on the other side of the door mumbled obscenities with a throat that I mistook for the pigeons that sometimes entered my room through the open window at late hours such as these. I turned to the window, and there were no pigeons in the window. Panic filled my head that night the way it sometimes does during the day for no apparent reason. For the first time in my life I prepared myself for what it would feel like to strangle somebody, to choke an intruder or to smash the frying pan or the huge bottle of orange juice over their head. I crept up to the door and half-embraced it, remembering the feel of the woman I had been with 2 nights before, who had kissed me while standing on that very spot, and who would be with me again the next morning. I silently placed my eye over the peephole, and saw that the person in the hall was also half-embracing the door. Her gestures in trying to open the door had a vulgar urgency, but much of my panic flushed itself away when I recognized her as the elderly woman who spent her days standing by the payphones in the lobby of the Parc Lincoln hotel. I don't know why exactly, but I grabbed the doorknob and started shaking it, and I pounded and kicked on the door. Angrily I muttered but did not yell "GODDAMIT, GO THE FUCK AWAY!" I could hear her voice cluck a little bit in confusion and annoyance, muttering "What th'..." She was probably scared herself and momentarily thought that someone was in her apartment beating on her door. But she saw that she was at the door of room 317, not 417, which I later learned was her room upstairs. I heard her walk away down the hall, and I heard the elevator door open, and there was silence. I lay down on the bed, exhausted by all that fear. I started to laugh, and cursed the ceiling with the words "Fuck with me, old lady, I'll kick your ass!" Then I laughed and laughed and laughed, and waited for the morning to come.
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