Just something I wrote a while back. I call it Home...
"I’ve come to realize that all my life, I haven’t been able to sleep and really rest at night. I have somewhat of a set of raccoon eye because of it. When I didn’t wear my glasses in the morning people would think I was high. I never really knew why I couldn’t sleep. There was just something missing. I now know what it is. Call it love, belonging, call what you will. I never really felt like I got it from my family (if that’s what you want to call it). Not even now. I guess they do in their own. What ever that is.
I’ve never belonged here. Even when I found friends that were as close to being me as I ever had. I still didn’t belong. There is only one place that I felt that I belonged that’s with her. I was home. I had found my home in her. In her eyes, in her face, in her smile, I had finally found my home after 19 years. The only problem is that I was not always welcome. Why? I don’t know. As soon as the door was opened and I entered, I found my self-thrown right back out not soon after. And so it has gone, for the past 4 years.
I’m being let back in once again. Can I go home again, this time for good? Should I go home again? All I know is that I’m tired and need to rest. One way or another I’m going to get my rest."
© 2004 Sergio Leal Jr.
Right now I'm kind of at a cross roads, I feel stuck in a life that is going no were. I'm filled with a head of useless movie trivia that seems to come out in the most inappropriate of times. Doing nothing then mostly annoying my friends when we are watching, well movies. Well most of my old college roommates have seemed to be making their way to LA. And I just and stuck here. I'm starting to say fuck it and just go. Take your tax return and take the fuck off. The more I think about it the lonelier I get and start to think about Section one, Chapter 12 of “On the Road” I just think it would be cool if something like that happened. Well its not the whole chapter but take a look and tell me what you think……………….RE
”I had bought my ticket and was waiting for the LA bus when all of a sudden I saw the cutest little Mexican girl in slacks come cutting across my sight. She was in one of the buses that had just pulled in with a big sigh of airbrakes; it was discharging passengers for a rest stop. Her breasts stuck out straight and true; her little flanks looked delicious; her hair was long and lustrous black; and her eyes were great big blue things with timidities inside. I wished I was on her bus. A pain stabbed my heart, as it did every time I saw a girl I loved who was going the opposite direction in this too-big world. The announcer called the LA bus. I picked up my bag and got on, and who should be sitting there alone but the Mexican girl. I dropped right opposite her and began scheming right off. I was so lonely, so sad, so tired, so quivering, so broken, so beat, that I got up my courage, the courage necessary to approach a strange girl, and acted. Even then I spent five minutes beating my thighs in the dark as the bus rolled down the road.
You gotta, you gotta or you'll die! Damn fool, talk to her! What's wrong with you? Aren't you tired enough of yourself by now? And before I knew what I was doing I leaned across the aisle to her (she was trying to sleep on the seat) and said, "Miss, would you like to use my raincoat for a pillow?"
She looked up with a smile and said, "No, thank you very much."
I sat back, trembling; I lit a butt. I waited till she looked at me, with a sad little sidelook of love, and I got right up and leaned over her. "May I sit with you, miss?"
"If you wish."
And this I did. "Where going?"
"LA." I loved the way she said "LA"; I love the way everybody says "LA" on the Coast; it's their one and only golden town when all is said and done,
"That's where I'm going too!" I cried. "I'm very glad you let me sit with you, I was very lonely and I've been traveling a hell of a lot." And we settled down to telling our stories. Her story was this: She had a husband and child. The husband beat her, so she left him, back at Sabinal, south of Fresno, and was going to LA to live with her sister awhile. She left her little son with her family, who were grape-pickers and lived in a shack in the vineyards. She had nothing to do but brood and get mad. I felt like putting my arms around her right away. We talked and talked. She said she loved to talk with me. Pretty soon she was saying she wished she could go to New York too. "Maybe we could!" I laughed. The bus groaned up Grapevine Pass and then we were coming down into the great sprawls of light. Without coming to any particular agreement we began holding hands, and in the same way it was mutely and beautifully and purely decided that when I got my hotel room in LA she would be beside me. I ached all over for her; I leaned my head in her beautiful hair. Her little shoulders drove me mad; I hugged her and hugged her. And she loved it.
"I love love," she said, closing her eyes. I promised her beautiful love. I gloated over her. Our stories were told; we subsided into silence and sweet anticipatory thoughts. It was as simple as that. You could have all your Peaches and Bettys and Marylous and Ritas and Camilles and Inezes in this world; this was my girl and my kind of girlsoul, and I told her that. She confessed she saw me watching her in the bus station. "I thought you was a nice college boy."
"Oh, I'm a college boy!" I assured her. The bus arrived in Hollywood. In the gray, dirty dawn, like the dawn when Joel McCrea met Veronica Lake in a diner, in the picture Sullivan's Travels, she slept in my lap. I looked greedily out tine window: stucco houses and palms and drive-ins, the whole mad thing, the ragged promised land, the fantastic end of America. We got off the bus at Main Street, which was no different from where you get off a bus in Kansas City or Chicago or Boston -- red brick, dirty, characters drifting by, trolleys grating in the hopeless dawn, the whorey smell of a big city.
And here my mind went haywire, I don't know why. I began getting the foolish paranoiac visions that Teresa, or Terry -- her name -- was a common little hustler who worked the buses for a guy's bucks by making appointments like ours in LA where she brought the sucker first to a breakfast place, where her pimp waited, and then to a certain hotel to which he had access with his gun or his whatever. I never confessed this to her. We ate breakfast and a pimp kept watching us; I fancied Terry was making secret eyes at him. I was tired and felt strange and lost in a faraway, disgusting place. The goof of terror took over my thoughts and made me act petty and cheap. "Do you know that guy?" I said.
"What guy you mean, honey?" I let it drop. She was slow and hung-up about everything she did; it took her a long time to eat; she chewed slowly and stared into space, and smoked a cigarette, and kept talking, and I was like a haggard ghost, suspicioning every move she made, thinking she was stalling for time. This was all a fit of sickness. I was sweating as we went down the street hand in hand. The first hotel we hit had a room, and before I knew it I was locking the door behind me and she was sitting on the bed taking off her shoes. I kissed her meekly. Better she'd never know. To relax our nerves I knew we needed whisky, especially me. I ran out and fiddled all over twelve blocks, hurrying till I found a pint of whisky for sale at a newsstand. I ran back, all energy. Terry was in the bathroom, fixing her face. I poured one big drink in a water glass, and we had slugs. Oh, it was sweet and delicious and worth my whole lugubrious voyage. I stood behind her at the mirror, and we danced in the bathroom that way. I began talking about my friends back east.
I said, "You ought to meet a great girl I know called Doric. She's a six-foot redhead. If you came to New York she'd show you where to get work."
"Who is this six-foot redhead?" she demanded suspiciously. "Why do you tell me about her?" In her simple soul she couldn't fathom my kind of glad, nervous talk. I let it drop. She began to get drunk in the bathroom.
"Come on to bed!" I kept saying.
"Six-foot redhead, hey? And I thought you was a nice college boy, I saw you in your lovely sweater and I said to myself, Hmm, ain't he nice? No! And no! And no! You have to be a goddam pimp like all of them!"
"What on earth are you talking about?"
"Don't stand there and tell me that six-foot redhead ain't a madame, 'cause I know a madame when I hear about one, and you, you're just a pimp like all the rest I meet, everybody's a pimp."
"Listen, Terry, I am not a pimp. I swear to you on the Bible I am not a pimp. Why should I be a pimp? My only interest is you."
"All the time I thought I met a nice boy. I was so glad, I hugged myself and said, Hmm, a real nice boy instead of a pimp."
"Terry," I pleaded with all my soul. "Please listen to me and understand, I'm not a pimp." An hour ago I'd thought she was a hustler. How sad it was. Our minds, with their store of madness, had diverged. O gruesome life, how I moaned and pleaded, and then I got mad and realized I was pleading with a dumb little Mexican wench and I told her so; and before I knew it I picked up her red pumps and hurled them at the bathroom door and told her to get out. "Go on, beat it!" I'd sleep and forget it; I had my own life, my own sad and ragged life forever. There was a dead silence in the bathroom. I took my clothes off and went to bed.
Terry came out with tears of sorriness in her eyes. In her simple and funny little mind had been decided the fact that a pimp does not throw a woman's shoes against the door and does not tell her to get out. In reverent and sweet little silence she took all her clothes off and slipped her tiny body into the sheets with me. It was brown as grapes. I saw her poor belly where there was a Caesarian scar; her hips were so narrow she couldn't bear a child without getting gashed open. Her legs were like little sticks. She was only four foot ten. I made love to her in the sweetness of the weary morning. Then, two tired angels of some kind, hung-up forlornly in an LA shelf, having found the closest and most delicious thing in life together, we fell asleep and slept till late afternoon.”
© 2004 Sergio Leal Jr.
Haunted
We will always be haunted by the memory of the person we have come to love the most. Every were we go, and everything we see will cause that persons voice to scream in our heads, “Look! There I was.” Then as we turn to take a second look, images of the past come and flood our senses. What we see makes us weak in the knees, but does not bring us to our knees at least not till a few seconds have past and their scent engulfs us. Sending a shiver down our spine, chilling us to the bone yet warming us at the same time as we shake ever so slightly. Tears start to run down our face as we think of the happiest moments we ever spent with them. The moments lying in bed on a Sunday morning as a cool breeze hits us as we lay there, laughing about this and that. The cat coming in and laying on top us as it purrs and pushes its paws up and down on us, trying to get compatible. Laughing again as one of you tells the other, “You do know that one of these days it won’t just be the cat that is doing this?” Of course every time you experience this you can’t show it. You can make it visible to anyone that is around you. You can’t shed one tear or show any once of emotion that hints at your memory of this person. No mater how much you want to communicate what you are feeling and exercise this ghost, you can’t. Any attempt will lead to criticism and more pain. Some people will just tell you to get over it and not even listen to you and the others, well the others is the ones that really hurt. You have learned to just keep your mouth shut about it and are even starting to let go because you start to meet people that you think you could move on to. But there is only one problem. That person has heard your stories and has seen your pain that the past have caused you. So even if that person had feeling for you and would like to get together with you, they will not dare make their feeling known because they feel that you are not ready to move on, even thought you are. So again you are left alone, in pain and with no support.
© 2004 Sergio Leal Jr.
An observation of beauty at Barns and Noble.
We got there, got some coffee and found a seat. We were not at our seats for more then ten minuets when Christina started to talk about how she wished books had more illustrations. Its not that she didnât like reading, she does but she just likes illustrations. So Gabe goes and takes her to see some great-illustra
I could not help but keep every so often looking up at her face and admiring her beauty. Now here most people would think of me a strange person, but what most people donât understand is that everything has beautify in it. An innocent beauty, Innocent beauty meaning this, if a person has nude pictures up on their wall most people look at it as a sexual thing. They donât see the simple beauty in it, the art of it. That is how I was looking at her, as art, as a painting that you couldnât but keep your eyes off. That is how I view a lot of things, a lot of people. And this is how I was viewing her.
I began to wonder were I would be planning my own wedding and with who. I was reminded of when I had. But that was in the past and the person that I had planed it with was in the past, and not even worth thinking about. I guess I just started to live vicariously for a moment. Then again not that I wanted to get married right now I just thought was a nice moment and it was a beautiful woman to share the moment with. As I was trying to read again it turned out that the man with this woman was not her fiancé. âI knew it,â I was thinking to my self. The man with her just didnât seem like he would be with her. I looked up one last time and admired her beauty for what would be one last time, because the next time I would look up from reading they would be gone.
© 2004 Sergio Leal Jr.
I don’t know what has been going on with me lately. I just can’t seem to get to sleep. Lately I think I’m just going nuts or maybe things are getting darker and lonelier I can’t tell anymore. Old memories keep haunting me but its not so much the memories as the emotions that come with it. How everything was good not perfect mind you but things were just fine. Like most people you might assume that I want the person that is associated with those memories back in my life to make me feel ok again, but nothing would be further from the truth. I just want to feel ok. Some people keep asking me why I don’t get medicated and I really don’t have a solid answer for them. I guess it because I really don’t want to rely on a pill. I remember how little it took to make me happy before and it was just a presence of a certain person. I just want to find that peace again with someone and not a pill but then again watching that commercial for adult A.D.D. makes me thing I should get medicated at least for the A.D.D. because my head is just like the commercial says, its as if some one is constantly changing the channel and won’t stop on one station for a min. Well all I can do at this moment is just start to learn everything I can at my internship and wait to take the classes that I need to take before being a substitute teacher. Then with time and if something opens up at the school districts TV station, then I’ll go and get in there full time. Then see were I can go from there, maybe go to Austin or L.A....
What the hell is going on in this world? The Food and Drug Administration on Monday asked 10 antidepressant drug manufacturers to change label warnings to advise closer monitoring of suicidal behavior. What the fuck? I thought the reason that you take anti-depressan