My construction job, I worked seven 10-hour days a week, with an hour's drive to work and an hour's drive back.

A lot of walking and climbing, on the job.

I lost weight.

It was dark when I left the house and dark when I got home.

Brenda was at home with Owen and I had the truck. I don't know when we shopped for groceries or went to the library.

Brenda had gone from thinking she was going to be an anthropologist to being stuck off in the country with a demanding baby and me, working as a laborer and drinking.

I drank on the drive home, I drank at home until I passed out. I got up and left.

I wrote in my head at work and typed it up on the kitchen table when I got home.

I never drank when I was writing, but I drank when I was typing.

I could memorize a day's writing and type it up word-for-word. Because I had to. And because the work I did allowed it.
It's a wonder I didn't electrocute myself, or fall off a scaffold.

I wrote a book called RACE, SEX, AND LIBEL.

Race was the chapbook Playing Hurt, a book that asked what colored town would be like in Utopia.

Sex was Trailer Park Tramp, a take-off on the old Lenny Bruce routine "Tract House Chippie." I later published Trailer Park Tramp as a pamphlet.

Libel was "The Books in My Life." I wrote about what whores and lickspittles contemporary writers were. "The Books in My Life" has never been published.

Race and Sex were about a poet working construction and writing in his head.

Sex begins, "Her privates ached." The hero revises it until the sentence reads, "Her privates throbbed achingly, in rising crescendo."

One reviewer, Robin Michelle Clifton, née Merritt Clifton, did not realize the book was satire, and called me a male chauvinist pig.

I don't know if Brenda had postpartum depression or codependent of a drinking alcoholic depression, but she was depressed.

I was not sympathetic. I had my own problems. I thought she should get up out of her funk and drive herself harder. Get up and clean house. Clean up the mess.

I was exhausted, trying to work long hours and write full-time both. I was depressed myself, from the drinking and from rejection. I was angry, at myself, at New York, and at Brenda. And of course I was full of fear. Morning terror and large bowel complaints.

I chewed Brenda's ass. I snarled and was mean. This depressed her, of course.

We were a mess.