THE HORROR OF MOVING

New York chewed me up and spit me out again. It took 25 years the first time, only six months the second. I didn’t want to stay there after losing my job; it has gotten much crueler and filthier since I lived there 8 years ago. Some guy got set on fire on the F train. Trash was everywhere and writhing with rats the size of tea kettles. Getting my mental health meds was bank-breaking; the shrinks in NYC charge $500 a month. The mice in my house were openly galavanting around my bedroom and mocking me openly — doing line dances in little cowboy hats — all the way up to the very last day of my residence; suffice to say there is no love lost for that apartment in the Little Haiti/Hasidic area of East Flatbush, or Lower Crown Heights, or Wingate Park — nobody was ever able to determine what neighborhood I lived in with any reliability. I managed to sell my Vespa for 2/3 of what I paid for it, which smarted, but Conchita got a cool new dad — a handsome DJ guy named Fish, who looked like he would give her a glamorous nightlife, and I felt she belonged with him.

All of my worldly possessions were, for the second time in one year, loaded into a 16 foot PODS container, which has been driving across the country toward me for the last 2 weeks. The movers couldn’t fit everything into it and left some cool, irreplaceable shit behind that I will sorely miss. I abandoned these things to the mice, who will set them on fire.

The stress of moving is absolutely mangling. I am scared shitless that none of my furniture will fit in the tiny new cabin I am moving into in Oakland, surrounded by fruit trees. My nerves are as overfried as my platinum blonde hair — incinerated on the tips and chewed as a dog toy. I’m drinking a lot of White Claws, which seem to keep The Fear slightly at bay — like Hodor in Game of Thrones giving his life to keep out the frozen skeletons — yet it never quite gives me any recognizable buzz.

I thought there was about a 10% chance my plane back to SF would fall out of the sky because Elon Musk was vandalizing the FAA, so I took a cheap upgrade to Business Class. “I am not fucking dying in American coach,” I told Killer Joe. I actually had the only pleasant experience I have ever had on the normally deplorable American Airlines. Killer Joe told me that if the plane goes down, I should grab my seat cushion, run to the bathroom and stick the cushion on my head. That, he said, was my best chance at survival - but once I got into the fully reclining seat, I decided that if the plane went down, I would remain boneless in it and die like a gentleman with a plastic glass of red wine. The bathrooms, I reckoned, should be saved for the young, who won’t mind being slathered in pissy fountains of electric blue chemical toilet liquid, if they survive — personally, I’d sooner perish. But I’ve had worse experiences on American.

I’ve been staying at Killer Joe’s bachelor den, which he shares with two roommates. It’s on the squalid side — I once described it uncharitably as “a shithole,” but it is in a magical Salvadorian neighborhood, and it does have a lovely overgrown back yard. I move on Saturday, and the whole prospect of trying to put that truck-full of stuff in that tiny house is gut wrenching - like trying to stuff a horse into a Volkswagen Beetle.

I’ve resigned myself to swirling in the breeze — the country, I know in the lining of my stomach, is going to be an actual hellscape sooner than any of us fully realize. Packs of emboldened Proud Boys will be patrolling the streets in matte black F-150s as self-appointed Morality Police like they have in neat countries like Iran, Saudi Arabia, Malaysia, Afghanistan and Nigeria. Your cleaning lady’s son will be found with a “Michigan Necktie” — a Goodyear steel-belted radial thrown around his neck and set on fire. I am in more debt than I can ever repay, so under this regime, I will probably end up in prison, or systematically euthanized because females are no longer sexually viable past the age of 30. A couple of friends of mine have already fallen by the wayside and stopped communicating due to the weight of their travails; I can only lament that they’re in even more trouble than I am…for the moment.

The nurse boyfriend, Killer Joe, did decades worth of volunteer work in homeless shelters and needle exchanges. “You don’t understand, but I’ve seen it over and over and over again: middle class people who lose their footing and end up dying on the street. It’s much, much easier than you realize,” he says, which scares the fuckleberry pie out of me. I press on in a wondrous state of financial denial and magical thinking.

My object in life was never making shitloads of money — I just wanted respect for my artistic output. But money is the only thing of value in the world now, and I have little talent for making it. I don’t know how to make it work for me, except in real estate, which I no longer can participate in. (My instincts were so killer. I made loads. But then it all went away because my regular income as a writer fell by a literal 90% in 2008.) So, as soon as I unpack, I will start trying to get another wine bar job, against a sea of equally unemployed actual sommeliers who crowd the Bay Area food scene like now-defunct authors crowd around open cans of Sterno.

The competition will be…impossible, really.

And so it is with this in mind that after next week, I will be offering small group writing classes.

A THOUSAND WORDS IS WORTH A PICTURE

FIVE WEEK COURSE: $500

TUESDAYS AT 6PM PST, STARTING 3/18

OR

MONDAYS AT 6PM PST, STARTING 3/17

DROP-IN CLASS

WEDNESDAYS AT 6PM PST: $120

The classes are one hour Zoom classes with a maximum of 5 students each.

We will all focus on thousand word essays, or thousand word chunks of larger pieces.

Everyone will have to read 1000 words, each week.

Everyone will get critiqued, by me and the other students - both on their pieces, and on their reading. Reading live is such an important part of being in any real literary scene! It’s a great thing to do! Don’t worry if you think you’re no good! Your voice is welcome! Seriously, even if public speaking scares you, public reading can be liberating.

What I am hoping to do with the 5 week courses is create some cliques of students who can successfully bounce and jam off each other. A little literary art camp.

Seats are limited, first come first serve. Repeat offenders will be given preference.

I guarantee this will be infotaining. Strap on a thousand word a week deadline and join me. It will be worth it.

Contact me at CINTRAW@GMAIL if you’re interested.

HIRE ME AS YOUR EDITOR and/or WRITING COACH. Cintraw@gmail.com

Theme song: Jack Black

Artwork: “Garden and Gun,” oil on canvas, Cintra Wilson 2020

FOR SALE. INQUIRE WITHIN.