"my father was good, my mother was bright"

me: he slapped you!
nane: as long as i'm sitting down!

nane: where is he, is he coming back? he was here.
me: i don't know. was he here. whi is he? why don't you go back to sleep.
nane: ok. i hope he comes back!

my mother, my father

my mother was bright, my father was good she says. I was asking her if she'd had many boyfriends. I can't remember, there were always so many people. I can't see all of them. I had a good life. I was with good people who I liked. I really have had a good life. I don't take shit from nobody and that's why I'm happy.

Early in the morning, when it is still dark, I hear Sharon knock quickly at my door and whisper, "hey jessie, she's on the floor again." I almost want to groan, but I don't. I've been awake all night, I can never get tired enough for sleep. I've been trying to listen to David Sedaris reading his books on a walkman someone sent me through the mail when they believed somehow, ludicrously, that we'd fallen in love at the Bonaroo music festival that summer and would write songs by sending a walkman back and forth through the mail. A three page letter written in red ink, which I read only once, accompanied the walkman. I thought it absurd that the person who'd sent it could have missed the message quite shoddily hidden behind my sudden "sleep attacks" which had occured anytime we had brushed knees after 8 pm at night. The thing was, if there was anything at all, that we were staying in this gentleman and a friend of this gentleman's hotel, and so we tried to keep the peace...or at least prolong some sense of naievity concerning the state of our co-dependence. Us, a four member group of twenty one year old faux-groupies who needed at least two hours and plenty of electrical units in order to prepare for possibly the most important day of our lives each morning and Them, two production assistants who were being put up in a hotel room, were somehow some kind of friends with two of the girls, and who benefitted from our ability to get them backstage. The largest commonalities were an affection for drugs and a fort consisting of the expensive linens we'd taken from her parents house which  Megan made us put together inside the hotel room.

I got up. I could have slept forever. I opened the door and walked over to the bathroom and there she was, like Sharon said, sitting on the floor beside the claw foot tub. What are you doin down there? Sharon was saying, "you're like the dog." We both grabbed a shoulder and told her to bend her legs. She did. We pulled her up, and as always I thought I might drop her, I noticed that my strength was unparallel with Sharon's. Once I dropped a purple couch onto my friends foot in the middle of the night as we were trying to move it toward the trunk of her mini-cooper (where it would never have fit). Technically, she dropped it on her own foot, but I dropped it first, which made it, ultimately, my fault. To be fair, I hadn't known how drunk she was at the time. I had just gotten to her house when she'd told me about the purple sofa and how we needed to go get it. right. then. I thought that the purple couch was code for a drive and a cigarette, during which she would tell me the story or problem or possible pregnancy which was truly on her mind. Ten seconds after I jumped in the passenger seat and we peeled out of the driveway, I realized the purple couch was real and that my friend was deadly serious, or almost deadly serious. What happened was, she went into shock right after the couch punched a hole in her foot and so I drove her back to the house and as we were driving she started laughing...maniacally. And since I was not in shock but fullheartedly accepted her reaction to the event, I also started laughing maniacally. When we got to the house and proceeded to exit the mini cooper, we looked down to see a pool of dark blood decorating the passenger side floorboards. Someone inside caught a glance at us and immediately called the ambulance which would eventually caret my friend off on a stretcher. Up until they came, and whenever the emt's lef the room, I would lean over her body where it lay on the couch, her left leg covered in blood, and hold the menthol cigarette to her lips as she took unreccomended drag after drag after drag and everyone else scurried around her. And\, maniacally, we laughed

the dog is named Candy. Candy lives on a postcard. She sits at the kitchen table.